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Technology is not a representative government

    Americans treat technology companies as a substitute for effective representative government. It shouldn’t be.

    After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, many abortion rights advocates turned their attention to how people’s digital breadcrumbs from apps and the web can blame them if they want the procedure, and what tech and telecom companies like Facebook, Apple, and Verizon could do to protect them.

    This was understandable. In our data-hogging economy, companies have information about almost everyone. That makes them potential resources for law enforcement officers seeking to prosecute those involved in abortions.

    On the other hand, it was another example of people bypassing elected officials and instead looking to powerful tech companies to address their concerns about law, policy, and accountability.

    Many people believe that Donald Trump and other Republican officials will not stop making false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. So a lot of thought has gone into what Twitter, Facebook or YouTube could do to stop those lies from spreading.

    Politicians are angry that some big companies don’t pay federal income taxes, but instead of changing the legal deductions and exemptions, they are yelling at Amazon and other big companies for not paying their fair share of taxes. People are angry about Facebook’s lenient enforcement of rules banning gun sales, but there are more gun restrictions on Facebook than in much of the real America.

    Businesses are an important factor in our lives, and a few digital superpowers act as consistent global actors, sometimes on an equal footing with governments. They have a responsibility that goes beyond making a profit, whether any of us like it or not.

    But it’s also strange to be both concerned that Big Tech has too much power and sometimes demand that the companies fix what we don’t like about the world. Corporate action is not a substitute for effective government.

    (To learn more about the limits of corporate social responsibility, read this piece by Emily Stewart of Vox and this by Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.)

    I understand why this is happening: Many Americans are not confident that the government is able to effectively address major issues such as public safety, healthcare and climate change. Companies are often more responsible and responsive to people’s demands than our elected leaders.

    It’s also true that tech companies, including Facebook, have fought government regulation while saying it’s necessary to fix the problems they’ve created.

    I keep thinking about a conversation I had a few years ago with Zephyr Teachout, a left-wing attorney who is now a special counsel to the New York Attorney General, about the historic aberration of people now petitioning corporations for social and political change.

    We discussed a mass protest in Britain in the early 1800s that Teachout has written about. Protesters angry that sugar producers were using enslaved people demanded that the government abolish slavery — not that the companies change their behavior.

    The lack of trust of Americans in the government makes for strange spectacles. Concerns over the use of company data in abortion lawsuits — and fears that the Chinese government is using Americans’ data from the TikTok app — could be a boost for elected leaders and the public. We may have national restrictions in the US on the data that companies collect about us and change how easy it is for companies to sell or share that data with just about anyone.

    Google said last week it would remove location information when people visit certain sensitive places, such as addiction treatment centers and abortion providers. TikTok’s parent company, based in China, has tried to shield the app from China’s digital borders.

    America’s lax restrictions on data haven’t changed. But TikToks and Googles have.

    The internet can be great sometimes! Our On Tech editor, Hanna Ingber, watched her kid unleash his amazing taste for interiors. We want to hear from you how technology has been a window to personal discovery or joy:

    My 8-year-old son was recently playing on his out-of-school Chromebook and stumbled upon a design app. I let him download it and he designed his first living room. And then he wanted to design more and more.

    A friend told me that her son was playing around on Google and heard about an upcoming convention for those who like to make origami; he asked his mother about it and she took him. It was mostly adults there – but he had a lot of fun.

    These experiences made me think about how the Internet can open up worlds to children beyond what their parents had considered or knew existed.

    We’d love to hear from you, our On Tech readers, about a recent experience with technology that has helped you or your family broaden your horizons. Share your stories with us by emailing ontech@CBNewz and putting “tech wonders” in the subject line. We may publish a selection in a future newsletter.

    • Starting money dips below: Investments in US tech start-ups have fallen 23 percent in the past three months. It’s the first drop in funding since 2019, my colleague Erin Griffith reported, and another sign of the freeze on money flowing in and out of fledgling companies.

    • The dollar store of the internet has lost its touch: Wish grabbed the hearts of shoppers and some investors who bet the company’s cheap tchotchkes would make it an ecommerce superstar. But plastering the internet with ads for Wish products stopped working, and the company sometimes used deceptive experiments that drove customers away, wrote my colleagues Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari.

    • Can you recognize a country by the color of the ground? My colleague Kellen Browning wrote about people catching a glimpse of any place in the world with Google Street View and guessing which country it is as quickly as possible. The best players can identify a location in seconds or less.

    At a fairground in southwest Virginia, a woman won more than 25 categories in a competition, including the best sauerkraut, jelly, jam and pie, and the top three for biscuits. People wouldn’t rest until they found her.

    We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you would like us to discover. You can reach us at ontech@CBNewz.

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