Technology by Ideology, Part 3
Over the last two weeks I've covered the ideological underpinnings of today's consumer technology and attempted to show that the technology we use reflects certain left-leaning or right-leaning tendencies. We may not be aware of these leanings but we certainly saw a projection of them when President Trump and his allies were banned from social media the moment it became politically expedient for Big Tech to do so.
It can be uncomfortable to reflect on the technology that most of us use today and realize how left-leaning it all is. Notwithstanding the far-left biases of the Big Tech companies themselves, even the ideological foundations of our technological lives are slouching to the left. Here are the three main attributes of left-leaning tech I covered last week.
Attributes of Left-Leaning Technology
Proprietary
Centralized
Surveilled
To recap, left-leaning technology is proprietary so we have no idea what's going on under the hood. The software tends to be offered as a service which enables it to be controlled by a single company. And the service spies on us, in some cases when we're not even using it. This is a broad overview that manifests itself in different ways depending on whether we're talking about smart phones, social media, or operating systems. Let's get into some specific examples.
Hardware
Smart phones
Tablets
IoT Devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Nest
Smart TVs
The vast majority of these devices are proprietary which allow no access to their hardware specifications or the code that runs them. That means the only way we can gain any insight into what they're doing under the hood is to observe their behavior while they're running. Do you really need that much knowledge of a device you purchased? I would argue that you do. Maybe it doesn't matter much in isolation that your Google Nest knows when you're at home or not. But in combination with all the other Big Tech products in our lives, each device becomes a node in a surveillance network which can be used against us in a variety of ways. In a political environment where 75 million Americans are considered domestic terrorists by the ruling elite, we shouldn't make their attempts at retribution any easier.
Furthermore, the Apple/Google duopoly of the smart phone market enables those two companies to possess an enormous amount of information about us that we would have never allowed just 20 years ago. Our precise location and location history, a complete graph of our social and familial relationships, and in the case of Google, a comprehensive mind map gleaned from our use of its search engine form the core their power over us. Smart phones are little more than data gathering endpoints that let us play Candy Crush and watch Tik Tok videos.
Since these devices are primarily deployed in service to the vendor and not the user, they can be built in such a way which shifts most of the processing power away from the user over to massive server farms owned and operated by Big Tech. The result is that we wind up with attractive and efficient devices that can't do much of anything on their own. Try using a new iPhone without an Apple ID and witness how neutered it feels in terms of capability. In the technology industry, devices like this are called "thin clients." All the magic is performed offsite which is why they like to be connected to the internet all the time. The opposite of this, where the device does most or all the processing work on the device itself, are called "fat clients," which we'll get to later.
Messaging
WhatsApp
Facebook Messenger
iMessage
WeChat
Big Tech loves their messaging apps almost as much as it loves their social media. Messaging services provide a fertile environment for the acquisition of personal information from users like us. Every fight with your spouse, every wedding or baby announcement, and every picture of your children you send to family and friends become part of a rich record of our daily interactions for the purposes of advertising and legal compliance. Moreover, our social connections derived from these apps form a relationship graph which reveals almost as much about us as direct surveillance does.
Like their hardware cousins, these messaging apps are proprietary which forbid us from examining the code in order to verify that they do what we think they do. And unfortunately, these services are not interoperable. A user on Facebook Messenger cannot communicate with someone on iMessage, and someone on Facetime cannot have a video call with someone that doesn't own an iPhone or an iPad. These apps herd us into kennels and this can have a dividing effect on our real-life relationships. Have you ever missed a major event in someone's life because you weren't on the right social media site or the right messaging platform? Do you have to maintain a presence in a group chat simply because leaving the group would mean the effective end of your communications with the other members? Proprietary, centralized, and surveilled messaging apps create little social fiefdoms which were absent from the older technologies such as the telephone system, email, and standard texting.
Operating Systems
Windows
MacOS
iOS
Android with Google apps and services (which is just about every Android phone available today)
Devices such as desktop, laptops, smart phones, tablets, smart TVs, and connected cars all require software called "operating systems" in order to perform their intended functions. However, after over 30 years of progress, operating systems have matured to the point that their primary function - to operate a device - has been mastered. The "innovations" in operating system development today focus on, you guessed it, the acquisition of user data. Microsoft, Apple, and Google have brought what used to be a neutral and benign technology into the data mining world by all but requiring the use of "online" accounts in order to use our own devices. The fact that Microsoft and Apple have not yet forced the issue could be remnant of an earlier age when accounts on computers were offline, or "local." Although they certainly don't hesitate to send us through a maze of dark patterns in order to trick us into creating online accounts. Google Chromebooks, on the other hand, cannot be operated as intended without one.
Windows and Apple's MacOS are proprietary but they still allow the installation of software outside their app stores. Google's Android is built on an open source project called AOSP (Android Open Source Project) but it adds a layer of proprietary software called GApps which provide Google's services and their associated data mining and manipulation activities. It remains possible to install software on an Android device without going through the Play Store[1], and it’s even possible to run an Android phone without a Google account at all (although it's uncommon). Apple's iOS is the worst offender of all, providing a closed, proprietary device which forbids the installation of any software at all without an Apple ID.
The picture looks bleak. Advances in processing power and bandwidth have delivered most of their benefits to Big Tech at the expense of the people. It has allowed them to retain control of the devices they sell us, challenging the idea that we even own them at all. They monitor our usage of their products and services while hiding the algorithms they use to subject us to advertising, manipulation, and censorship. This didn't used to matter that much until the 2016 election. After the left dried its collective tears the morning after that pivotal day, they mobilized and completed their march through virtually all American institutions, converting them from beneficiaries of free enterprise to agents of identity socialism. And the first major expression of their power was the selection of the current occupant of the White House.
Next week I'll conclude this series with some rays of hope by covering examples of technologies that lean right - or put another way - lean forward.
Thumbnail by Myrabella - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25401006
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