Big Tech Accelerates Isolationism

By producing such extremes of wealth, big tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who — after buying Twitter for an inflated $44 billion — invited in misinformation, disinformation and hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists and conspiracy theorists, while also using his Starlink satellite technology first for and then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with Russia. “There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations,” Ronan Farrow wrote in the New Yorker, “or for the degree of dependency that the US now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” Farrow also reported that people who know Musk say his ketamine use “has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, along with his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.”

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, the fifth richest, who has turned a blind eye to Facebook’s role in election corruption around the world and in the genocide in Myanmar, and to Instagram’s role in the teenage mental health crisis. His company recently lost $46 billion on the Metaverse, the virtual-reality venture he has earnestly promoted. “Pretty soon,” he said last September, “we’re going to be at a point where you’re going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they’ll feel just as present as everyone else.” Like technocrats before him, Zuckerberg insists that online connection is a perfect substitute for human contact.

Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as gay. This might make you think he cared about privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security, assisted in Cambridge Analytica’s weaponization of Facebook user data on Trump’s behalf and, according to the Intercept, “has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world.”

Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that “conservatism consists of one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect” applies precisely to the industry and its captains.

While Musk dreams of space travel and colonies on other planets, Thiel dreams of immortality. Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely. “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” Thiel wrote in an online libertarian journal in 2009. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He didn’t choose democracy.

For a while, Thiel backed the libertarian wet dream known as seasteading, building artificial islands beyond government control. Thiel’s attempt to build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s eighth richest person, has his own island in Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person, owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels and all, which he’s made an inhospitable place for anyone who’s not enormously wealthy.

According to Wired, Zuckerberg’s private compound covering 1400 acres of the Hawaiian island of Kauai includes multiple mansions and luxury treehouses, plus an underground bunker. (Tech billionaires often seem more interested in surviving the apocalypse than preventing it.) Non-disclosure agreements bind the construction workers who built it, and a long wall shuts off outsiders from any view of the sea while making access to the public beach extremely difficult.

You can’t really be in favor of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.

Sometimes disconnection is itself the business model, as with the San Francisco-based Airbnb, which has undermined neighborhoods around the world, from major cities to rural communities, by turning long-term housing, where people had roots and relationships, into short-term rentals, often jacking up the price of housing and taking housing stock out of the area at the same time. A friend of mine who lives in Joshua Tree, the semi-rural community in the desert east of Los Angeles, has found herself surrounded entirely by short-term rentals, so she no longer has neighbors in the usual sense of the word.

The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms and software and move among their employees. I live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideals, which are not my urges and ideals.

When I use cash to buy something in a shop, I sometimes joke to the cashier that this stuff is more secretive than crypto. If you’re paying Bay Area bridge tolls, using parking meters (which often require you to punch in your license plate and use a credit card), getting coffee or anything else with a credit or debit card, you’re creating a record of your activities. In the shops that use Square for card purchases, the devices already know your email address. (Bob Lee was chief technology officer for Square for a few years.) If you don’t adjust its settings, your smartphone is tracking your journeys for Google or Apple. Google and Meta are collecting and monetizing all the data they can, and while you can opt out of some of their surveillance, and that of most of the websites you visit, the default setting of the commercial internet is the capture and commodification of your life.

Facial recognition software and DNA collection are undermining other kinds of privacy. China has demonstrated that the new technologies can create a surveillance state far beyond anything previously imagined. At the same time, cryptocurrency is being promoted as a means of escaping whatever control nation-states have over their residents’ financial transactions, a libertarian privacy currency with almost no safeguards. Some have grown rich on it; others have lost their life savings. Scams and lawsuits abound.

In an essay for the New Republic in 2022 about Sacks and his isolationist, new-right peers, Jacob Silverman wrote:

“The symbolic epicenter of this movement is San Francisco, but really it’s the entire curdled utopian dream of California. In the eyes of rich techies who have seen their beloved metropolis fall into decay, vast inequality and social misery, the state is dead. Their disappointment and alienation has melded with traditional Republican disgust toward liberal cities (and their non-white residents) to paint a picture of irredeemable urban squalor. These frightened urbanites are echoing the Trumpist drumbeat that cities — particularly in California — are dangerous, dark places that must be tamed.

But they never really loved San Francisco, at least not as a place of diversity and free circulation, and they’ve never acknowledged their role in its dramatic economic divides, housing crises and desperate homeless population.