Why America is falling out of love with technology
Blame the industry’s treatment of data, the bizarre behaviour of cult CEOs and old valuations for this
America is falling out of love with tech. For the first time since the dot-com bust in 2001, this year we’ve seen a broad cultural backlash against the tech industry, culminating with the recent rout of tech stocks. Tech’s increasing role in American identity coincided with the financial crisis and the collapse of institutional trust. It’s not that tech started becoming economically and culturally significant only in 2008; it certainly already was.
PCs became the centre of American households starting with Microsoft’s Windows 95; Apple’s iPod became a hit in the early 2000s, followed by the transformative iPhone in 2007. So tech was big before the financial crisis.
But Silicon Valley started to take on a new mythology about eight years ago. The film “The Social Network” appeared in October 2010, loosely based on the founding of Facebook at Harvard. Then came Steve Jobs’s death and Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, in October 2011. Perhaps tech would inevitably have taken a broader role in the national identity, but the 2008 financial crisis certainly felled the competition: The downturn killed any credibility of Wall Street, the housing market and the auto industry, and government lost some of its standing with the subsequent bailouts by the Bush administration. If the “ownership society” of the 2000s had collapsed, perhaps the “sharing economy” represented by Uber and Airbnb were the future. Americans might as well embrace “disruptive innovation.”
But by now the “Social Network”/Steve Jobs/ “disruptive” mythology is showing very real flaws: the industry’s treatment of user data epitomised by Facebook; how the industry gets its money; bizarre behaviour by a CEO like Tesla’s Elon Musk; and old valuations and business models turning south.
If tech’s role wanes, what will rise to take its place? I’ll offer up a couple possibilities.
First: the energy behind whatever Democratic electoral wave we get. This doesn’t mean Democrats will take over a divided country — which seems to lurch from left to right every six to eight years — but that they might set the terms of the national debate. Politics might be shaped more by Democrats like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rather than Republicans like Texas’ Ted Cruz.
Another possibility is rather than the national conversation being set by an industry or a political party, we could go back to seeing the world through an international rivalry, specifically with China. Perhaps the priorities of national politics, the tech industry and the broader economy will be secondary to asking “How does this impact US-China dynamics?” For those of us too young to remember the Cold War with the Soviet Union, this would be unfamiliar territory.
Historians might someday argue that after the Second Age of Tech (2008-2018) came Cold War II or the New New Deal. The midterm elections could be one of the deciding points. Over the centuries, Diwali has become a national festival that is enjoyed by most Indians regardless of their religion or faith. Everybody has a different interpretation of Diwali depending on the place they live in, but one common thread rings true — the festival marks the victory of good over evil. Keeping this in mind, should we think about celebrating it a little differently this time around?
On the day of Diwali or before it, most of