Technology companies will dominate the politics of my children’s generation.
It’s inevitable. The politics of oil and resources dominated my time because the key political issues of that time revolved around resources and access to them. That’s what the Arab oil embargo was all about in 1973. It’s what the Iranian embargo was about in 1979. It’s why we went to war in 1990. That’s why we invaded Iraq. It was oil. Anyone who denies this is like those who deny the Holocaust, or who claim slavery to have been good for black people. They’re lying and should not be heard again on any subject.
In the same way, the politics of manufacturing dominated the lives of my parents. That’s what the Great Depression was about, what World War II was about, what the development of the military-industrial complex was about. It was about creating new markets for the abundance of factories. That’s what the suburbanization of America was about. It was about ginning up demand. Mass consumption leads to mass production.
The point is every American generation has a dominant industry, one whose problems and demands come to control American politics. It will be the same with technology. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
I do, that is, assuming they make the right choices now, assuming they understand where their own self-interest lies, and assuming they take steps to defend it.
The self-interest of the “cloud czars” – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook – dictates support for democracy, for liberty, and for free trade capitalism.
This is the first time in a century that the interests of our dominant industry and the interests of our people have aligned this way, since what is called the Progressive Era.
What electric companies, phone companies, gas companies and transit companies had in common was a need for organized markets. It made no sense to have a dozen phone lines over the streets of lower Manhattan, each incompatible, as happened in the 1880s. A single system allowed the network to deliver “Universal Service,” and was a fair distribution of scarce capital. In exchange, profit margins were limited, but market growth meant profits also grew, as the network and its traffic expanded.
This was the core business idea that made the Progressive Era possible. Forget what Richard Hofstadter may have written about the heroism of Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt or Ira Tarbell. It was Theodore Vail of AT&T, and business contemporaries like J.P. Morgan and Samuel Insull in the Midwest, it was their needs for organized monopoly, that made progressivism happen.
The political needs of technology have been obvious to me since I began writing in the 1970s.
What the PC, networking and software industries have in common is their gating factor, their greatest need. That gating factor is human capital. Not hands, but minds. Not just minds but trained and highly motivated minds. The more of these minds tech gets the more tech grows. This is the Creative Class Richard Florida wrote about two decades ago.
Central cities rich in human capital, from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco to Singapore to Tel Aviv, from Mumbai to Hong Kong to Shanghai, have prospered as a result. Minds are like diamonds, precious beyond measure. Mining them and harnessing them creates prosperity.
What you need determines where you stand. Tech needs human capital. It is the drive for human capital that should drive the politics of the cloud czars.
The cloud czars want education. Not necessarily mass education, but elite education on a mass scale. That’s why the cloud czars anger liberals with their support of charter schools. Manufacturers needed everyone to have enough learning to do factory jobs. Software companies need engineers. Biology start-ups need scientists.
The cloud czars don’t care where talent comes from. You could be black, brown, yellow, red, white with pink polka dots, male or female, able-bodied or with some mental or physical challenge that holds you back in other settings. You can come from anywhere. But if your mind is malleable, if it’s hungry for knowledge, if pushing through complex problems is where you live, the cloud czars need you, and can make use of you.
If you’re not like that, you’re the market.
What great minds need isn’t wealth, but peace. Social peace is important to the cloud czars. That’s where the strength of the markets they serve comes from. Over the last two decades more people have risen out of abject poverty into something like a middle-class existence – enough food, a roof, basic health care and hope for the children – than at any time in human history. Relative social peace, in Southeast and South Asia, in South America and across Africa, has made this happen. This benefits technology. It provides fertile ground for talent to develop, and a market for all the diversions technology might then create.
The greatest business values live on the cutting edge. The cotton gin was cutting edge in 1800. The railroad was cutting edge in 1860. Electricity was cutting edge in the 1890s, consumer goods were cutting edge in the 1920s, suburbs were cutting edge in the 1950s, and computers were cutting edge in the 1980s.
The highest and best use of technology lies in pushing that cutting edge further out, into areas through which our planet can be saved from mankind’s lesser angels. Big guns are no longer cutting edge. Google doesn’t need our military budget, and Alibaba doesn’t need China’s, either. What both need is access to markets, faster networks, and wireless abundance, through which clouds can seek and exploit human capital and solve the problems we hold in common.
The needs of the cloud czars should dictate their political choices, and 2018 is the year those choices must be made. This is because the cloud czars face an existential crisis, from forces that wish to break them up on anti-trust grounds, from the abuse of their systems by criminals, bots and dictators.
Fake news has put people with no love of technology, or its needs, in charge in Washington, as they’re in charge in many other places. China is the primary beneficiary, and Russia benefits from the chaos, because no one notices failure if everyone else is failing as well. We don’t face war with China, but we do face what should be a healthy competition. The struggle against air pollution and global warming should take precedence. The Internet doesn’t know you’re a dog, and doesn’t care where you’re barking from, either. A global Internet should be leading to global order, for the primary benefit of those who control the resource.
So today is a time for choosing. For Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, for Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin, for Bill Gates and Tim Cook. If you want this world to keep spinning in your direction, you must take responsibility for that spin. You must step up, not directly but through others, as the Kochs stepped up through the Bushes, and the Rockefellers behind the Roosevelts.
It won’t be as easy this time as it was to win the Presidency for Barack Obama. You’ll have to put your creations into the arena and create new institutions through which the truth of our time can shine. Jeff Bezos took a step in that direction buying The Washington Post, Laurene Jobs by buying The Atlantic. But now it’s up to Zuckerberg and Page to clean their own houses, to fix the business model disconnect that lets lies drive out truth at Facebook and Google.
Watching how this plays out will be the story of 2018, and beyond.
