The coronavirus crisis has upended most of normal life as we knew it—but one key economic sector is poised to emerge from the pandemic with vastly improved fortunes and social power. That would be the already top-heavy and dangerously underregulated tech-industrial complex, which now supplies a lifeline to many workplaces, consumer goods, and entertainment options for a lockdown-weary American public. As New Republic contributor Jacob Silverman notes, the stunning resurgence of tech concerns to the forefront of the present crisis has come at a moment when they were facing some serious scrutiny in Washington. Figures on the left such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called to break up big tech monopolies like Google, Apple, and Amazon, while right-wing populists like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley have made a case for aggressive antitrust enforcement in Silicon Valley.
Now the same companies that looked like anti-democratic leviathans in January have smartly repositioned themselves as vanguard anti-Covid operations. Google and Apple eagerly publicized a new cross-platform agreement to expedite contact tracing—even though the app they’re planning to debut has little actual promise of getting the job done, since there are serious privacy issues alongside pressing logistical ones, such as the high rate of infection among asymptomatic carriers.
But never mind, the fantasy of a tech quick fix to the labor-and-planning-intensive challenge of comprehensive contact tracing is just the sort of delusional magical thinking that’s fed the past three decades of top-heavy growth in the tech sector, Silverman writes. With the once-ballyhooed “techlash” on the wane,
we have a burgeoning alliance between industry and government that has them returning to something like a post–Patriot Act, pre-Snowden mindset: a self-reinforcing, quasi-authoritarian belief in the power of surveillance and data-crunching to solve the problem at hand. Just replace the task of tracking terrorists with the mandate to track infections. Contact tracing—the practice of mapping social networks between people infected with the disease or exposed to someone who is infected—is now widely considered a key technique in fighting the spread of the virus. And though some state governments have leaned on analog tracing, it’s presumed that Silicon Valley will be involved in digital contact tracing on a mass scale.
Indeed, while megabrands like Google and Apple soak up public attention, the most serious—and dangerous—players in the new Covid-tech alliance are defense-and-surveillance specialists like Palantir, the brainchild of longtime Trump supporter and hard-right libertarian Peter Thiel. Palantir is “is already gobbling up government and corporate contracts, with the coronavirus providing a whole new line of business,” Silverman writes. “Insiders estimate that Palantir will bring in $1 billion in revenue in 2020, a 35 percent increase, year over year.” Palantir originally recruited intelligence agencies as its principal client base; for it to move so seamlessly into public health applications is no small cause for alarm. “Whether Palantir’s software works is almost secondary to what it represents: A data-driven company now competes with defense giants like Raytheon,” Silverman writes. “Secretive and politically connected, espousing its own omniscience in the fights against terrorism and disease, Palantir remains the emblematic tech company of our time.”
And in the meantime, the other tech giants have doubled down on their convenience-enhancing and labor-soaking business models. Amazon and Google are hiring new employees in the thousands in the face of the coronavirus recession—and Amazon, in particular, has pushed its already sorely used workforce into overdrive. It has dismissed workers who have complained about the allegedly shoddy state of worker safety in the company’s Dickensian warehouse facilities and faced a wave of wildcat labor stoppages as a result of its lax health and safety protocols.
But this, too, is a feature, not a bug, as tech commentators are fond of saying. “What’s notable about these moguls” atop the tech sector, Silverman notes, “is that they never propose a more equitable, just world—simply one that provides for their own leisure and convenience, built upon the labor of an expendable class of workers who will one day be replaced by apps and robots.” And sadly, no one has yet developed a vaccine for the viral appeal of this dystopian vision.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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