The iPhone Is Bigger Than Donald Trump

Why we are not going to stay under the covers, despite all temptation.

By Steven Levy

If there are two Americas — and why bother saying “if”? — the staff of Backchannel clearly belongs to the country now in shock — and frankly, terrified — at what this other country has thrust upon us. How can it be otherwise? We are five people, four of them women, all college educated, three with advanced degrees. We live in New York and San Francisco. We make our living from facts and reasoned ideas. We are cosmopolitan — I read recently that many of those in the other America rarely venture 200 miles from their home — and one of us flew to Lisbon as election results were tallied. I am currently on a plane to San Francisco. And we are doggedly optimistic about the the future, and how technology, with all its black mirrors, will make life better. Last night, our optimism was shaken. We know that the other America has legitimate issues, but him? After our initial expressions of disbelief and grief, we began to contemplate whether we should publish our scheduled story for today. “The piece I’d prepared doesn’t seem appropriate at this moment,” one editor Slacked, and indeed how could any piece? I’m betting that all of our team felt like I did, reading posts from Facebook friends weighing which countries might provide asylum, or reading the doom-soaked takes from the Times and The New Yorker. And we’re going to act like the world is still on its axis, and do one more story about technology?

I think the answer to that has to be yes.

I started Backchannel with a core belief — that the rise of digital tech, from chips to machine learning, is the story of our time. It has changed humanity, and it will change humanity even more. If civilization as we know it survives (and even this unimaginably ill-suited person in the White House will have difficulty tossing homo sapiens back to the cave), people (and maybe non-people) will primarily regard these times as the era during which tech changed everything. I have been lucky enough to be joined by a fantastic team that shares this view. Backchannel tries to make sense of this, dig out the key stories, and document, piece by piece, this transformation for today’s readers and tomorrow’s. It is a collaborative process: we are building a community that understands the importance of this huge narrative and adds its voice to ours.

It might not feel like it today, but technology and science is a bigger story than Donald Trump. Think about it. Who ran Italy when Galileo made his discoveries? How was Italy even run back then? Who was king during the industrial revolution in England? The quirks and flaws of government leaders are not relevant information when studying the enlightenment. In the long run, the Galileos and James Watts of the world have even more influence than the Napoleons.

And the fact that I can Google the answer to those above questions — that we have given humanity endless knowledge at the tap of a touchpad — will ultimately be recognized as more important than the identity of whoever sits in the White House, even if he has no attention span and boasts of sexual assaults. As horrible as 9/11 was, the fact that one single corporation might connect almost all of the world’s population on a single service is, in the long run, actually bigger news.

So, yes, we are going to keep running our technology stories in Backchannel. We will of course include whatever relevance our current political situation brings to this story—and I pray that it is not as bad as we fear. But we’re not going to emigrate to New Zealand, or keep our heads in some virtual reality that provides escape from this new, very unwelcome reality.

Last night was one of the most horrifying moments in my long life as an American. And the temptation to stay in bed and binge-watch…well, anything— seems compelling. But our mission continues. The Trump presidency (there, I said it. And no, it doesn’t feel good) will certainly shape our coverage in some ways. After all, American tech policy (which so far has not been much of a passion for our president-elect) can have a decided impact on the course of tech in terms of investment, regulation, and economic development. We’ll be on top of that, but we’ll also keep writing about artificial intelligence, diversity in the tech world, how startups disrupt, and what happens when your name is Mark Zuckerberg and you are not the founder of Facebook.

We owe it to you, and to those who come after. Remember, there have been economic crashes and horrible wars throughout history. But people carrying supercomputers in their pockets — supercomputers that change their lives hundreds of times a day — is new and earth shattering. We’re still on it.