It\u2019s remarkable to look at the world twenty-five years ago. We were just coming off the end of the Cold War, the end of the war in Kuwait, the end of wondering when the nukes were going to fall. Anita Hill had us paying attention to sexual harassment. Rodney King had us paying attention to police violence. Al Gore had us paying attention to climate change. And for the first time, almost anyone could get to the \u201cinformation superhighway\u201d that was going to transform the world.<\/p>\n
Of course, it was all an illusion, because \u201cwe\u2019re going to\u201d means nothing. The worst verb in the world is \u201cwill.\u201d We will take care of the environment, we will get a fair shake for people of color, we will make sure women enjoy full equality in society. Because when you say \u201cwe will,\u201d you get to drop back and punt and let the future take care of it. And then you get Ferguson, and Sandra Bland, and Harvey Weinstein and Walter Scott and Kevin Spacey and Mark Halperin and Twitter bots and Facebook frauds and a ballistic missile alert in Hawaii and above all, the racist grandpa who got to sit in the White House without the most votes. In twenty-five years, if anything, we\u2019ve gone backward.<\/p>\n
Because we didn\u2019t really believe in consequences<\/em>. We said \u201cthis is wrong\u201d but forgot to mention \u201cunless you\u2019re powerful enough to make it hell on anyone who calls you on it\u201d and \u201cwe all know Hollywood and CEOs and powerful people are Just That Way and what can you do.\u201d And when the Internet became a thing, it started off as rare and different and exotic and ended up being shaped exactly the same as everything else. Them that has, gets, and them that has more gets more. Silicon Valley in 2018 is functionally indistinguishable from Wall Street in 1986, except Y Combinator has replaced Wharton and Stanford is the new Harvard. Same big swinging dicks, same get-rich-quick scam artists crowding out actual product, same firehose of wealth pointed at a narrow sliver of white or proper-sort-of-Asian dudes from the same half-dozen schools. The money assholes moved to the Peninsula and metastasized, and just kept enabling more horrible assholes to be more horrible than ever.<\/p>\n Because the Internet gave us a data revolution and let us slice and dice and find people. We thought that it meant a gifted kid in Alabama would never have to be lonely, without thinking that a horrible racist in New Jersey would be empowered and enabled in the same way. It unleashed all kinds of power with absolutely no control or judgement of whether this was a good idea or not. Why? Because that\u2019s how society already is. It\u2019s how society has always been. Don\u2019t believe me, book a flight on a commercial airplane. Look at your seat classes and your boarding groups and your TSA Pre and your CLEAR and the fact that bags cost, snacks cost, choosing your own seat costs\u2026somewhere back there we managed to decide that we could charge extra to treat people like human beings and slice that into tranches of its own so people would pay more for the privilege of not being veal-boxed across the country. And then technology gave us the ability to add dynamic pricing to that, so now everything is a game of chicken designed to squeeze the most out of every salable good from airline seats to baseball tickets to advertising.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019ve taken the internet revolution and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it. With every advance, our choices get smaller. We used to have hundreds of dialup ISPs. Then we had a handful of DSL providers. Now, you pick between your cable company and either your phone company or doing without, because fiber isn\u2019t there for most people. There were a dozen significant phone manufacturers in 2006. Now it\u2019s Apple and Samsung literally accounting for every dollar of profit in the mobile handset market, plus a few other players trying to find their way. We started with Yahoo and Hotwire and Excite and Altavista and Webcrawler and we wound up with Google. How many people in your address book have personal email accounts that end with something other than @gmail.com?<\/p>\n We thought the Internet didn\u2019t require regulation. We actively avoided<\/em> it. These were not laws of nature, they were deliberate choices. Letting Amazon walk on sales tax for a decade or more gave them an economic advantage that catapulted them to the top of the marketplace. Letting Facebook accumulate real name information and suddenly tear down the walled garden without consequence, and then purchase Instagram and WhatsApp, gave them a critical edge on making themselves the universal address book – and the ability to sell it out to anyone with cash. Letting Twitter become a honeypot for assholes and a free-fire zone for bots and racists so their DAU numbers could stay higher was just plain fucking stupid. But for whatever reason, the kind of scorn we gave junk-bond traders and algorithmic banking hustlers just never got turned on the likes of Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Bezos and the Googlers and Y Combinator.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how it was that we decided that \u201ceveryone should code\u201d and that \u201cthe most important skill you can learn is being able to code\u201d and all that sort of nonsense. There\u2019s plenty enough in Silly Con Valley that doesn\u2019t rely on code, and I guarantee you none of the names above have made a significant contribution to their company\u2019s Github in years. Because it\u2019s not really about code, and it\u2019s not really about everyone knowing how to code. It\u2019s about establishing \u201ccode\u201d as a shibboleth for the technical elite and \u201ccoders\u201d as inherently special people who deserve an exalted place, as if system administrators and technical writers and support agents aren\u2019t equally critical in making the Valley go. \u00a0It\u2019s about collecting and consolidating privilege. It\u2019s like the parable of the man who thinks the one thing he knows is the only thing worth knowing. And it\u2019s of a piece with Gibson\u2019s character of Cody Harwood in the Bridge trilogy: a person who wants a new world while ensuring that he will retain the same power and privilege he possessed in the old.<\/p>\n Which actually is itself of a piece with things like the so-called dark enlightenment. Or the Six Californias nonsense of Tim Draper, or the New California nonsense of whatever Infowars deviants cooked that up over the weekend. It\u2019s about saying that the present system needs to be changed in such a way that I will automatically enjoy greater puissance under the new regime than I presently possess\u2026which means removing power from anyone I don\u2019t like. Women, Democrats, brown people\u2026come to think of it, this is all of a piece with the assorted VRA shenanigans and \u201cvoter fraud\u201d suppressions that Conservative, Inc has been flogging for twenty years.<\/p>\n And we\u2019re back to the early 90s. I\u2019m pretty sure that history will record 1994 as a nodal point, when the South managed to get astride the American future and scream \u201cSTOP\u201d while simultaneously signaling that \u201cdo as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.\u201d Two decades of a culture explicitly bending toward the notion that you don\u2019t have to know or care that other people exist. Two decades of making sure we don\u2019t get any further than we were. Two decades of ending up right back where we started from. Actually, in 1995, we at least had a reasonably capable human being in the Oval Office and didn\u2019t have to worry about ballistic missile alerts. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d give just to be back where we started, instead of going in reverse.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a lesson from the last year – or the last twenty-five years – it\u2019s that you should never say something is unthinkable, because everything is possible. And things can always, always<\/em> get worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s remarkable to look at the world twenty-five years ago. We were just coming off the end of the Cold War, the end of the war in Kuwait, the end of wondering when the nukes were going to fall. Anita Hill had us paying attention to sexual harassment. Rodney King had us paying attention to … <\/p>\n