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[1] The Silicon Doctrine. (Aitor Jimenez)

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(Source) tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is an open access journal focused on the critical study of capitalism and communication. (www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1147

Published 2020-03-19. Issue Vol 18 No 1 (2020)

tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X). All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License.

Abstract: This article explores and theorises what is here termed the Silicon Doctrine (SD), that is the legal ideology underpinning the libertarian version of the digital economy promoted (among others) by Facebook, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. The first part of the text explores the Silicon Doctrine’s Frankensteinian ideological roots. The second part of the text scrutinises three dimensions of the Silicon Doctrine: 1) data extraction; 2) domination of the informational infrastructure; and 3) labour exploitation. This article examines the social contract proposed by Silicon Valley, evaluating its two-sided role as a disruptive breakout from the twentieth century social model, and as a continuation of the neoliberal shock doctrine.

Keywords: digital capitalism, Silicon Valley, Facebook, platforms, Google, law

Acknowledgements: The author wishes to acknowledge the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Prof. Campbell Jones and Prof. James Oleson for their generosity and support.

The Silicon Doctrine. Aitor Jimenez.

(The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, aitor@auckland.ac.nz)

      1. Introduction

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein (2007) described the legal-political proposal of one of the most influential intellectuals of the neoliberal Chicago school, the economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006). Friedman advocated for the neoliberal regularisation of the financial sector, the privatisation of public companies, and above all, establishing the market as the role model for shaping public policies (Couso 2017). In the prologue of one of his texts he defended the use of political crises to dismantle the protectionist economic structures of the (Southern) American countries (Friedman 2009). What was nothing more than another theory suddenly became mainstream economic policies at the beginning of the 1970s.

The dictatorial regimes imposed by arms in Brazil and Chile followed the economic dictates proposed by Friedman. Although Brazil would soon renounce it, Chile would nevertheless become the benchmark of global neoliberalism. The respected scholar  was especially questioned for his intellectual collaboration with Pinochet’s bloody regime in Chile. The coup-makers, protected by the United States, took advantage of the political crisis they had caused to promote radical neoliberal economic reforms. The shock doctrine, inspired by Friedman’s ideas and put into practice during the Chilean dictatorship, has continued to be used undercover in the so-called war on terror, or as recipes against economic crises (Harvey 2007; Connell and Dados 2014; Monbiot 2016). The Silicon Doctrine was born at the confluence of both phenomena. Its genesis can be traced back to 2001, being the consequence of two major political and economic events: the terrorist attack of 9/11 in New York and Washington (the deadliest in the history of the United States) and the implosion of the technological bubble (or dot-com boom), accelerated by the attacks.

The survivors of the dot-com bubble had to reinvent themselves in a world where the Internet was becoming part of everyday life and, as such, a war scenario. The need to communicate grew along with the need for intelligence agencies to control the new networks. The same technologies that enable the Internet as we know it – GPS localisation techniques, cookies, mobile devices, computerised semantic analysis, neural networks, massive data analysis – also supported surveillance and control, both governmental and corporate (Lyon 2003). To develop these new technologies, existing laws were violated. Corporations and governments alike proceeded without consultation: gathering data, experimenting, surveilling; that is, exploiting the grey areas of scarce (or absent) legislation. It became a priority for corporations and governments to advance these technologies, both to generate benefits and to guarantee national security (Richard 2012). But still, until 2007 the absolute implantation of this new technological ecosystem was not guaranteed. Capital, fundamental for driving the project, still did not flow.

Since the outbreak of the 2008 economic crisis and the shaking of traditional markets, global capitals have sought refuge in a new (old) sector, catapulting forward what we now know as digital capitalism (Wonglimpiyarat 2016). The 2008 shock was intelligently used by venture fund executives, who, far from having to assume the legal responsibilities of their corporate crimes (one of the elements at the origin of the 2008 crisis), were recognised as the new heroes of the new economy, first American and then global (Eren 2017). The capital that shook the global economy now flooded Silicon Valley start-ups, for whom, following the influential Declaration of Cyberspace Independence (Perry 1998), the laws of the material word had no legitimacy in cyberspace.

The new shock doctrine is called “disruption” and is celebrated by CEOs and executives, academics, politicians, and consultants like McKinsey (2018) and Deloitte (2019). Tech-publications such as Wired and international organisations such as the OECD (2015) have also recognised disruption as the digital capitalist zeitgeist. A phrase coined by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, synthesises the spirit of the disruptive era: “Move fast and break things” (Taplin 2017). The legal consequences of this philosophy have resulted in a permanent violation of human and fundamental rights. Silicon Valley’s legal disruptive spirit is a real threat to which the global authorities have begun to pay attention; as reported by the Guardian (Solon 2018), Zuckerberg has had to respond not only to the Senate of his country but also to the European Parliament as a consequence of the irresponsible handling of the data of tens of millions of users. What do we know about the legal and political project behind that profitable and deliberated data misuse? This question raises another, perhaps much more important: What are the legal-political beliefs in which Silicon Valley’s version of digital capitalism stands?

This article will answer that question by analysing and interpreting contemporary contributions on and by digital capitalists using a socio-legal approach. With this I aim to offer theoretical grounds from which to reflect Silicon Valley’s legal thinking; this may be useful not only in understanding that thinking, but also in building alternatives to it. Section 2 of this article will briefly look at the ideological Frankenstein’s monster in which the Silicon Doctrine stands – a monster with a libertarian head, a liberal body and a neoliberal soul – in order to understand Silicon Valley’s political stakes. Section 3 explores three of the Silicon Doctrine political pillars: its data extractive model, the monopolist behaviour of digital corporations and the methods those corporations use to exploit their workers and users.

      1. Liberals, Neoliberals and Libertarians

Standard Silicon Valley is a small strip of territory located in the Santa Clara Valley in California that includes the cities of Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Francisco (not geographically in the Valley but closely related to it), Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. In this fraction of Californian territory are concentrated some of the most currently relevant digital economy companies, both in terms of software and hardware (Castells 2014). As reflected by Katz (2015), despite the newness of its media relevance, Silicon Valley has been playing an extraordinary role in technological, financial, educational and management transformations worldwide for almost fifty years. Mazzucato (2015) has described how what she terms an entrepreneurial state (or, in other words, public funding) hides behind the success of the region. As Levine (2018) explains, the Silicon Valley techno-industrial ecosystem prospered in the heat of public funds destined for defence (military) research. Tax-payers’ money flowed into private corporations such as Apple or Google, or elite educational institutions like Stanford, creating a unique ecosystem that occupies a privileged place in the development of current (digital) global capitalism (Fisher 2018).

Silicon Valley was, until the first decade of the 21st century, an almost exclusively technological and economic power. With the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook, Silicon Valley has also found itself to be a political and cultural behemoth, both nationally and internationally. The Silicon Valley platforms not only represent a disruptive channel by which the old powers access new social segments; they are themselves a power demanding an active role in the global arena (Cohen 2018; Solon and Siddiqui 2017). Despite their differences, Silicon Valley corporations are lobbying together in Washington and Brussels, trying to intervene in legislative developments affecting the digital economy, such as copyright or data privacy laws (Cooper and Hirst 2017). The enormous power of these companies has led them to maintain face-to-face diplomacy with nations, as well as to sustain international conflicts with powerful international actors like China or the European Union (Bratton 2016).

While there is no doubt that the weapons industry and speculative investment funds have shaped the character of Silicon Valley, no less relevant have been the cybernetic and utopian thinking of engineers and developers like Engelbart (Katz 2015). Highly disruptive technological products such as online communications, and the interaction between the machine and people through graphic interface, artificial intelligence, virtual reality or the exchange of P2P files, have their theoretical basis in intellectuals whom, like Jaron Lanier, wanted to make a contribution to humanity, or in other words, to “save the world” (2014). This body of utopian developers and intellectuals sought to reaffirm the autonomy of the masses to the detriment of the growing influence of states and private companies, actors on whom they ultimately relied to finance their projects. Therefore, the network formed in Silicon Valley, its companies and its products present a strange and contradictory mixture of radical capitalism and emancipatory potential (Dahlberg 2009).

Silicon Valley’s ideological structure is complex, but at least three levels of composition can be identified: a libertarian layer (libertarian as Robert Nozick not as Pyotr Kropotkin); a neoliberal level; and a liberal stratum (liberal as Bernie Sanders not as John Stuart Mill). This heterogeneous composition comes together in a particular and contradictory legal narrative. In the name of freedom, innovation, and the neutrality of the web, Silicon Valley is demanding non-interventionist policies from the State, as well as fighting against current or further privacy laws, or tax regulatory frameworks for the digital economy (Post 2017; Zuboff 2019). At the same time that they claim freedom, the tech companies dominating the network in a quasi-monopoly position impose harsh contractual conditions on their employees and users (Malos et al. 2018; Musk 2018). Companies do not even respect terms of use, as has been probed by the German Federal Cartel Officer in a case where Facebook was found to be combining user data from its different platforms, a practise that went against not only EU and US regulation but Facebook’s own terms of use. Such is the character of Silicon Valley: freedom for corporations, subjection for consumers.

The three ideological dimensions (libertarian, neoliberal and liberal) have numerous points of contradiction. Progressive liberalism has been embodied in the United States by the Democratic Party. It ranges from the leftist proposals of Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to the centrist ones carried out by the ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton (Noel 2016). Both positions coincide in assuming the need to establish controls and legal mechanisms for capitalism in order to maintain economic and social equilibrium (Hawley 2015). Since the 70s important sectors of the Democratic Party have also embraced the demands of social and civic rights for racial, ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities. Although Silicon Valley has furiously challenged attempts to regulate its capitalist model, it has also embraced and sweetened an individualistic version of multiculturalism in its rhetoric.

Both the neoliberal and the libertarian proposals have tended to find their place in Republican candidacies. Libertarian and neoliberal ideologies defend the hegemony of the market over other social institutions. Their regulatory models are adjusted to this objective, limiting state action as much as possible while encouraging the presence of private actors in all areas, from education, to health, safety, social services, and of course, financial, commercial or productive sectors (Grewal and Purdy 2014). The neoliberal and libertarian ideological discourse makes the individual responsible for structural failures. Under the neoliberal narrative, evolution, progress, and scientific, technical, cultural and economic development depend on a handful of geniuses and makers, without whom humanity would be lost. This mythical story, popularised in the 70s by the novelist Ayn Rand, was taken over by the new neoliberal wave of the 70s and Silicon Valley cyber-utopianism (Freedland 2017). In Rand’s narrative (2005) the State, the masses, the crowd, should neither dominate geniuses, nor restrict the work of the creators of worlds. The smaller the intervention of the State, the less submission the individual suffers, the greater the freedom and, with it, the progress.

Although cyber-utopianism and neoliberalism differ diametrically in the rhetoric about minorities, migrants, gender and the environment, they coincide in the recognition of the individual as the historical subject. Silicon Valley and, until very recently, the ultimate representative of neoliberalism, Wall Street, identify the market as the fairer arbitrator of public choices; hence, the State must restrict its activities. Ayn Rand defends an elitism with a strong technocratic flavour, much to the taste of Silicon Valley’s techie elite. For Rand, creators, engineers and developers (but not politicians) are among those who should be in charge of the relevant decisions (Berlin 2017). Wall Street agrees with Silicon Valley when considering the need to establish business leadership over political life. It is the market that should guide the polis and not vice versa. After all, isn’t money what moves the world? Wall Street and Silicon Valley, often presented as antagonistic forces, intersect in the new economic scenario of CEO-engineers (Cohen 2018).

Silicon Valley believes in a cosmopolitan, technocratic bourgeoisie: a body composed of (intellectually speaking) the best, the fittest, and the most capable; a heroic body that has been entrusted with the task of saving humanity (Solon 2018). Silicon Valley does not believe in homelands, nor in identity groups, nor in inherited communities. The Silicon Doctrine affirms with conviction the new digital social contract: social bonds are created through the affirmation of online subjectivity, joining Facebook groups or forming digital communities. The consumer is at the centre of its faith, a monetised version of the individual, thrilled by the perspective of social climbing in the tech meritocracy ecosystem. As noted by Himanen in his Hacker Ethic (2001), a hacker should not be evaluated for his age, sex or ethnicity, but for his ability to hack. That is why in Silicon Valley racism, sexism or any other type of discrimination against social groups is rejected, always through radical individualism (Broockman et al. 2017). The individual must be measured by their talent, not by their appearance. The problem is that, as its critics have pointed out, Silicon Valley has not been settled in an abstract territory where all subjects compete in equal conditions.

California is a fully racialised, stratified, unequal society standing on the shoulders of nearly five hundred years of colonialism (Pitti 2018; Bacon 2018; Levin 2017). The Silicon Doctrine rhetoric asserts that any person with the necessary skill can reach the highest social peaks, in one of the latest restatements of the American dream. However, recent studies reveal that inequality is increasing, the digital divide has not diminished and the social and racial fracture is enlarged. The multicultural narrative of Silicon Valley, curdled with magnanimous gestures through corporate donations, does not confront the structural dimensions of the problem (Walker 2018). In this sense we can affirm that Silicon Valley liberalism grows and prospers in the fertilised field of right-wing neoliberalism, with which it shares the fundamental elements of its ideology: faith in the market, globalism, individualism, technocratism and strong limitation of the State (Wong 2017).

[ … ]

[continued in part 2]

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About the Author — Aitor Jimenez

Aitor Jimenez is an academic, lawyer, and activist. He is a visiting research scholar from Auckland University at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Aitor Jimenez is currently organising several courses on digital capitalism among other things. His current research looks at digital capitalism’s regulatory framework. His work is focused on the question of how we can communalise/socialise/nationalise the digital commons.