RS

I’ll start by making the point that technology companies like to portray themselves as public-facing, and in that way misrepresent what they are. For example, Apple used to call its retail centers “town squares.” The entire idea is to take over and capture the public discursively through branding, through architecture, through corporate slogans. Tech companies brand themselves as public services when in reality they exploit public labor. So I think in that sense they’re attempting to appear not just apolitical, but almost beyond political, or above politics.

The second point is people have long treated internet technologies in particular — though this is true throughout the history of digital technology and science itself — as morally neutral. We tend to think of technologies as almost teleological attempts to maximize efficiency, just linear instruments of progress. We think of them as agnostic, simply the creation of neutral scientists, neutral engineers.

What I seek to expose in my book is that the political biases, the racial biases, the economic biases, the geographic biases, the gender biases of technologists are fundamental to shaping and impacting the technologies they create, which either open up or foreclose on the life chances for people who are implicated by their systems. So they are profoundly political in that sense.

Now to discuss their political activity itself. Google is one of the biggest lobbyists in the American government. Meanwhile, Amazon already does work with ICE, and a lot of these companies are very cozy with the military. Their goal is to maximize not just their profit, but their overall speculated valuation, and it doesn’t matter who ends up on the chopping block as a result of that.

When Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook will run all political ads because it’s a matter of free speech, what he’s actually doing is emboldening a world where those who have more power are provided with the ability to abuse that power on Facebook’s platform. Meanwhile, when a company like Facebook or YouTube designs its systems to make visible content that is more extreme, more hateful, more disinformation-based, that’s all done with the intention of locking people in. And that is a political choice, based upon a private self-interest, never mind the consequences for the rest of us.

These companies are intruding upon our political life, claiming the language of democracy and the public interest, when all they are interested in doing is supporting their own bottom lines, their own investors. They do not care about their impact on democracy. It’s quite clear that they do not care.