The Arousing Reality Behind Today’s Tech Giants
The tech companies extract a huge wealth in data from their users, and they give back very little. We are milked like cow udders from one of the most precious resources today — information.
Do you think these companies work for you?
This is the common belief, but belief doesn’t mean knowledge. All companies operating within our current economic paradigm have ‘profit maximisation’ as unique directive. Even turning to green energy or having prosocial actions is solely a consequence of marketing departments wanting to safeguard or increase profits by painting themselves into something they’re not — the eco-friendly giant. All these “concerned” attitudes lead to marginal action, for mere face value in most cases and only after a very pragmatic calculation of cost vs. cash returns. The architecture of salaries, bonuses and promotions of those that have top decisional power are based only on ‘return maximisation’ — pushing highly skilled individuals for anything but user and social interest. That ‘user interest’ comes only as the byproduct of a design who’s primary intent is to make us consumer addicts. There’s a big imbalance of ‘value extracted’ vs. ‘value returned to the user’ that’s hidden by smart marketing so that people think Facebook for instance, works first and foremost at improving services offered to users. The real services that are improved, are those made for their real clients, those financial and political interests that use this huge data base for extracting knowledge, statistics, predictions and running simulations.
We are ‘users’ as in used! The real clients of social media companies are economic and political entities, that purchase access to us!
Here’s a link to Forbes magazine documenting some of the experiments and simulations done by Facebook on it’s users. These dodgy maneuvers we know about are most surely just a drop in the water. What we’re not realising is the weight with which this treasure-trove of data turns right back against us, in the form of control and manipulation. The span of control ranges anywhere from how to efficiently transform an entire generation of kids into junk food consumers and brand zombies, to altering people’s emotions towards events, manipulating them to vote, or accepting situations that go against their interest!
Another aspect of our ‘used’ status reveals itself when we realise the means by which they make and keep users. It’s called ‘habit formation’, and although it sounds trivial it’s rather interesting and makes use of serious cognitive science. You can get a clear and simple explanation in this video, narrated by Nir Eyal, author at Forbes magazine and habit formation specialist. However this rigorously applied expertise has a huge detrimental downpour on society — it hampers peoples attention. One of the most important cognitive abilities we have is our attention — attention is the thing that allows you to take in larger density and volume of information, to get more deeply immersed in a pleasant activity like sex or listening to music, and it’s the cross-hairs that sets your path as you’re pulled towards the future — it’s your will! Damaging this “aiming mechanism” greately prejudices the individual, and doing it so on a massive scale is leaving a whole handicapped society behind!
Andrew Ledvina, former research scientist at Facebook :
“The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site.”
Facebook even has a chance at being the biggest manipulation and intelligence gathering agency in human history, while masking itself as the project of a nerdy kid — a non-threatening poster boy, benign in every aspect and boring in every way. What would be stranger — being truly so, or, having all the necessary cards and not using them?
R&D departments everywhere are pushing the boundaries of science fiction, with pivotal technologies laid out on a spectrum from simple entertainment to medicine. All these stay unused until the ‘business’ departments give green light, thus depriving humanity of a huge wealth of means and resources for individual and social evolution. Oftentimes the green light doesn’t ever need to come, for the company to stay in profit. A clear example of this can be seen in the hardware industry — why make the effort to create a state of the art phone when you can repackage the same shit for years with slight tweaks, selling it because the ‘new cool’ is with round edges or different screen dimension, all to be repeated again and again from rounded to straight and back. Once again, in this current paradigm, working for community benefit is not an option:
It’s hugely more profitable to make money with the marketing department instead of the R&D dept! Engineering quality consumers is vastly cheaper than engineering and producing quality products.
You may think that competition would drive companies in the other direction, thus correcting their behavior — wouldn’t it? The highly influential ‘Game theory’ which is a mathematical study into strategies for competitive situations — a sort of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of war’ for economic conquests — states that it’s in your own interest to maintain a close relationship with your greatest economic opponent, while manufacturing the external impression of real rivalry. This rivalry energizes consumers on both sides and gives them the impression of freedom to choose between two giants that are in a ‘real competition to produce only the best’. For economic experts it should be clearly obvious that direct competitors like Apple and Samsung are closely cooperating behind closed doors, and a billion $ lawsuit between them once in a while is small change — especially to what they would have to lose in a real fight to win the markets by pushing newer, greater, cheaper, more useful technology and services to consumers. Win-win for the corporations, loss for people and society. In general people fail to realise just how cold and pragmatic ‘big business’ is! They relate it to their own grudgy competition with some neighbor or to the two butcher-shops fighting for clients. But at the top level things are as serious as they can get, and if mathematics tells you that you have to sleep mouth to ass with the competition for maximizing your profit you cannot ignore it.
In this the Capitalist free market, anyone who’s focused on the product and on the benefit of the clients is destined to die. Companies are forced before anything else to become pros in making money!
One of the advantages that come with this focus on returns can be seen in how easily they deal with possible start-up competitors. Besides the efficiency of ‘buying good ideas instead of coming up yourself with them’, the big tech companies buy startups just to bury them before they get to push the ‘technology market’ too high. Year after year promising small companies are acquired only so that their projects can be sidelined. All these things coupled with the enormous wealth of highly useful patents that are kept under key, strategically unused, by giants like Apple and Samsung and one can begin to realize what a huge brake in society’s development these monopolies are!
The bottom-up value creation of individual human beings is slowly being replaced on all fronts by automation, without any real effort from the part of these global economic entities to address the important rising issues. As long as they are looking at human beings for their ‘utility value’ this prevents these great agents of change to act in a moral way. Just as the industrial revolution eventually left us without the ability to work (see this beautiful playlist of machines replacing human labor), this time with the new age of artificial intelligence we will be left without any utility whatsoever. As Sam Harris put it in one of his podcasts:
“If you would have given me a horse a hundred years ago you would have given me the ability to do valuable work. If you give me a horse today you’re giving me a headache. This will very soon, very likely, happen to human beings. And once they’ll lose their value as workers they’ll also lose their political power!”
And Yuval Harari completes the picture by stating:
“We could soon end up with the sole worth of being consumers. But perhaps these giants will eventually have no need for human consumption to fuel their existence. And even if consumption would still be required, the product and service demands coming from robots and AI would be hugely greater than that of human beings.”
Some may be inclined to look at the present and ignore the future — and here, it appears that these “too big to fail” corporations contribute in a positive way by creating jobs and paying taxes.
These are the number of workplaces created by the giants of the world:
- Microsoft 124,000 employees — 2017 statistics
- Google 72,053 employees — 2017 statistics
- Facebook 18,770 employees — 2017 statistics
The global tech giants’ impact on employment are insignificant. This however is considerably raised up for companies like Apple with their huge distribution networks, supplier ecosystem and app developers. But after a short period of 5 to 10 years the growth of employment has nowhere to go but down. With increasing automatization these numbers will fall in accelerating fashion. Uber mediated the interaction between drivers and customers, very intelligently creating a job market while in the same time capitalizing on it’s activity — only to invest heavily in self-driving cars and trucks! The social aftermath of our world wars, i imagine, could one day be surpassed by a vast social degradation ensuing from today’s ignorance.
As for tax contributions, ‘these companies are paying less than any other economic agent’, including any normal citizen!
Google for example moved in the year 2012 alone, through a shell company in Bermuda no less than 11.91 billion dollars! This was done by selling or licensing it’s rights coming from foreign activity but using intellectual property developed on us soil, to a subsidiary registered in the famous tax haven. Effectively all the profits coming from google search and the advertising technology — that’s the mother-lode of Google’s fortune(!) — go to Google Ireland Holdings headquartered in Bermuda. Now guess what the income tax is! 0 (zero)! (for further reading into their financial loopholes — arsTechnica). In the case of Microsoft it’s rich shareholders benefited from a total of 8.6 billion $ in tax breaks from the state of Washington. All this while the company quietly surpassed 1 trillion $ in all time revenue — meanwhile its home state faces emergencies in education funding, homelessness, heroin addiction and escalating crime (further reading on jeffreifman.com). These are just two examples of how these private entities literally suck the life and future out of the human population.
The concept of ‘economy’ must have as sole purpose the betterment of human lives! We don’t have an economy on earth right now!
The social media companies are making a real scorched earth policy, cluttering people’s attention in trivialities and destroying real opportunities for growth, they are creating a real productivity vacuum in society while transferring huge resources and prosperity to the heads of big business and investors. Taxation is further sucking huge amounts of money from the people while making indecent allowances in the ranks of corporations. This can only lead to totalitarianism and serfdom — if we’re not already there!
When a whole generation of youths will be left with likes, selfies, shallow promiscuous disposition and no jobs — a fraction of society will bring themselves closer to absolute autocrats!
This, off course, is just a satirical pamphlet — i’m sure that in reality all these appearances are explained away by serious ethical interest and prosocial action.
Artist — Louis Quiles
