For four days in January, Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, lectured to packed houses at the University of Cambridge on the theme of “Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power”. His visit, as Humanitas visiting professor in media, provided a fascinating opportunity to observe a major corporate leader discussing ideas, rather than talking purely about matters of business.
Schmidt‘s message was that the world is set to become a much more connected planet as the next 5 billion people come online, and that this will have dramatic implications for lives, societies and individuals. These implications, on balance, would be largely positive, although there might be some alarming downsides – for example, in relation to privacy and identity.
Running through everything Schmidt said, like the words in a stick of seaside rock, was the assertion that increased connectivity would mean the diffusion of power. This is also the theme of the recently published book that he co-authored with Google’s ideas director, Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age.
The more connected populations become, the harder it will be for authoritarian governments to control them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. There will be fewer genocides in a densely connected world. And so on.
Schmidt’s contention was not quite the Marxist notion that the state would wither away but, to some members of his audience at least, that seemed to be the direction of travel of his thinking. To say that this seemed simplistic to an academic audience is an understatement – especially as the Google boss appeared to have one significant blind spot: the question of corporate power. After all, in a networked world companies like his will be among the masters of the universe.
Eventually the issue came to a head in the symposium that concluded his visiting professorship, when he was vigorously tackled on the question of the nature and potential of corporate power. This stopped him briefly in his tracks, after which he observed that the discussion highlighted a significant difference between the United States and Europe. In the US, he argued, people worried more about the power of the state rather than that of corporations, whereas in Europe people seemed to trust the state but mistrust companies.
The revelations of the past week explain why Schmidt was so preoccupied with the power of the state – especially of the national security state, which is what our democracies are morphing into. The apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, Google’s vehement insistence that it has “not joined any programme that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers” and, on the other, the assertions to the contrary in the leaked National Security Agency slide-deck that demonstrate the extent to which Google (and the other internet companies) are caught between a rock and a very hard place.
The rock is that the national security state, as embodied in the National Security Agency, GCHQ and kindred agencies, shows no sign of withering away. Au contraire. In the end, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple will be compelled to obey the state’s orders. If they don’t, their executives will find themselves sharing jail cells with the likes of Bradley Manning.
The hard place is corporate terror that their users will become alienated by the realisation that personal communications cannot be safely entrusted to internet companies based in the US. Crunch time has arrived for Google & co, in other words. I look forward to the second, revised, edition of Schmidt’s book.
