The drumbeat of concern about the perils of our digital economy just got a lot louder. Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg college roommate Chris Hughes is now urging that Facebook be broken up.
. He follows early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee in seeing the company as a “catastrophe.”Zuckerberg himself has been calling for regulation from lawmakers and has recently insisted, along with Google chiefBut at some level we all know perfectly well that privacy of the sort we had before personal computers is impossible unless one unplugs from the grid entirely.
Of course, this is at one level only an extension of television’s effort to “rent eyeballs” for advertisers. But Nielsen’s crude data-gathering methods could not hold a candle to the artificial intelligence-driven methods deployed by the social platforms to monopolize our attention.
Breaking up Facebook, as Elizabeth Warren has proposed, would be a valuable test case. It uniquely dominates the social networking space. But it’s not clear why people might not find competitors more palatable. In the meantime, however, we may have to give up the idea that all these internet platforms are “free.
Meanwhile, workers at the big tech firms have been mobilizing. Google workers walked out to express their anger about sexual misconduct at the company. Uber and Lyft workers struck recently to convey their unhappiness about pay and working conditions, just as IPOs are making the company’s founders very rich.
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