The long read
Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from
the pandemic
As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each
day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and
power. By Naomi Klein
Republished
with permission from The Intercept
by Naomi
Klein
Published
onWed 13 May 2020 06.00 BST
For a few
fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus
briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for
weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.
“We are
ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re
aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it … We realise that change is not
only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”
The
inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from
the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to
announce that he will be heading up a panel to reimagine New York state’s
post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into
every aspect of civic life.
“The first
priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on
telehealth, remote learning, and broadband … We need to look for solutions that
can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things
better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were
purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel
wings.
Just one
day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system”. Calling Gates a
“visionary”, Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we
can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all
these physical classrooms – why, with all the technology you have?” he asked,
apparently rhetorically.
It has
taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock
doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech
than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being
rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical
isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory
for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future.
Anuja
Sonalker, the CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking
technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalised pitch. “There has
been a distinct warming up to humanless, contactless technology,” she said.
“Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”
It’s a
future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are
also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices,
our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of
us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our
primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance
incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future that is
hastily being constructed, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed
acceleration.
This is a
future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered,
either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via
driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s
a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no
cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control), and has skeletal mass
transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on
“artificial intelligence”, but is actually held together by tens of millions of
anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centres, content-moderation
mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing
plants and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and
hyper-exploitation. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our
every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented
collaborations between government and tech giants.
If all of
this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven,
gig-fuelled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free
convenience and personalisation. But many of us had concerns. About the
security, quality and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About
driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and
people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our
privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous
social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids’ mental
health. About “smart cities” filled with sensors supplanting local government. About
the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass
produced.
And most of
all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power
accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication –
eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they
now dominate, whether media, retail or transportation.
That was
the ancient past, also known as February. Today, a great many of those
well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this
warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a
harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise
that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives,
the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.
Thanks to
Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael
Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the
gleaming showroom for this grim future – but the ambitions reach far beyond the
borders of any one state or country.
And at the
dead centre of it all is Eric Schmidt.
ell before
Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive
lobbying and public-relations campaign, pushing precisely the Black Mirror
vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of
this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon
Valley giants – with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and
military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to
private tech companies.
It’s a
vision Schmidt has been advancing in his roles as chair of the Defense
Innovation Board, which advises the US Department of Defense on increased use
of artificial intelligence in the military, and as chair of the powerful
National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, which
advises Congress on “advances in artificial intelligence, related machine
learning developments and associated technologies”, with the goal of addressing
“the national and economic security needs of the United States, including
economic risk”. Both boards are crowded with powerful Silicon Valley CEOs and
top executives from companies including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and
of course, Schmidt’s former colleagues at Google.
As chair,
Schmidt – who still holds more than $5.3bn in shares of Alphabet (Google’s
parent company), as well as large investments in other tech firms – has
essentially been running a Washington-based shakedown on behalf of Silicon
Valley. The main purpose of the two boards is to call for exponential increases
in government spending on research into artificial intelligence and on
tech-enabling infrastructure such as 5G – investments that would directly
benefit the companies in which Schmidt and other members of these boards have
extensive holdings.
First in
closed-door presentations to lawmakers, and later in public-facing opinion
articles and interviews, the thrust of Schmidt’s argument has been that since
the Chinese government is willing to spend limitless public money building the
infrastructure of high-tech surveillance, while allowing Chinese tech companies
such as Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei to pocket the profits from commercial
applications, the US’s dominant position in the global economy is on the
precipice of collapsing.
The Electronic
Privacy Information Center (Epic) recently got access, through a freedom of
information (FOI) request, to a presentation made by Schmidt’s NSCAI in May
2019. Its slides make a series of alarmist claims about how China’s relatively
lax regulatory infrastructure and its bottomless appetite for surveillance are
causing it to pull ahead of the US in a number of fields, including “AI for
medical diagnosis”, autonomous vehicles, digital infrastructure, “smart
cities”, ride-sharing and cashless commerce.
The reasons
given for China’s competitive edge are myriad, ranging from the sheer volume of
consumers who shop online; “the lack of legacy banking systems in China”, which
has allowed it to leapfrog over cash and credit cards and unleash “a huge
e-commerce and digital services market” using digital payments; and a severe
doctor shortage, which has led the government to work closely with tech
companies such as Tencent to use AI for “predictive” medicine. The slides note
that in China, tech companies “have the authority to quickly clear regulatory
barriers, while American initiatives are mired in HIPPA compliance and FDA
approval”.
More than
any other factor, however, the NSCAI points to China’s willingness to embrace
public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a
reason for its competitive edge. The presentation touts China’s “Explicit
government support and involvement eg facial recognition deployment”. It argues
that “surveillance is one of the ‘first-and-best customers’ for Al” and
further, that “mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning”.
This is
notable because Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been pushing this
precise vision through its Sidewalk Labs division, choosing a large portion of
Toronto’s waterfront as its “smart city” prototype. But the Toronto project was
just shut down after two years of ceaseless controversy relating to the
enormous amounts of personal data that Alphabet would collect, a lack of
privacy protections, and questionable benefits for the city as a whole.
Five months
after this presentation, in November, NSCAI issued an interim report to
Congress further raising the alarm about the need for the US to match China’s
adaptation of these controversial technologies. “We are in a strategic
competition,” states the report, obtained via FOI by Epic. “AI will be at the
centre. The future of our national security and economy are at stake.”
By late
February, Schmidt was taking his campaign to the public, perhaps understanding
that the budget increases his board was calling for could not be approved
without a great deal more buy-in. In a New York Times article headlined “I used
to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China”, Schmidt called for
“unprecedented partnerships between government and industry” and, once again
sounding the yellow peril alarm, wrote:
“AI will
open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also
a defense department priority … If current trends continue, China’s overall
investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the
United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to
become larger than ours.
Unless
these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has
a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research,
wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure …
Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world’s leading innovators,
and the United States is not playing to win.”
The only
solution, for Schmidt, was a gush of public money. Praising the White House for
requesting a doubling of research funding in AI and quantum information
science, he wrote: “We should plan to double funding in those fields again as
we build institutional capacity in labs and research centres … At the same
time, Congress should meet the president’s request for the highest level of
defence R & D funding in over 70 years, and the defense department should
capitalise on that resource surge to build breakthrough capabilities in AI,
quantum, hypersonics and other priority technology areas.”
That was
exactly two weeks before the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, and
there was no mention that a goal of this vast, hi-tech expansion was to protect
American health. Only that it was necessary to avoid being outcompeted by
China. But, of course, that would soon change.
In the two
months since, Schmidt has put these pre-existing demands – for massive public
expenditures on high-tech research and infrastructure, for a slew of
“public-private partnerships” in AI, and for the loosening of myriad privacy
and safety protections – through an aggressive rebranding exercise. Now all of
these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible
hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years
to come.
And the
tech companies to which Schmidt has deep ties, and which populate the
influential advisory boards he chairs, have all repositioned themselves as
benevolent protectors of public health and munificent champions of “everyday
hero” essential workers (many of whom, like delivery drivers, would lose their
jobs if these companies get their way). Less than two weeks into New York
state’s lockdown, Schmidt wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that
both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of
leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation.
“Like other
Americans, technologists are trying to do their part to support the front-line
pandemic response …
But every
American should be asking where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19
pandemic is over. How could the emerging technologies being deployed in the
current crisis propel us into a better future? … Companies like Amazon know how
to supply and distribute efficiently. They will need to provide services and
advice to government officials who lack the computing systems and expertise.
We should
also accelerate the trend toward remote learning, which is being tested today
as never before. Online, there is no requirement of proximity, which allows
students to get instruction from the best teachers, no matter what school
district they reside in …
The need
for fast, large-scale experimentation will also accelerate the biotech
revolution … Finally, the country is long overdue for a real digital
infrastructure … If we are to build a future economy and education system based
on tele-everything, we need a fully connected population and ultrafast
infrastructure. The government must make a massive investment – perhaps as part
of a stimulus package – to convert the nation’s digital infrastructure to
cloud-based platforms and link them with a 5G network.”
Indeed,
Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision. Two weeks after that
article appeared, he described the ad-hoc home schooling programming that
teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together
during this public health emergency as “a massive experiment in remote
learning”.
The goal of
this experiment, he said, was “trying to find out: how do kids learn remotely?
And with that data we should be able to build better remote and distance
learning tools which, when combined with the teacher … will help kids learn
better.” During this same video call, hosted by the Economic Club of New York,
Schmidt also called for more telehealth, more 5G, more digital commerce and the
rest of the preexisting wish list. All in the name of fighting the virus.
His most
telling comment, however, was this: “The benefit of these corporations, which
we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal
with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your
life would be like in America without Amazon.” He added that people should “be
a little bit grateful that these companies got the capital, did the investment,
built the tools that we’re using now, and have really helped us out”.
Schmidt’s
words are a reminder that until very recently, public pushback against these
companies was surging. Presidential candidates were openly discussing breaking
up big tech. Amazon was forced to pull its plans for a New York headquarters
because of fierce local opposition. Google’s Sidewalk Labs project was in
perennial crisis, and Google workers were refusing to build surveillance tech
with military applications.
In short,
democracy – inconvenient public engagement in the designing of critical
institutions and public spaces – was turning out to be the single greatest obstacle
to the vision Schmidt was advancing, first from his perch at the top of Google
and Alphabet, and then as chair of two powerful boards advising US Congress and
the Department of Defense. As the NSCAI documents reveal, this inconvenient
exercise of power by members of the public and by tech workers inside these
mega-firms has, from the perspective of men such as Schmidt and the Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos, maddeningly slowed down the AI arms race, keeping fleets of
potentially deadly driverless cars and trucks off the roads, protecting private
health records from becoming a weapon used by employers against workers,
preventing urban spaces from being blanketing with facial recognition software,
and much more.
Now, in the
midst of the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and uncertainty
about the future it has brought, these companies clearly see their moment to
sweep out all that democratic engagement. To have the same kind of power as
their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of functioning without being
hampered by intrusions of either labour or civil rights.
All of this
is moving very fast. The Australian government has contracted with Amazon to
store the data for its controversial coronavirus tracking app. The Canadian
government has contracted with Amazon to deliver medical equipment, raising
questions about why it bypassed the public postal service. And in just a few
short days in early May, Alphabet has spun up a new Sidewalk Labs initiative to
remake urban infrastructure with $400m in seed capital. Josh Marcuse, the
executive director of the Defense Innovation Board chaired by Schmidt,
announced that he was leaving that job to work full-time at Google as head of
strategy and innovation for global public sector, meaning that he will be
helping Google to cash in on some of the many opportunities he and Schmidt have
been busily creating with their lobbying.
To be clear, technology is most certainly a key
part of how we must protect public health in the coming months and years. The
question is: will that technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy
and public oversight, or will it be rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy,
without asking critical questions that will shape our lives for decades to
come? Questions such as these, for instance: if we are indeed seeing how critical
digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks, and our
data, really be in the hands of private players such as Google, Amazon and
Apple? If public funds are paying for so much of it, should the public also own
and control it? If the internet is essential for so much in our lives, as it
clearly is, should it be treated as a nonprofit public utility?
And while
there is no doubt that the ability to teleconference has been a lifeline in
this period of lockdown, there are serious debates to be had about whether our
more lasting protections are distinctly more human. Take education. Schmidt is
right that overcrowded classrooms present a health risk, at least until we have
a vaccine. So how about hiring double the number of teachers and cutting class
size in half? How about making sure that every school has a nurse?
That would
create much-needed jobs in a depression-level unemployment crisis, and give
everyone in the learning environment more elbow room. If buildings are too
crowded, how about dividing the day into shifts, and having more outdoor
education, drawing on the plentiful research that shows that time in nature
enhances children’s capacity to learn?
Introducing
those kinds of changes would be hard, to be sure. But they are not nearly as
risky as giving up on the tried-and-true technology of trained humans teaching
younger humans face-to-face, in groups where they learn to socialise with one
another to boot.
Upon
learning of New York state’s new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Andy
Pallotta, the president of the New York State United Teachers union, was quick
to react: “If we want to reimagine education, let’s start with addressing the
need for social workers, mental health counsellors, school nurses, enriching
arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts
across the state,” he said. A coalition of parents’ groups also pointed out
that if they had indeed been living an “experiment in remote learning” (as
Schmidt put it), then the results were deeply worrying: “Since the schools were
shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of
screen-based instruction has only grown.”
In addition
to the obvious class and race biases against children who lack internet access
and home computers (problems that tech companies are eager to be paid to solve
with massive tech buys), there are big questions about whether remote teaching
can serve many kids with disabilities, as required by law. And there is no
technological solution to the problem of learning in a home environment that is
overcrowded and/or abusive.
The issue
is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly contagious virus for
which we have neither cure nor inoculation. Like every institution where humans
gather in groups, they will change. The trouble, as always in these moments of
collective shock, is the absence of public debate about what those changes
should look like, and who they should benefit – private tech companies or
students?
The same
questions need to be asked about health. Avoiding doctor’s offices and
hospitals during a pandemic makes good sense. But telehealth misses a huge
amount. So we need to have an evidence-based debate about the pros and cons of
spending scarce public resources on telehealth – rather than on more trained
nurses, equipped with all the necessary protective equipment, who are able to
make house calls to diagnose and treat patients in their homes. And, perhaps
most urgently, we need to get the balance right between virus tracking apps,
which, with the proper privacy protections, have a role to play, and the calls
for a “community health corps” that would put millions of Americans to work,
not only doing contact-tracing, but making sure that everyone has the material
resources and support they need to quarantine safely.
In each
case, we face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing
in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very
unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources
to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus
health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis.
Public schools, universities, hospitals and transit are facing existential
questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying
campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G and driverless vehicles – their
Screen New Deal – there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public
priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs. On
the contrary: the price tag for all the shiny gadgets will be mass teacher
layoffs and hospital closures.
Tech
provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And
the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to “reimagine” our states
and cities to men such as Bill Gates and Schmidt is that they have spent their
lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot
fix.
For them,
and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to
receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has
been unjustly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, by putting the former Google chair in
charge of the body that will shape the state’s reopening, appears to have just
given him something close to free rein.
•
Republished with permission from The Intercept. Sign up for The Intercept’s
Newsletter here.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário