Teflon Industry

Evgeny Morozov calls Silicon Valley the Teflon Industry: “no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick”! Part of the reason, he says, is that any criticism gets “framed as a debate over “the digital”:

“This is where the “digital debate” leads us astray: it knows how to talk about tools but is barely capable of talking about social, political, and economic systems that these tools enable and disable, amplify and pacify.”

And then there’s the lingo of such debates: they involve words like “information”, “networks” and “Internet”. Which, let’s face it, are terms synonymous with progress. And that would make any critic of the same a Luddite!

Morozov is also pissed with Silicon Valley’s grand mission statements about changing the world and making it a better place. As if that’s the only thing driving them, not profits. Branding (bragging?) aside, he points out there are privacy risks with the:

“data-centric model of Silicon Valley capitalism seeks to convert every aspect of our everyday existence…into a productive asset…our relationships, our family life, our vacations, our sleep.”

He quotes Google’s ex-CIO: “All data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet”. That sounds ominously similar to what the CTO of the CIA, Gus Hunt, once said, “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have …we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”

And then there’s the tech industry’s belief that all the world’s problems can be solved by more computation and/or more data. But as Morozov points out:

“It doesn’t follow that they are also most effective responses to the unwieldy, messy public problems have deep institutional and structural causes.”

I guess Mozorov would love these lines by Bruce Sterling:

“If the NSA released their heaps of prying spycode as open-source code, Silicon Valley would be all over that, instantly. They’d put a kid-friendly graphic front-end on it. They’d port it right into the cloud.”

While I don’t agree with Mozorov (after all, it’s not Silicon Valley’s job to solve the world’s problems regardless of their claims), I still feel it is worth reading what the other side feels. And why.