When I sit down at my work computer—say, to check my email—I enter a password; then my phone vibrates, asking me to confirm whether it is actually me logging in on the same computer I use every day. To open my email, because the account is administrated by my university, I repeat this process one more time.
Say I’m now checking the news in my inbox and want to read about a recent political speech from a different news outlet. I make a Google search; the first three options are advertisements, followed by a series of headlines, some from decent publications, some from radical ones. When I find a site that looks reasonable, I am greeted with a full-page banner that blocks the page and asks me to accept tracking cookies. That site doesn’t have what I need; let’s try another one. More cookies; more advertisements flashing on the sidebars; a pop-up asking me to sign up for a weekly newsletter. I scroll down and realize the article is locked behind a paywall.
So I try the New York Times. Another paywall, but this one allows a number of free articles. But I have to log in to my non-work email, which means another password, which means another notification on my phone. By the time I get to the text of the speech, I’ve wasted ten minutes, and the whole process has generated some four unwanted emails: Are you logging in? Are you really logging in? Welcome to the New York Times! What can we get for you? What can we get you to pay for?
Am I the only one who remembers when it wasn’t a chore to go online?
When I get home from work, my phone is the key to get into my apartment. God forbid I want to leave home without my phone. Using coupons at the grocery store requires a dedicated account and phone app. Getting packages from the apartment mailbox requires my phone. Reading a menu at a restaurant requires my phone.
I know I’m being a curmudgeon. I can’t pretend that I haven’t benefited from digital technology. I can stay in touch with my friends in Utah. I can write on a computer much faster than on paper. I don’t have to carry around stacks of bound periodicals when I do research. I like Zelda games as much as the next guy. But is it really necessary for me to be locked out of my own home if my phone battery runs out?
What I’ve described so far are, ultimately, mere inconveniences. Allowing cookies ten times a day won’t kill me, and many journalists do need paywalls in order for their jobs to exist. But I have concerns about the future of the Internet that reach beyond the fact that the time I spend in my inbox and on social media is, increasingly, time spent interacting with automatically-generated content, advertising algorithms, and the targeted messages of political interest groups.
First, it is well understood that online algorithms have become very good at telling people what they want to hear. This is convenient when you’re looking to, say, buy a specific lightbulb. Google gives 76 million results for “buy lightbulbs”; Amazon has over 10,000 product results on its platform. But it is highly problematic when users can read whatever they want to hear about any political candidate, public figure, or ballot initiative. Online content is becoming less transparent about where information comes from—and who is paying money to show it to you.
Second, corporations have gotten better at monetizing every form of communication. Instagram now looks less like a platform for sharing photos of yourself with your friends and more like the paid programming between shows on satellite TV. Providers of online services have a financial incentive to make their content as visible as possible, whereas folks like you and I don’t have that incentive. The inevitable result has been that strategic corporate content has crept to the foreground of social media while organic content has faded into the background. And now that corporations have entrenched themselves in our phone pockets, it is easier for them to reach over into our wallet pockets. By demanding more of our attention on services that we use anyway, like search engines and social media, the tech giants can easily shut out competitors and consolidate power.
What unites these two processes—social media “echo chambers” and overreaching consumerism—is that unless the system of incentives that drives them is somehow undermined, they will continue to fuel themselves. As low-quality news drives more people to the political fringes, more radical content will proliferate. And as corporations get bigger and their competition gets smaller, there will be no system of checks and balances to limit their control over our finances, attention, and interactions with the Internet.
Technology corporations are already ubiquitous and unavoidable. Right now, I’m using Google software running on a Microsoft operating system on a machine with Nvidia components that I carry around in a backpack sold on Amazon. Just to write this essay, I’ve already handed money to four of the world’s five most valuable companies (I’ve only avoided Apple through sheer obstinacy). And that doesn’t just mean that those CEOs walk home with a fatter bank account. The ramifications are also political. The combined wealth of those five firms is greater than the GDP of 147 of the world’s nations combined; and if those five firms were a country, they would be the world’s third richest, after the United States and China. It is an open secret that—at least in my native United States—money buys power, by means of lobbying and propaganda campaigns bankrolled by super PACs and, ultimately, well-heeled corporate investors.
It is no exaggeration to say that modern living cannot operate without a phone. Technology corporations already run the network that runs our lives, and unless savvy governments can rein them in, their financial power—and, by extension, political power—has nowhere to go but up. We may, in the coming decades, find ourselves in a world where the wealth of nations and the wealth of profit-making corporations are synonymous—a world that more closely resembles the dystopias of cyperpunk fiction than our own history. And if we ask ourselves what is to blame, we need look no further than the indispensable blocks of rare metals and plastic in our pockets: our calendars, keys, notepads, newspapers, calculators, cameras, doctors, maps, magazines, movie theaters, metronomes, fact checkers, banks, and meeting rooms.
With every new development prophesied by billionaires who stand to profit from the endless integration of their technology into our lives, the first question to be asked is, inevitably, “Can we?” That is human nature. But perhaps the question we should ask, what we should have asked, is: “Should we?” ∎