Silicon Valley likes to see itself as a bastion of human progress. Yet it seems to be content to ignore humanity’s most pressing concerns.
It’s not every day that I come face to face with a Silicon Valley insider. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I recently found myself at work speaking to one of the engineers of SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1.
A discussion about the rocket itself and SpaceX’s dealings with NASA soon led on to the ways new technology would shape our future. Per the engineer, today’s rockets could transport a busload of essential supplies from the west coast of the US to Japan in just 18 minutes. A technically amazing feat, certainly. Yet diplomatic issues complicate the picture. For instance, would Japan accept having a specialized launchpad on its territory, thereby becoming the de-facto center of East Asia’s rocket-enabled trade? To clarify: I wasn’t the one who raised this question.
Interestingly, the engineer seemed unfazed about these issues. From his tone of voice and the sparkle in his eyes, it was clear that he genuinely believed in the power of technology to eventually overcome them. And as our conversation moved on to AI and cloud capital, I got a clearer picture of his belief system: Whoever doesn’t embrace progress will simply get left behind.
Progress at All Costs
In the context of Silicon Valley, ‘progress’ tends to mean whatever is good for investors. In other words, it’s usually a byword for greater profits. But the sparkle in the engineer’s eyes suggested to me that his faith in technological progress was not necessarily profit-oriented. Instead, he saw it as essential for the betterment of humanity. A cynic might say that his words were simply a way to rationalise tech companies’ ever-greater profits. But my very human intuition told me otherwise.
In a sense, it was heartening to witness this manifestation of faith in the future of humanity. With the ills Silicon Valley has unleashed on us, it’s easy to cast the people behind it as the villains. Yet, in my eyes at least, people like the engineer aren’t bad people. If they were, it’s hard to see why they’d want to overcome the potential issues technological progress might bring. To me, this concern is a testament to their belief that they’re working in the service of humanity. But here we find the elephant in the room: Where’s the space for humanity’s views among all their bright ideas?
Practical Issues, Disinterested Solutions
Let’s return to the engineer’s concern: the diplomatic issues concerning the 18-minute rocket transport. Would the Japanese want to be the centre of the rapid supply of essential goods in eastern Asia? Would they want a launchpad and supply chains hoisted on them by the dominant partner in this agreement – the US? Perhaps the Japanese government would agree to it, pending certain conditions. But would Japanese citizens, especially those living near the launch site, be happy about the potential for increased noise and environmental pollution? Presumably, for the engineer, these would be costs people would just have to bear until new technology eventually negated them. Otherwise, they’d face getting left behind as the rest of the world embraced these new technologies. It seems reasonable to mention a rock and a hard place here.
No matter how genuine and well-intentioned the engineer’s beliefs, then, they’re fundamentally antidemocratic. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship, after all. And, like all dictatorships, a lack of democratic accountability risks driving an ever-larger wedge between what those with power believe to be good for humanity and what’s good for it in reality.
Benevolent Dictatorship vs Democratic Accountability
Such antidemocratic viewpoints should come as no surprise, given the origins of Silicon Valley. As Paris Marx recounts in his review of Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian, the Valley has been in cahoots with the military-industrial complex since the 1950s. Tech investors like Peter Thiel, and now Elon Musk, have pushed a clearly antidemocratic, right-wing worldview where tech companies would bypass democratic protocols in order to maximize profit. Any benefits for humanity would simply be a bonus for them, if that.
For years, tech companies were able to establish a narrative that their profit-motivated projects were beneficial to humanity’s progress. Unfortunately, governments and regulators didn’t challenge it. Indeed, many politicians helped promote it. (Remember Obama’s coding push?) Now, regulators and governments are on higher alert. But it’s all too little, too late. Silicon Valley’s insiders are still pushing on with its world-altering projects without sufficient democratic accountability. Their antidemocratic worldviews, whether motivated by profit or faith in progress, means that they can’t help themselves. Hence the need for rigorous democratic accountability to rein in their worst impulses.
The methods available to achieve this aim are numerous. Governments could introduce laws that criminalise excessive damage to the environment. They could implement wealth taxes. In the US especially, they could overhaul corporate law, which currently prioritises shareholders’ profits above all else. These steps, among others, would dampen Silicon Valley’s ability to shape the future in their own image. They would stop Big Tech deciding what’s good for humanity and hold it accountable to the electorate. Perhaps most importantly, they would strengthen the general democratic culture not only of the US, but of other countries subject to Silicon Valley’s conception of the ‘future’, too. Step by step, the electorate, not Big Tech, would determine its future. Perhaps one day, even people like the engineer would accept that if they want to help humanity, then they should probably listen to it too.