A way out from under Facebook’s thumb
US novelist Dave Eggers has become a crusader against the supremacy of Big Tech. His charter for digital human rights requires action from us all. Bryan Appleyard reports.
The bestselling novelist and now anti-Silicon Valley activist Dave Eggers recently gave a lecture to 300 high-school pupils in Texas. He asked how many were on Facebook. One hand went up. The rest regarded Facebook as some ridiculous and intrusive thing their parents did.
‘‘They see it as the platform of their parents and grandparents,’’ he tells me. ‘‘They are horrified by how they post photos of their vacations with them in them. They see this as an absurd, indiscriminate posting of life.’’
The catch is that the kids were all on WhatsApp and Instagram, both owned by Facebook.
Even so, on top of the leaks of user data, the political meddling, the cack-handed cover-up and, earlier this month, the immensely damaging email cache published by British MPs, the news that the kids find this social medium desperately uncool is one more reputational horror Facebook could do without.
Nobody actually likes this company. ‘‘Whenever there’s something especially creepy,’’ says Eggers, ‘‘or especially duplicitous, it seems to come from Facebook. There’s something culturally wrong at Facebook.’’
We’ve come to expect tone deafness from the Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, but now Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, has been embarrassingly implicated in the creation of this culture.
She was a hero of women in the workplace, the founder of LeanIn.org, which offers women ‘‘ongoing inspiration and support to help them achieve their goals’’.
But the revelations about Facebook’s attempts to cover up its part in Russian meddling in the 2016 American presidential election revealed she was a key player, an active participant in attempts to smear the company’s critics.
As if that weren’t bad enough for Sandberg, she has now been attacked even by the sainted Michelle Obama.
‘‘That whole ‘so you can have it all’. Nope, not at the same time,’’ Obama said. ‘‘That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that s .... doesn’t work all the time.’’
The emails released by MPs may prove the most serious threat of all to the company. They show a deliberate crushing of competitors – possibly opening a route to an unfair-competition action – even more ruthless harvesting of users’ data and the sale of it to selected companies and covert trawling for information about competitors. The charge list is long and getting longer.
Nothing, in the circumstances, could be more topical than the talk Eggers was scheduled to give overnight (NZT) for this year’s PEN HG Wells lecture in London.
He was to speak on digital human rights: it is 70 years since the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was a development of Wells’ 1940 essay The Rights of Man.
Others have made statements of digital human rights – notably Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, and Stefano Quintarelli, an Italian politician and IT expert – but they talk about rights when you’re already online. Eggers wants something more.
‘‘What I want to add is that as a society we really have to reverse or slow down what seems to be a headlong move towards every aspect of our lives, from social to civil to political, having to be conducted in the digital world.
‘‘An essential human right should be that we should be able to participate as citizens without having to do so in the digital world. There should always be an analogue option.’’
This strikes me as brilliant – digital rights would not be rights at all if they did not include a right to be non-digital, a status that, as the damning evidence piles up, may well become widely desired.
Eggers has been lecturing about online evils since 2013, when his novel The Circle was published, a Brave New World or Nineteen EightyFour for millennials and snowflakes. The Circle is a tech company, a combination of Facebook and Google, with dreams of world domination. It would achieve this primarily by eliminating privacy. Everybody ends up watching everybody else all the time, except during threeminute ‘‘bathroom breaks’’.
The book was partly inspired by something Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, said: ‘‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
‘‘So Silicon Valley claims moral authority over us all,’’ says Eggers. ‘‘Schmidt has said some of the most concerning things – they gave me a real chill. You feel privacy is only for deviants.’’
Will any of the big companies co-operate in this attempt to make them decent organisations? Google and Facebook have signed up to new internet standards designed by Berners-Lee that require companies to respect data privacy. But does that mean anything?
‘‘I always thought that at least some of the major tech companies would accept some kind of regulatory framework if it were based on a common sense understanding of morality, decency and democracy.’’
This is naive, Eggers now admits, because there is a ‘‘profound lack of humility’’ in Silicon Valley.
‘‘It’s one of the foundational problems with these companies. They walk in the door with the sense that they are the centre of the universe and the smartest people on the planet and their company is the most influential of all time.
‘‘That can lead to some terrible outcomes. They should have a more humble approach to their work and their place in the world. Also an awareness of their power and an awareness that they are just a tech company, sellers of emojis and frivolities. If they were a little bit more humble from top to bottom, I think we could have a conversation about regulation and basic human rights.’’
Unfortunately, the US political landscape is now so opposed to regulation of any kind, nothing is likely to happen. Eggers also sees little hope that other obvious ways to tame Silicon Valley will be used – for instance, legally defining the giants as publishers, which would make them responsible for their content, or breaking them up with competition laws.
‘‘There’s no appetite for these things. The last time major monopolies were broken up was the phone companies and that was 40 years ago.’’
They are publishers, because these words online are permanent: they are able to be seen by thousands and millions of people. Of course they’re publishers. But they’ve been dodging that and they will continue to do so. For whatever reason, tech companies remain above the law.’’
We are all to blame, he says. Users submit to highly addictive software and gadgets, affecting themselves and their children in the process.
‘‘The more we require schoolchildren to do their work online, to spend more time in front of their screens, the more we are guiding them into a world we know is not good for them.’’
He compares the state of the internet companies to that of Big Tobacco in the early 1990s: the evidence against them is overwhelming but still we remain addicts.
Eggers himself uses a basic LG flip phone. He writes on a 14-year-old Apple Mac that is not connected to the internet. He checks his emails on another machine a couple of times a day.
‘‘All the old software still works and I don’t have to submit myself to indentured servitude to Adobe or some other company.’’
Overall, though, he’s optimistic. The Texas teenagers were no longer in thrall to the Valley giants and regarded their parents’ screen addiction with dismay.
He even detects signs that Zuckerberg is waking from his moral slumber, putting money into philanthropy and maybe even considering the possibility that he does not own the future. A lengthening list of smart Valley apostates are leaving, in disgust, these companies that peddle addiction.
‘‘All the power lies in the hands of users. They should use that power and opt out and move their money and their eyeballs elsewhere.
‘‘You can enact radical shifts. These things have only been around a few years, but we think of them as a permanent aspect of life. They shouldn’t be.’’
Or, as Michelle Obama said of Sandberg’s Lean In manifesto, ‘‘that s... doesn’t work all the time’’. In the case of tech companies, one might add: ‘‘If ever.’’
‘‘All the power lies in the hands of users. They should use that power and opt out.’’ Dave Eggers