The Humanist Cyberpunk Is Lit, Fueled By Big Tech’s Tragedy
Emerging Tech Trends, the End of Plutocracy, and New Countercultures — inspired by SXSW 2019
Privacy is dead. Or: data is everything.
Using voice search optimization, personal data records, and biometric scanning, today’s computer systems can gather enough information from our commands to our cars and conversations with our personal AI assistant not only to know how we feel, but what advice, products, and services might make us feel better.
Sound utopian? Dystopian? Possible?
This is only a tiny glimpse into one of the future scenarios of the coming year, presented by Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute at SXSW in Austin this past week.
While it’s not news that companies are finding it challenging to learn how to store, use, and share the massive amounts of data they keep gathering, what is new is the degree of concern raised by the fact that a mere handful of companies hold the power to determine how that data will be handled. In Silicon Valley, it’s the G-MAFIA (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Facebook) and in China, it’s BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). That’s just nine businesses leading the focus of research, the distribution of funding, the relevance of government involvement, and finally, the development of consumer-grade applications that will pre-set the terms of our thinking and behavior, and ultimately shape the society we’ll be living in — on a global scale.
Take biometric scanning. Last year, as stated in the Tech Trends Report Amazon filed a patent for a new system that detects the physical and emotional wellbeing of users, based on their previous and current interactions with bots like Alexa. This might result in Alexa offering, for example, to get cough drops delivered to your house in one hour. What sounds like a practical convenience really raises fundamental questions such as:
Is such radical transparency really purposeful, and above all, desirable?
Under what circumstances will this data be shared with third parties, if at all?
Who owns individual data? Who owns the access to your emotional reactions and physical state?
The recent revelations about Silicon Valley’s big tech companies’ handling of privacy and data should be enough to make us pause, rethink, and consider an alternative future to these rigged systems, systems which currently lie at the foundation of capitalism.
The End of Plutocracy
In news that broke during SXSW, one of the Valley’s most prominent players in the private equity world, Bill McGlashan, founder and managing partner at TPG Growth and a proponent of ethical and social-impact driven investments, was charged in the college admissions scandal.
This is only one of example of a widespread tactic that TIME Editor-at-Large Anand Giridharadas points out in his recent book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
He refers to this behavior as “doing good by doing well,” i.e. acting in favor of one’s own interests (often using exploitative technological possibilities), while setting up a philanthropic initiative to “make powerpoints and excel sheets for Africa,”otherwise known as “doing good.”
In a conversation with U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren at SXSW, Giridharadas ignited a discussion about the present culture of win-win by today’s tech monopolies.
Using #breakupbigtech, Elizabeth Warren has been calling for a re-distribution of power between platform and data (“as a nurturing ground for exponential business opportunities”) to protect competitive markets.
Otherwise, any new or smaller companies will be gone before they can even grow — “killism,” as it’s referred to a term by Silicon Valley’s leading VC voices.
While Warren wants to “distinguish the billionaire monopolist owners and investors from the rank and file of Big Tech,” as Giridharadas writes in his TIME’s piece, she still acknowledges that the system itself is rigged. Because “the elite weighs in for their own interests, such as tax breaks, instead of investing in education or health care. And this is not representative of the mainstream American people.”
In the closing of this fascinating conversation, Anand started a lightning round of questions, one of which was: “AOC: overhyped or underhyped?” to which Warren responded: “Rightly-hyped.”
Since she’s been in office, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), has confronted the Senate on a number of issues, including taxes, and initiated the Green New Deal to fight climate change and its inextricable link to racial and economic injustice. She has become a public voice for a positive, counter-reaction — and a hot celebrity if you consider the thousands of people queuing hours to see her live at SXSW, where she explained her understanding of democratic socialism:
“Capitalism, to me, is an ideology of capital. The most important thing is the concentration of capital, and it means that we seek and prioritize profit and the accumulation of money above all else, and we seek it at any human and environmental cost… But when we talk about ideas for example like democratic socialism, it means putting democracy and society first, instead of capital first.”
By implication, AOC’s pledge of “people before profit” — honoring the “fundamental values of a just, inclusive, and sustainable society” — also calls for an end to plutocracy.
New Countercultures
Tim Berners-Lee certainly wouldn’t say that this is how he pictured the story of his first web server unfolding back in 1990. Thirty years ago, he was one of the pioneers shaping a new narrative, similar to the cyberpunk movement of the early 80s. While the term “cyberpunk” is often associated with a Matrix-like high-tech world, it is rooted in a countercultural movement which addressed the now (and increasing) contradictory state of today’s society amid emerging tech trends, powerful monopolies, and increasingly digitally-infused humans.
Douglas Rushkoff , who wrote his first book on cyberculture, and just recently published Team Human, shared his thoughts on the need to fight the tyranny of tech via a live-streamed session at SXSW:
“The internet has turned from a space of possibilities to a quest of predictability. (…) While young developers might understand iOS and Android, they don’t necessarily understand the underlying concept of capitalism, of inducing settings, a certain state of mind, and by that, atomizing people to their — newly created — needs.”
Despite his general concern for the drug-like consumption and abuse of tech, Douglas Rushkoff still believes there’s hope, and to him, it comes down to the question of questions:
What does it mean to be human, in an age of machines?
Rather than focusing solely on the utilitarian value of humans, he argues, one must believe that there’s more to the human species. An intrinsic value, if not, a soul. Thus, what really is needed, is retrieving (and maybe finding some globally shared) human values.
From alternative business models such as platform cooperatives to the rising popularity of festivals such as Burning Man and the sentiments of avant-garde artists, many SXSW participants echo Rushkoff’s hope:
“There is a growing movement towards real, human interactions, and an openness to “finding humanity in the other.”
As interdisciplinary artist Lisa Park showed with her audio-visual interactive installation at SXSW: Blossoming.
Or, as Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling said in his brilliant, annual keynote on our zeitgeist at SXSW:
“Computers became more and more glamorous and now, the sense of wonder has vanished. But: cyberpunk is not dead. The new wave is dead, but the ocean is not.”
Sterling points to Shenzhen, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Berlin, Somalia, Belgrade, Austin, and Kiev as places that hold potential as future cities of a new cyberpunk, reconciling humanity and tech, and redistributing power and more equal opportunities.
Leading the cyberpunk of humanism is at the core of what we believe is needed to create more beautiful businesses.
But rather than breaking up or burning down what exists from the outside, we’re beginning by sparking new, different conversations, and by sharing untold stories, from within.
Because clearly, the future of capitalism is slowly, but surely, running through the fingers of big tech like sand.
To build a movement takes time, to build a counterculture of humanist cyberpunks, even more. So we’re beginning from the core, by gathering individuals in a space to converse, to explore, to imagine, to wonder, and to become brave again: to make beautiful business the new “business-as-unusual”.
In the end, each of us needs to decide and step into action for a future we actually want to live in, or, as Amy Webb said at the closing of her presentation:
“While you cannot solve for future uncertainty, you can prepare your teams to think strategically using data-driven signals, trends and outcomes. Focus on connections, not predictions. Doing so will help your organization get ahead of disruption in order to build your preferred futures.”
