Move Fast and Break Things; Irresistible: why we can’t stop clicking

Two new books argue Big Tech is taking over the world and it’s time for us to do something about it.

Leonardo de Vinci’s Mona Lisa gets the smart phone treatment at the Louvre in Paris

At what point, I sometimes wonder, did Google’s motto Don’t Be Evil become a standing joke? Was it when the multinational started monetising the information collected on its users? Or when it decided to avoid paying taxes? Surely it can’t have been as late as 2009, when it gave the US National Security Agency direct access to its worldwide network.

I suppose the answer will depend in part on our view of info capitalism generally. But I doubt there can be anyone left who doesn’t cock at least one eyebrow when they encounter, or remember, this corporate imperative.

To this extent American writer Jonathan Tap­lin is pushing at an open door when he asserts that the giant tech companies are, in fact, evil indeed, if by “evil” we mean driven by profit, not people, and indifferent to the greater good.

His spirited book Move Fast and Break Things takes its title from another imperative, from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and captures the nihilistic ethos that characterises info capitalism. The bright young things of Silicon Valley like to paint themselves as blue-sky thinkers. But for Taplin they stand in a long tradition of predatory capitalism and are no less savage in pursuit of their interests than the British East India Company.

Taplin’s aim is to locate these companies in the history of monopoly capitalism and to show how a “cadre of libertarian ubermenschen” effectively hijacked the utopian promise of the internet in its early days. To this end he takes us on a whirlwind tour of neoliberalism’s exponents and architects — Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, the brothers Koch — and a rogues gallery of digital robber barons, including Peter Thiel (Paypal), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Kim Dotcom (Megaupload), and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

He is especially attuned to (and dismissive of) the countercultural posturings of these billionaires, not least because he is a veteran of 1960s counterculture: a manager-producer for several artists, including Bob Dylan, George Harrison and rock group the Band. Indeed it was his work with the Band that set him on a collision course with Big Tech, that group having suffered a sharp fall in revenue as a result of the file-sharing platform Napster.

For Taplin, people such as Napster’s Sean Parker (that’s Justin Timberlake in the 2010 David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin film The Social Network) are men of “passing artistic desire” now “chained to a world of suits and bureaucratic concerns”. They are artistes manque, and utterly ruthless.

Big Tech’s core business model, Taplin argues, is best described as “surveillance marketing”: companies collect information on their “customers” and sell it on to the big end of town.

In the process they effectively steal from the people — musicians and so on — who created the content used to ensnare the public. Interested only in the bottom line, they take advantage of a lack of industry regulation — the weakening of antitrust laws in particular — to cement their market position. They are the rent-seekers par excellence: price makers, not price takers, who augment their power through tax avoidance (“transfer pricing”) and regulatory capture.

All of this is set out well, and if Taplin’s analysis is a bit obvious at times, it is elevated above the mundane by his experience in the music industry and his fury at those who would profit from it while condemning musicians to increasing precarity.

But for me the book runs into trouble when it comes to Taplin’s solutions to this problem, most of which seem to be predicated on the idea that, given the proper regulations, the market in digital commodities can be made to function to the benefit of all.

It is in the nature of those commodities, however, that they can be stored and reproduced for free, or as close to free as makes no difference, and it is that which makes them so disruptive. In other words, Taplin fails to appreciate the extent to which the rent-seeking behaviour of the giant tech multinationals is driven by necessity. He wants a “moral framework for the digital economy”, but it may turn out that a “digital economy”, or at least a capitalist digital economy, is a contradiction in terms.

This is not to argue that Taplin is being unfair to the big tech companies. In my view they are every bit as ruthless and opportunistic as he suggests.

But a more radical approach would be to view such behaviour as the last hurrah of a capitalist system confronted with a technology that is implicitly post-capitalist, and that may be used in some future society to extend the possibilities of the artists Taplin so admires.

Not to want to get all techno-utopian about it but it seems to me that the problem Taplin identifies is pregnant with its own solution. Information wants to be free, in both senses of the word.

Taplin describes the musicians and artists who are fighting back against Big Tech as “The Resistance”. But American author Adam Alter seeks to remind us that one of the weapons Big Tech has in its armoury is the “irresistible” nature of the tech itself. His book Irresistible is an essay on behavioural addiction and a survey of the techniques used to pull us in and keep us hooked. Since some estimates suggest internet addiction affects 40 per cent of the population, this is a matter of some urgency.

Contra the “addictive personality” thesis, Alter argues that addiction has as much to do with environment as it does with genetics and biology. Yes, personality is a factor in the prevalence of addictive behaviours, such that some people may be likelier than others to fall into drug-use or alcoholism. But even most drug addicts, Alter suggests, are addicted less to the drug itself than they are to the circumstances of its taking. It follows that addictions will be harder to beat when circumstances are harder to escape, and that the ubiquity of the internet is thus a cause, and not just a consequence, of internet addiction.

On to this can be mapped the six key ingredients of behavioural addiction, as Alter regards them: compelling goals, unpredictable feedback, incremental progress, increasing difficulty, unresolved tension and social connection. All role-playing games or social media platforms depend for their effectiveness on one or several of these ingredients, and the creators of these games and platforms understand this well. In Alter’s view these internet designers are engineers of addictive experiences.

Though Irresistible contains lots of interesting material, it feels rather Pollyannaish at times. Alter has little to say, for example, about the principal pushers in this crack-house economy, and even suggests that their habit-forming technologies can be harnessed in the cause of “social goods”.

Worried that people who work in call centres suffer dips in motivation (who knew?), he suggests companies “gamify the workplace to motivate their employees”. Elsewhere he sings the praises of something called the Pavlok — a device that uses electric shocks to establish new behavioural patterns. It’s almost as if the paraphernalia of behavioural psychology, with its levers and addled rats and pigeons, had spilled out into the human world.

Perhaps, then, Alter is insufficiently alive to the “evil” of the big tech companies. But he is an entertaining guide to the science, and his book contains lots of practical tips on how to limit our use of technology. If my pessimism survives his recommendations, it’s partly because he does such a good job of explaining the dynamic of behavioural addiction and just how pervasive it is in this space.

Richard King is an author and critic. His most recent book is On Offence: The Politics of Indignation.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us

By Jonathan Taplin

Macmillan, 308pp, $32.99

Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching

By Adam Alter

Bodley Head, 354pp, $35