Admittedly, this piece is a few years late. Gone already is the era when ‘disruption’ was spoken as a magic buzzword that could fix everything. We’re past the point where we’ve realised that technology and disruption aren’t all what they were touted to be.
It helps to think of the pre-technology era, when the biggest companies we could name were not Google, Amazon or Facebook but BP, Dupont, Philip Morris et al. We have ample evidence that all these firms were, for decades, well aware of the harms they were perpetrating on us and the environment. But they did their best to thwart public knowledge of these harms, buying doctors and scientists alike and establishing competent lobby groups attached to world governments. Decades later when the truth emerged, it was still daunted by backlash and denialism. As recently as last year I read a report that the energy major Shell was aware what its effluents were doing to water bodies, but the management decided to sweep this under the carpet and continue unabashed.
If this is how corporations have been pre-tech, why do we assume they will be any different post-tech?
The evidence is already out. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter etc. have known for a long time what their platforms are doing to users. They’ve willingly made their platforms more addictive, so that our lives now revolve around small dopamine kicks triggered by notification icons at the corner of our screens. Ex-insiders have been warning us for years that a fundamental rewiring of the human brain is underway, led by big-tech. And these firms have unprecedented control over the information available to us. The tech platforms are also where we get our news from, though in a previous era no one opened a box of cigarettes to know the latest events of the world! The bubble is complete. 1984 is here.
Big tech came to us wrapped as ‘convenience.’ Transport convenience, retail convenience, hyperlocal convenience, social networking convenience. All of these seemed great when they came, making icons of the likes of Bezos, Kalanick and Zuckerburg. But we’ve missed the other side of this coin. On the flip side of convenience is dependency, and the more convenience we receive from something the more dependent we become on it. At the time of writing this, the cab drivers of Ola and Uber are on strike. Supposedly, this is because while petrol fares have been rising, driver fares haven’t. Drivers on strike, users stranded or rushing for the nearest ATM to get cash for an auto. This is an example of the convenience disappearing and the dependency rearing its ugly head. It doesn’t take much imagination to see analogous situations arising once Amazon is literally your one-stop retail outlet for “anything.” And this is without mentioning the infrastructural, transport, class-based and local economy damages that such conveniences bring.
If Amazon sets up a warehouse in your city, it seemingly opens up many new employment opportunities. But then it controls the wages, and your city is now beholden to Amazon for its economy. Monopsony is not convenience.
But even that wasn’t the biggest wrong idea big-tech sold to us. That label belongs to the buzzword ‘disruption.’ We were told that disruption is a good thing. It brings value and innovation to the economy, apart from providing employment. Most of all, disruption brings about radical changes that make things better. Filter the BS, this is a pack of self-suiting lies. When you disrupt the consumer mobility market by aggregating cab drivers- this isn’t any world saving innovation. It brings convenience to those who can afford cabs, yes. But on the flip side is loss of jobs for existing cab economies, a dilution of the core issues around transportation- low-cost, mass, and less reliant on street traffic, and an increased dependence of users on private platforms that not only reserve the right to change whatever they want but also amass vast swathes of private data about our lives. For the convenience of ordering a cab by phone, I allow Travis Kalanick and any Uber employee to see my whereabouts, my travel patterns and more (this isn’t even speculative- it’s happened!).
Hell, even in providing “employment” to thousands of young males as ‘delivery partners’ we hide a stark economic reality- young males across the country and in rural hinterlands are unemployed, unskilled and frustrated.
All of this isn’t a blanket indictment of modern tech and disruption. I remain a loyal and delighted Amazon customer, and even I’m forced to choose between Ola/Uber, Zomato/Swiggy and the likes. My concerns over Tesla’s automated cars being fundamentally Tesla-owned and not consumer-owned exist alongside my admiration for the attempt to move to a clean-energy economy. Even the dream to move to Mars is exciting, but it must be mitigated with a realisation that only a specific set of people will move there- the rest will languish in the waste left behind on Earth. And nothing about that will be convenient, I can assure you.
But what we fail to realise is that most of that waste on Earth was created by the big companies in the pre-tech era. The post-tech era’s wastefield will not be Earth- it’ll be our brains. Beholden to corporations, brands more important than lives and values, disruption more important than humanity. Why do you think the people rushing to go to Mars are among the ones who’ve created this very world? Much like the CEOs of pre-tech corporations, these founders are also aware of the harms they’re perpetrating. And for the first time in history, they have the money and the technological potential to escape it all for good. Taking you along will be an inconvenience.