Susie Cagle, a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, writes about technology, policy and economics for Pacific Standard, The Guardian, Al Jazeera America and other publications. She is on Twitter.

Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest recent successes are not actually technological innovations, but business ones. Is a company a “tech company” if it uses smartphone apps to distribute, accept payment and organize shipping logistics for, say, its underwear delivery service?

Technological innovation undoubtedly has the potential to improve life for people in the U.S. and abroad, but the industry here has grown in ways that obfuscate, and even prevent, true potentially equitable innovations, in favor of traditional profit models.

The Internet's broad distribution networks were supposed to allow a much greater proportion of people to access global wealth and abundance, but it has truly done far more to concentrate that power and global wealth. While technology has provided underlying infrastructure to spark and support new peer-to-peer network behavior, it hasn't really changed anything about how those networks are built and owned.

For all its supposed disruption, the tech industry has not challenged much about the concentrations of power and wealth in the global economy.

For example, we now have the tools and ability to disrupt the taxi industry by allowing collectives of drivers to reach customers directly — but instead, we have Lyft and Uber, multibillion dollar companies that neither offer benefits to their drivers, nor truly give them the opportunity to run their own independent businesses.

Likewise, we have the tools and ability to build collectively owned messaging and social platforms — but instead, we have Twitter and Facebook, which mediate what users can see from other users and collect personal data to better tailor advertising sales.

We have the tools and ability to build convenient, widely accessible platforms without centralized profit motives — but we don't have the prevailing economics to do it. For all its supposed disruption, the tech industry has not challenged much about the global economy. After all, that very economy nurtured the world of "tech," and widened the gap between those who drive for Uber and use Facebook, and those who build and own Uber and Facebook.

For networks to reach their true potential, they would need to be uncoupled from the financial system that keeps Silicon Valley churning. Building a new platform is still incredibly resource-intensive, but the venture capital required to fund those projects is distributed with the goal of making more money, not spurring equitable innovation.

Technology tools have a tremendous amount to contribute to society, but if all its power remains locked up in a tiny, concentrated (and often rather unimaginative) industry, those social and economic changes, even when positive, will always be primarily in service to private profits for a very few. And that's hardly innovative.



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