Here is the entire Introduction to my book The Gig Society, which will be released this week on February 4, 2020!
Introduction
I wasn’t alive when the Internet was created, and I don’t wish that I was. The history of computation and modern technology is fascinating to me, but there’s a reason why it’s history. I can’t remember or imagine a world without the technology we have today, and for that I am grateful. I’ve always had the Internet, online multiplayer games, and computers fast enough to help everyday people. I remember that even in elementary school we had a computer lab, and each classroom had a couple of those single-unit colored Apple machines.
For generational reasons, a lot of contemporary humor is lost on me. I never knew the time before this era of technology—when books were the primary way to learn things (as opposed to one of many ways), when relationships were built without constant connection (as opposed to the availability provided by messaging applications and text messaging), and when keeping up with people meant talking to them (as opposed to checking their social media). It’s not that I don’t understand the humor the older generations make about the younger generations’ reliance on technology, it’s that I can’t get it.
This morphs my perspective significantly. I won’t ever know the world before the Internet and modern technology, so I don’t reminisce. I don’t idealize or hold on to a past I never lived. It’s clear that the technological advancements of the 1990s and 2000s took over parts of our lives and had negative impacts on our society that make some want to go back. But for me, technology’s always had the effect on society that it has today. It makes me want to improve it, not dismantle it. It makes me dream of a better future, not pine for a better past.
And there are negative impacts, potentially a lot of them. The ones we do know about are getting worse for us every day. Loneliness caused by a lack of real-life interaction is causing suicide, and the average American’s life expectancy is dropping. Technology fundamentally changes the way our freedom of expression and our rights to privacy are interpreted, often in ways that violate them. The recognized potential for gigantic job loss caused by the technologies of artificial intelligence and automation will bring despair to people and widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
These are the challenges of our moment, and how we choose to solve them will define our country’s culture and economy. If we don’t recognize and address the negative impacts, we will lose our national cohesion, liberty, economic security, and happiness. But if we confront the challenges with solutions as modern and complex as the technologies that befall us, then we will find our national identity, secure our freedoms, create an economic system that works for the people and not the profits, and discover hope for the future.
Threats to Our Society
The Internet’s connectivity is its mission and its power. The Internet can gather people under common interest and enable real-time conversations between them, even if they’re half a world away. There are discussion boards and groups for every interest, people can watch and discuss events in real time with streaming, and it’s all made possible by the Internet.
It’s not just that the Internet has the power to connect people, it’s that people are actually using that power. There are four-and-a-half billion people with Internet access globally. The consensus over several studies done in recent years is that the average person is spending over six-and-a-half hours a day online.1 So in the world of connectivity, we ought to be socializing more, making more friends, and utilizing amicable ways of dealing with people who think differently from us.
Except, as we know, those assumptions are wrong. Americans are lonelier than ever before, with nearly half reporting sometimes or always feeling lonely. 43% of American adults say their relationships are not meaningful and that they feel isolated.2 As our social support framework has crumbled, a quarter of Millennials say they have no close friends.3 Our national division has increased too, with 77% of Americans viewing the country as divided, up from 65% in 2004 and 69% in 2013.4
While there are other issues at play, this is largely the fault of technology. Or rather, I propose, it’s the fault of how we use technology. Technology has connected us all but has failed to keep us connected in ways that feel meaningful, or promote understanding and inclusion. In an era where seemingly everyone is doing the same thing (being online), there’s no reason why 27% of Americans should feel like no one understands them.
There are reasons why people don’t seek connections online, and I don’t discredit those. People don’t share personal information because they’re worried about being doxxed. People limit interactions on social media sites because they don’t trust the tech industry to do good things with their data. I don’t deny that these are valid oppositions, but I think we can come up with forward-thinking and technical means to put them to rest.
What the older generations often don’t understand is that the younger generation doesn’t want to return to an old way. It’s not that we don’t know that church exists, it’s that we don’t want to get up early on a Sunday morning. We understand that reading a book is better than reading social media, and that it’s easier to meet people at a bar than online. We know these options exist, but we choose not to partake in them.
This really only leaves one option: if we are going to spend a quarter of our lives online, and nothing can talk us out of it, then we need to make being online more positive. We need to find ways to make social media social again. We need to figure out how to create happy communities online, where people can make meaningful connections and friends, establish trust in each other, and stop feeling alone.
The proposition is new and requests a radical change in how we conduct ourselves online. The grave threat of American loneliness is causing us to kill ourselves. This is a complicated problem, and of course additional research and study is needed. This solution, or whatever other solution we use, is going to have to involve us changing online culture. We need to be ready to make the cultural changes that are asked of us to stop the epidemic of loneliness and save lives.
The Internet’s Power in Action
I spend a lot of time on the Internet, probably more than I should. I’d like to imagine I have my finger on the pulse of the user bases and attitudes. I’ve recently seen a rise in content from people admitting that they’re depressed and lonely, in some cases even suicidal. I think it’s horrible that people are feeling these ways, but expressing it is better than wallowing about, waiting for something to change. Expressing it is a way of reaching out.
For the broader direction I’d like to see the Internet go in, this is great. People are openly talking about their issues, and in that conversation they’re looking for connection. Obviously, these people would be better off talking to a therapist than to Internet strangers, but people beginning to talk is key to people broadly becoming social online again.
I think it’s no surprise that the rise of the Internet has led to a dramatic shift in the ways Americans view certain issues. For example, 63% of Americans in 1994 believed that immigrants were a burden to the country, but in 2019 62% believe that immigrants strengthen it.5 A similar flip in perspective exists in America’s views of gay marriage, where in 1996 only 27% believed same-sex marriages should be recognized by the law as valid, compared to 63% in 2019.6 I think the connectivity of the Internet helped open the discussion around these issues and ultimately changed a lot of minds.
We need to use the Internet’s power to fight the cultural threats of today. We need to bring back the openness of discussion where we can talk about our issues, including loneliness and depression. I remember seeing a heavily shared Tweet that said something to the effect of “Why does it matter that I can like whoever I want if no one likes me?” This is emblematic of the problem: our cultural understanding of sexual orientation has progressed, but people remain as alienated as ever.
Threats to Our Economy
The societal threat posed by technology, that it brings loneliness and depression, is new and scary. Clearly, we do not have a good way to deal with that threat yet. The changes of technology do not just threaten our relationships and our culture, but also threaten our economy. Automation poses a threat to America’s most vulnerable workers, and surveillance capitalism endangers our privacy. Technological progress should make our lives better. If it does not, we need to evaluate the winners and losers of the economic model to ensure its fairness.
Automation is an issue for workers in that 47% of American jobs are at a high risk of being automated in the next two decades. I fear, as do millions of Americans, that if automation were to happen in an instant right now, that the biggest winners would be the ruling class, and the biggest losers would be the working class. But it doesn’t have to be—with the right economic framework, losing jobs to automation could be the start of those workers’ reeducation and reintroduction to the workforce. Under the current framework, that wouldn’t be the outcome for those people.
Automation should not represent a threat to our economy, it should represent a springboard we can use to achieve justice for the millions of people it will displace economically. We have the knowledge to preempt this economic transition to take advantage of it. By being forward-thinking, we can derive an economic model beforehand that embraces automation, rather than rejects it.
Another fresh challenge our economy will deal with will be surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism is an economic system that uses its knowledge of consumers to the advantage of the business. Instead of businesses needing to trust consumers, surveillance capitalism offers those businesses with something way better: the user’s actual data. It is replacing the trust in what the consumers say with trust in what their data says about them.
Unlike automation, I see surveillance capitalism as a complete negative that erodes our values. Surveillance capitalism relies on having an abundance of customer data, usually obtained by years of tracked activity and real-time monitoring. It’s a misplaced assumption that Americans are willing to give up their privacy for an economic model that tells businesses not to trust them.
We need to find ways to curtail surveillance capitalism before it grows into something we cannot control. It is a new threat, one that not many Americans could recognize, and we’ll need to be proactive in shutting it down. Being put under perpetual surveillance for the good of the economy is a dystopian nightmare.
America Needs to Lead the Regulatory Charge
Due to its unparalleled values of freedom and individualism, America has a responsibility to the rest of the world to resist the dangers of these economic trends. Without American leadership on how to handle these new challenges, globally we will watch freedoms erode, speech become limited, and privacy get eradicated. We need to set an example and act decisively on regulating modern technology.
Another facet of this situation is that the tech giants that need regulation are American companies. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple are all headquartered in the US. Regulating the tech industry in America will create downstream effects on their business models and culture in the global market.
Surveillance capitalism brings a change to economic models that the entire world is unprepared for, the United States included. It will bring an unprecedented amount of monitoring and surveillance into the lives of all Americans. It seeks to disrupt the right to privacy and turn it into a privilege on a global scale.
Bear in mind that there is no other country on Earth with a legal commitment to the privacy of its citizens like America. We have the Fourth Amendment to protect us from this threat of surveillance from the government, and it’s high time we enforce that amendment on businesses as well. The United States must face the challenges of the new economy and regulate them to preserve the rights and dignity of its own people as well as the world’s.
Because of the unique status of America as a champion of the rights to speech, privacy, and freedom, we must take up this mantle and lead the world. The world’s culture and economy are changing dramatically, and while we’re bidding farewell to a lot of old ideas and bringing in the new, let’s make sure that we keep what’s worth preserving. It’s important to promote the American perspective on individuality and liberty as American companies gain power and enact their will globally.
Identifying How Big Tech Wrongs Us
The purpose of this book is to educate and inform the American people of the way that modern technology has changed and will continue to change our country, and propose legislative action to help alleviate the negatives of those changes. My educational background is in Computer Science with a concentration in Internet Technologies, a minor in Management Information Systems, and a certificate in Systems Development. I’ve worked as a full-stack (responsible for all categories of technology) software developer and engineer for four years.
I see the threats that the modern tech industry is posing to Americans, but I also understand that there are barriers that prevent meaningful regulation and accountability from occurring. Too often a lack of technical knowledge can impede legislators’ abilities to find nuanced solutions or cause the judicial system to fail in holding people accountable. Writing a book which provides essential background on these threats is a good way to increase baseline knowledge in the American electorate.
That’s what the first half of this book is largely focused on- discovering and analyzing the dangers posed by big technology. I want to give a face to the evils of the tech industry: what kinds of subversive practices they have, what their economic endgame looks like, and how they abuse their customers’ freedoms. Identifying these moves us closer to the point of regulation.
We’ll talk about Google, the company with a penchant for authoritarianism and their control over the market; Facebook, the company that can’t align its business practices in ways that lets users feel comfortable; and Internet service providers, the companies that made false promises to gain market advantages and monopolize a category of service without helping the American people.
We will also talk about technology in this book: not just events surrounding the tech industry or their business models, but topics like encryption, how data gets moved across the Internet, how data is stored, and the potential for security breaches. Accompanying these topics will be detailed walkthroughs. There are no topics without introductions or words without definition.
Stop Big Tech’s Bad Practices
Naturally following the first part of the book, the second will explore how we can stop the tech industry from being destructive. There are problems not only with the tech industry itself, but also with the framework in which we legislate it. We don’t have the right agencies in place, and we don’t have legislators bold enough to take these issues on.
There are a lot of ways that we could regulate the threats of modern technology, but I want to keep the focus on ones that maintain people’s civil rights and dignity but don’t regress or prevent the progression of technology. Technological advancements have a lot to offer society, but we need to do our part to make sure all of society shares in their benefits. The way we can get that done is through regulation.
We need to regulate how private companies gain access to our data, how they use that data, and what rights users have over their own data. We need to examine laws that allow private companies to act in unfair ways against each other and how those laws affect the software market and user choice. We need to limit how private companies exploit government services. We need to ban technologies that pose a threat to our autonomy.
From the perspective of national consensus, I think implementing most or all of my proposed policies would be a homerun. As a country, we agree on these solutions and the corresponding philosophy behind them. We agree that big tech is invading our privacy and we’re not comfortable with it. We want the free market of technology to flourish without bad faith actors. We want our freedom of speech preserved.
With just over half of Americans thinking that big tech companies need regulation7, it’s time to start having more discussion about what we can or can’t do. There are regulations that people from all political stances can get on board with, as infringements of tech on our lives have become too egregious to be ignored.
I Am You
In an ideal world, it would not be me writing this book. I’ve never published so much as a blog post before I found it necessary to start the process. I am the average American: I work 9–5, I have a family and a mortgage, I take care of my pets, and I spend way too much time online. I’m not naturally inclined to put my name on things or push my personal stock.
But the threats of the tech industry can’t be ignored any longer, and I don’t have the option to wait for more advocates of a free Internet to start speaking up. I’ve spent practically my entire life living in one place (Omaha), in the middle of the country. The dangers of modern technology are not local to Palo Alto, where the big tech companies reside. They affect me, they affect you, they affect America, and they affect the world.
The time for change is now. We need to get in front of these challenges. Our culture, society, and economy are all changing as a result of modern technology, and Americans deserve to have a say in those changes. We don’t have to be helpless; we can use representation in government to guarantee that these changes help us, the average Americans.
The undermining of our liberties and values of individualism is too important not to worry about. These ideas are core to the American identity. If nothing else, I want to be clear that modern technology threatens these values, and we all will be worse off if it is allowed to progress unimpeded. Our generation, our kids’ generation, and the generations that follow cannot afford to have their rights dismantled for all tomorrows because we lacked the courage to take on those who threaten them today.
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