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Summary
The harm caused by social media and AI-powered apps is now too stark to deny—teen mental health crises, misogynistic deepfakes, algorithmic hate and political manipulation. Yet, as tech titans strut around the corridors of power, can anyone rein in what they’ve unleashed?
In Dave Eggers’ 2021 novel The Every, a giant search engine company acquires an e-commerce behemoth. Delaney Wells, the lead character, plans a vigilante action against the company by getting a job with it. Her college thesis, written with a view to charm her way into the company, argued that it was immaterial that it was a monopoly if consumers were fine with it. Delaney describes the phenomenon as “Benevolent Market Mastery.”
In the autumn of 2021, in a case of art foreshadowing real-life events, a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave the Wall Street Journal a stash of documents that showed that Facebook had been carrying out research for three years that revealed the damaging psychological effects on teens who used Instagram.
Its findings revealed: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the emotional issues, according to the WSJ report in 2021. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
The reports led to a Senate hearing.
Concern is rising about the effect of large tech monopolies, with alarm bells jangling that governments are ineffectual in curbing their excesses. Or worse, they are mostly going along with the logic of Delaney Wells’ thesis—that their market mastery is benevolent.
Tech CEOs are seen as today’s royalty, emblematically so at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi recently. Videos were enthusiastically shared of Google’s Sundar Pichai enjoying a cup of coffee or speaking about his rail journeys as a student to IIT Kharagpur. (Clickbait alert: I also travelled from Kolkata on the dusty Coromandel Express to Chennai as a schoolboy on my way to visiting my grandmother in Bengaluru).
In the November-December issue of Wired, the cover illustration showed many of the tech titans caricatured as foxes gambling for high stakes over a card game with US President Donald Trump.
In yesteryear, Wired would have been celebratory of tech, but the lead essay foresaw a dystopian future. “Maybe that’s the thing I got most wrong about Silicon Valley. Those Davids I wrote about seemed fearless as they rode the power of the chip and the net,” wrote Steven Levy, its editor at large. “Tech giants are certainly capable of standing up for the long-term viability of their industry. And for democracy... they are doing the opposite.”
Indeed, nearly all the tech titans dutifully attended the inauguration of the second Trump presidency last January and since then have given in to mostly whatever the administration wanted.
There are often threats of punishment if they don’t.
After Apple CEO Tim Cook declined to be part of a presidential visit to West Asia last summer, Trump threatened a 25% tariff on iPhones. Companies seem willing to do somersaults to stay on the right side of the administration. Apple meekly deleted from its app store in October an app intended to warn users if US immigration officers were in the vicinity.
The month before, at a White House dinner hosted by Trump with the founders and CEOs of tech giants, the fawning praise sounded akin to what one might hear at a similar meeting in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
It is exactly two decades since Facebook opened up to all users beyond its initial catchment of those with university addresses. For all the range of entertainment options and services these tech giants have given us, the lack of sensible regulation of their monopoly powers and the unchecked algorithmic tendency to lead us into a downward spiral on hate speech, abuse of women and polarized politics are now in plain sight.
Canadian author Cory Doctorow refers to this as the “enshittification” of the web. One must be cynical in the extreme to dismiss these phenomena as something that only users who are mentally disturbed succumb to.
In Australia and the UK, a start has been made by banning the use of social media by those under 16. But, as some observers pointed out, the time has passed for restrictions to be placed on companies and even perhaps on adult users.
Last week, the Financial Times followed up on the horrific use in January of Elon Musk’s Grok, an AI chatbot, to create sexualized images of women.
“Racism was deeply intertwined with misogyny: Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zendaya, Cardi B and other prominent politicians and celebrities were targeted with requests to portray them with white skin… Millions of the images featured child sex abuse,” Laura Bates wrote in The New Age of Sexism, observing that similar ‘nudify’ tools are widely available. It cited the Tech Transparency Project estimate that there are “more than 100 such apps available on the Google Play Store or Apple App store.”
What the article vividly highlighted is that a world of tech bros domination is reinforcing gender inequality, even a dystopian “new age.”
Meanwhile, seeking a stranglehold on the ‘attention economy,’ social media companies have fired moderators, allowing a free-for-all in hate speech. Last year, X was used as a megaphone for the extreme views of Tommy Robinson. Musk went so far as to address via a video link a demonstration of more than 100,000 in London last September. From X and its sci-fi-horror AI enabler Grok to that anti-minority and occasionally violent march in London, tech bros seem bent on controlling our minds and politics.
The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.
English (US) ·