Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
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Authors: Douglas Rushkoff
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Copyright © 2016 by Douglas Rushkoff
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ISBN 978-0-698-15366-0
Version_1
For Barbara and
Mamie
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
REMOVING HUMANS FROM THE EQUATION
The Digital Marketplace: Winner Takes All
Sharing Economics: Getting Humans Back “on the Books”
Reprogramming Money—Bank Vaults to Blockchains
Do Algorithms Dream of Digital Derivatives?
Investment Gamified: The Startup
Ventureless Capital: The Patience of Crowds
O
ne December morning in 2013, residents of San Francisco’s Mission District laid their bodies in front of a vehicle to prevent its passage. Although acts of public protest are not unusual in California, this one had an unlikely target: the Google buses used to ferry employees from their homes in the city to the company’s campus in Mountain View, thirty miles away.
As the photos and live updates from the scene filled my social media feeds, I wasn’t sure how to react. Google was, in most ways, the ultimate Internet success story—a college dorm-room experiment that had blossomed into one of the world’s most powerful technology giants and created thousands of jobs—all while striving to do no evil. The company’s stellar growth revived more than a few economic sectors, as well as a few neighborhoods. And for a while, everybody was happy with the way things were going. We all got free search and e-mail. Bloggers got paid to put ads on their Web sites, kids shared in the revenue from YouTube videos, and the Mission District got a bit trendier and safer as hipsters and tech professionals moved in, new coffee and book shops opened, lofts were constructed, and property values went up. Growth is good—at least for those doing the growing.
But the influx of Googlers to San Francisco’s most historic neighborhoods also raised rents, forcing out longtime residents and small businesses that were not participating in all this growth. Google’s air-conditioned tour buses epitomized the seeming invasion—like space transports taking aliens to and from their mother ship. Adding insult to injury, Google was now using publicly funded bus stops as loading stations for its very private transportation system. Rents close to those bus stops were 20 percent higher than those in comparable areas,
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which were themselves doubling every few years to accommodate not only Google’s employees but those of Facebook, Twitter, and the other Silicon Valley darlings.
And so on the same day Google’s stock happened to be reaching a new high on Wall Street, a dozen scrappy, yellow-vested protesters managed to paralyze one of the tech giant’s now infamous buses. Onto its side they plastered an Instagram-friendly banner that read “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies” in a perfect, multicolored Google font. Tapping into growing skepticism over the unequally distributed benefits of the tech boom, the image spread like wildfire. At least some small part of me smiled in solidarity with their critique.
A few weeks later, there was nothing to smile about. Protesters in Oakland were now throwing rocks at Google’s buses and broke a window, terrifying employees. Sure, I was as concerned about the company’s practices as anyone, and frustrated by the way Silicon Valley’s rapid growth seemed to be displacing instead of enriching the people of San Francisco and beyond. But I also had friends on those buses, trying to make a living off their hard-won coding skills. They may have made $100,000 a year, but they were stressed-out, perpetually monitored, and painfully aware of their own perishability. “Sprints”—bursts of round-the-clock coding to meet deadlines—came ever more frequently as new, more ambitious growth targets replaced the last set.
We may all be on the same side here. Google workers are less the beneficiaries of an expanding company than they are its rapidly consumed resources. The average employee leaves within a year
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—some to accept
better positions at other companies but most of them simply to break free of the constant pressure to perform. Taking the bus gives them more time to work or just relax instead of driving. They are human beings.
For its part, Google is relieving the freeways and the environment of thousands of commuter cars. Unlike many other companies in the Bay Area, which give only lip service to environmentalism or, at best, organize car pools, Google offers a shuttle program that saves more than 29,000 metric tons of CO
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per year. Since when has doing the right thing become the wrong thing?
There is something troubling about the way Google is impacting the world, but neither its buses nor the people in them are the core problem; they’re just the easy target. Google’s employees are not oblivious to the increasing poverty outside the bus windows on their way to work. If anything, such sights only make these workers cling to their jobs all the more desperately, leaving them less likely to question the deeper processes at play. They do want to become millionaires—but not so that they can live a life of luxury. In a country without a strong social safety net, workers are told that they have to become millionaires or else face penury as soon as they retire or, worse, get sick. A typical online retirement calculator insists that a person who earns $50,000 a year will require at least $1.5 million to retire at age sixty-seven, and a single unexpected medical bill can turn any of us into one of America’s 1.7 million annual health-related bankruptcies.
Not even Google’s investors, officers, or the infamous 1 percent are to blame for the growing inequalities of the digital economy. Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists are simply practicing capitalism as they learned it in business school and, for the most part, meeting their legal obligation to the shareholders of their companies. Sure, they are getting wealthier as the rest of us struggle, and yes, there’s collateral damage associated with the runaway growth of their companies and stocks. But they are as stuck in this predicament as anyone; many CEOs understand that meeting short-term growth targets is not in the best long-term interests of their companies or their customers, but they are themselves caught up
in a winner-takes-all race for dominance against all the other digital behemoths. It’s grow or die. So each tech company must become as intrusive, extractive, divisive, time-consuming, wasteful, expensive, job killing, exploitative, and manipulative as the next one. As for their impatient shareholders, well, they are the likes of us: we are the ones holding these very stocks in our own 401(k) and college savings plans, counting on them to go up, and selling them if they don’t. None of this worked out as we thought it would, and we’re all frustrated by the results.
But there’s no easy place to draw the battle lines or enemy at whom to hurl the rocks. That’s because the conflict here is not really between San Francisco residents and Google employees or the 99 percent and the 1 percent. It’s not even stressed-out employees against the companies they work for or the unemployed against Wall Street so much as everyone—humanity itself—against a program that promotes
growth
above all else.
We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook. It is the mechanism that undermines both businesses and investors, forcing them to compete against players with digitally inflated poker chips. It’s the pressure rendering CEOs powerless to prioritize the sustainability of their enterprises over the interests of impatient shareholders. It is the unidentified culprit behind the news headlines of economic crises from the Greek default to skyrocketing student debt. It is the force exacerbating wealth disparity, increasing the pay gap between employees and executives, and generating the power-law dynamics separating winners from losers. It is the black box extracting value from the stock market before human traders know what has happened, and the mindless momentum expanding the tech bubble to proportions dangerously too big to burst.
To use the metaphor of our era, we are running an extractive, growth-driven economic operating system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. Moreover, we’re running it on supercomputers and digital networks that accelerate and
amplify all its effects. Growth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy.
Classical economists and business experts have been of little help. This is because they tend to accept the growth-based economy as a preexisting condition of nature. It is not. The rules of our economy were invented by particular human beings, at particular moments in history, with particular goals and agendas. By refusing to acknowledge the existence of this man-made landscape and our complicity in perpetuating it, we render ourselves incapable of getting beneath its surface. We end up transacting and living at the mercy of a system.
We must instead take a good look at the underlying assumptions of the marketplace we’re busy digitizing and ask ourselves if they are still relevant to our situation before we let our computers and networks run with them. Perhaps ironically, only by thinking like programmers can we adapt the economy to serve human beings instead of the quite arbitrary but deeply embedded ideal of growth.
Until we do, we remain incapable of properly seeing, much less changing, the functioning of our businesses or the economy in which they operate. We are destined to repeat the same old mistakes. Only this time, thanks to the speed and scale on which digital business operates, our errors threaten to derail not only the innovative capacity of our industries but also the sustainability of our entire society. People throwing rocks at the Google bus will be remembered as the tremor before the quake.
Or we may come to our senses and choose a different path. We are at a critical crossroads. Every businessperson, employee, entrepreneur, or creator reading this book understands that we are all operating on borrowed time and borrowed money. We need to make a choice. We can continue to run this growth-driven, extractive, self-defeating program until one corporation is left standing and the impoverished revolt. Or we can seize the opportunity to reprogram our economy—and our businesses—from the inside out.
In doing so, we can begin to benefit from new, more distributed modes of value creation and exchange—the sorts of wealth generation we
see on trading sites, on peer-to-peer lending networks, on user-owned platforms, or even in the games and apps programmed by college kids on laptops and then brought directly to market.
That’s the economy most of us early net users envisioned back in the 1980s when we first got our hands on these new tools. But by the early 1990s, this human-centered vision of a networked marketplace was replaced by another vision of digital business—the one espoused by the libertarian founders and early writers of
Wired
magazine and the corporate-sponsored futurists of Cambridge, Massachusetts, many of whom were the very same people. They looked at digital technology and saw in it a way to revive the imperiled securities markets as well as to restore faith in the notion of an infinitely expanding economy.
After the biotech crash of 1987, many feared that the half century of unparalleled growth following World War II might finally be over. But now digital technology was to return the NASDAQ to its former glory and beyond. Indeed, just when it looked like we had reached the limits of the physical world to supply us with more opportunities for growth, we discovered a virtual world from which to extract still more value. According to the new pundits, this new digital economy would augur a “long boom”
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of economic growth: a digitally amplified, speculative economy that could literally expand forever.
We optimized our platforms not for people or even value but for growth. So instead of getting more free time, we ended up getting less. Instead of getting more varieties of human expression and interaction, we pushed for more market-friendly predictability and automation. Technologies were prized most for their ability to extract value from people in terms of “eyeball hours” and the data that could be derived from them. As a result, we have ended up in an always-on digital landscape, constantly pinged by updates and enduring a state of perpetual emergency interruption—what I call “present shock”—previously known only to 911 operators and air traffic controllers.
We are developing our new technologies not for the betterment of
humanity or even our businesses but to maximize the growth of the speculative marketplace. And it turns out that these are not the same thing.
On the bright side, millionaires and billionaires are being minted. Maybe not enough to compensate for the millions of people displaced from their jobs or disconnected from prosperity by the same mechanisms, but they are inspiring all the same. They come in on every new tech wave, whether it’s Web sites, blogging, search, social media, file exchange, photo sharing, messaging, or cloud services . . . each new Internet trend produces a new billionaire for the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
. They are a different sort of billionaire: “paper” billionaires, whose worth is measured in stock, not profits. That’s because, for the most part, the Internet companies they run don’t really have profits—certainly not ones commensurate with their market capitalizations. They become success stories only on the day the founders and investors make their exit—that is, sell their stake for something more real, like another company or just plain money.
That’s the game most of us now call the digital economy. It is accepted unquestioningly, because it stokes the flames of growth—however artificially. Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell, most of the founders of these digital companies don’t seem to realize this operating system even exists. They are happy to challenge one “vertical” or another, but the last thing they do when they’ve got a winner is challenge the rules of investment banking, their own astronomical valuation, or the IPO through which they cash out. Winning the digital growth game is less a new sort of prosperity than it is a new way to execute business as usual: old wine in a new bottle. It’s not that making money is so wrong; it’s that the premises of venture capital and the stock market—as well as their real effects—are never even questioned. The winners have, in some fundamental way, been duped.