Big Tech is Sick

Big Tech has lost its way.  It used to be about building products that raised standards of living for people.  It used to be about solving problems for people more efficiently.  A lot of big tech is still that way but the leadership at the Big Tech firms is not.  They have an agenda.  Venture capitalists are not immune either.  For a while now I have seen VCs with an agenda socially.  Interesting that they don’t put their dollars into companies that advance their agenda and their firms don’t hire on their agenda so it amounts to a lot of virtue signaling on their part.  I received a hat once from a VC that said, “Make Venture Great Again” which was a tongue in cheek joke that isn’t quite so funny anymore.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle, as extreme as Democrat Elizabeth Warren to more centrist Republican Josh Hawley want to break up big tech.  I went to the Stigler Center’s conference on Big Tech and it was eye opening.  I walked in with the perception that we ought to let markets take their due course and walked out with the opinion that examining some sort of regulation on the fringes might be fruitful but still skeptical that government could do it right.

The big players, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon all have agendas at the top of their management chain.  The too long don’t read version is advancing a pretty far left wing agenda and actively discriminating against conservatives.  This video is telling.  The school my kids went to had grief counselers available when Trump won.  They didn’t have them for my kids when Obama won.  For us, we didn’t like the policies but life goes on.

Since the election, we have seen private companies actively shape their corporate policy to advance the agenda.  Again, the New York Times is emblematic of the conversation.  Here and here are examples of editors, the leaders of the paper who decide what’s fit to print, sending messages to their employees and community about the news.  Dean Baquet actively went out of his way to brand Trump a racist since they were losing on the competition of ideas.

Communist China has a social credit system.  It forces people to stay in line with the edicts of the ruling dictatorial government if they want to have a higher quality of life.  Now Big Tech is bringing that to the US.  The thing is, it’s not only Big Tech but insurance companies, college admissions, human resources, credit agencies, Airbnb hosts, are all getting into the act.

I think it’s really important that people understand the psychological experiments Dr. Josh Milgram did at Yale in 1963.   Here is a shorter video about defying authority.

Once humans objectify other humans, it is easy to start to abuse them in small ways. Maybe you shun them. Maybe you do worse.  We can undergo a “great sort” and live in communities with only people that think like us.  That will only increase our isolation and ability to objectify the other side.

I do know that social media is tearing our society apart.  The institutions that are getting exposed deserve to get exposed but just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you throw the whole thing out.  We are in danger of raising an entire generation that doesn’t value anything in society.

It seems each side has identified the problem. But, the real hard thing to do is solve it.  I don’t have an answer for that.