tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/tech-industry-6929/articlesTech industry – The Conversation2024-03-05T12:46:21Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2246652024-03-05T12:46:21Z2024-03-05T12:46:21ZEurope’s tech industry is lagging behind the US – but it gives the continent a chance to write the rules of the game<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579147/original/file-20240301-16-17taok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C24%2C8192%2C5432&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The US largely dominates the technology landscape.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kazan-russia-oct-31-2021-facebook-2066815178">Sergei Elagin/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Europe invests a lot in research, and publishes and patents many ideas. But it <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/european-rd-review-finds-lagging-high-tech-performance-despite-major-science-investment">fails to compete</a> with the US and China when it comes to translating its innovation effort into large, global technology firms. The seven largest US tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, are <a href="https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/12/21/why-cant-european-tech-firms-compete-with-their-us-counterparts">20 times bigger</a> than the EU’s seven largest, and generate more than ten times more revenue.</p>
<p>That isn’t to say Europe has no tech <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2023/02/14/europes-venture-capital-scene-is-narrowing-the-gap-with-the-us-despite-global-investment-slowdown/">success stories</a>. The world leader in music streaming is Spotify, a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2022/01/19/spotify-comfortably-remains-the-biggest-streaming-service-despite-its-market-share-being-eaten-into/">Swedish company</a>. Dutch company ASML produces the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/23578430/chip-war-chris-miller-asml-intel-apple-samsung-us-china-decoder">world’s most advanced</a> computer chips, and Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk is <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/184617f3-9a88-4d23-8e23-d1a08d5577dd">leading</a> the extremely profitable market for weight-loss drugs.</p>
<p>European start-ups are also actually a <a href="https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/europe-leads-us-startup-vc-gray-equidam/">better deal</a> for venture capitalists on average than US ones. But they rarely develop into major global players. The main reason for this is that Europe regulates more.</p>
<p>Research has found that Europeans are <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20162015">less optimistic</a> than Americans about social mobility, want to <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/705551">redistribute income</a> more than they do in the US, and have a more cautious relationship to <a href="https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2270%7E9c72a27c18.en.pdf">owning risky assets</a>. This leads to some <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/securing-europes-competitiveness-addressing-its-technology-gap#/">very predictable outcomes</a>. Environmental, inequality and life expectancy metrics perform better in Europe, while the US does better on purely economic indicators.</p>
<p>This is not necessarily bad news. In the competition to define the rules of the technological game, combining the huge US tech ecosystem and the European obsession for regulation may be the best chance to protect consumers, freedom of expression, accountability and transparency around the world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="EU flags in front of European Commission in Brussels on a sunny day." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578982/original/file-20240229-28-6si2fv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Europe has the chance to write the global rules for the tech industry according to its own values.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/eu-flags-front-european-commission-brussels-162128453">symbiot/Shutterstock</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>The world leader in regulation</h2>
<p>The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6983504/">faster to expedite</a> its approval of new drugs than the European Medicine Agency. Pharmaceutical firms are also allowed a larger profit: drugs in the US are on average more than <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2956.html">three times more expensive</a> than in the rest of the OECD. </p>
<p>So it makes sense for pharmaceutical companies to develop their products in the US first. The same is true if you want to develop a new synthetic meat, a modified crop, or a product linked to Artificial Intelligence (AI). </p>
<p>Europe could grow faster by changing its model. But ask European leaders which precise regulation they are happy to relax, and you will hear a deafening silence. </p>
<p>Britain is perhaps the best illustration. A large part of the Brexit project was to simplify European rules that were perceived as excessive. However, the UK is yet to make any major regulatory change eight years after the referendum, and the government <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/07c98087-3914-4107-a6ee-56cc4086459e">shows no interest</a> in changing tack.</p>
<p>In the US, innovation has gone hand in hand with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv24w62m5">market concentration and market power</a>. When companies have high market power, they may have fewer incentives to innovate. They also start to gain <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4390776">political power</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Assorted app icons representing some of the major big tech companies in the US, including Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Twitter, as seen on an iPhone screen." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578985/original/file-20240229-30-iujk0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The US is home to tech giants including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/portland-usa-apr-21-2022-assorted-2148379161">Tada Images/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is where the role of Europe as an independent regulator is very important. The largest companies <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-eu/tiktoks-compliance-with-the-dma">tend to abide by EU law </a>because they want to keep access to the EU. They also have a tendency to offer the same products all over the world, which means European rules <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-usb-c-charger-rule-shows-how-eu-regulators-make-decisions-for-the-world-184763">apply to everyone</a>.</p>
<p>European rules have clear objectives. The EU’s <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3783436">Digital Markets Act</a>, which <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6423">comes into force</a> in March 2024, establishes rights and rules for large online platforms – so-called <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328">“gatekeepers”</a> such as Google, Amazon or Meta – to prevent them from abusing their market power.</p>
<p>Europe is also credible when it comes to protecting consumers, citizens and transparency. It cannot be suspected of favouring European tech champions, because there are none. Europe can, for instance, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-opens-formal-proceedings-against-tiktok-under-digital-services-act-2024-02-19/">judge Tiktok</a> based on whether it breaches child protection rules, and not based on fears that a Chinese company is taking market share away from a European one. </p>
<h2>Technology and democracy</h2>
<p>Perhaps the best example of the benefits of old regulating Europe and unleashed America is the current race for AI. The US is positioned as the market leader in AI technology, which can power products and applications such as image generators, voice assistants and search engines. <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/ai-investment-forecast-to-approach-200-billion-globally-by-2025.html">Roughly half</a> of the world’s investment in AI currently happens in the US. </p>
<p>At the same time, Europe has already taken several steps to regulate. The EU’s <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-countries-strike-deal-ai-law-act-technology/">Artificial Intelligence Act</a>, for example, defines <a href="https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai">different levels</a> of transparency and the auditing of algorithms depending on how dangerous they could become.</p>
<p>Europe will certainly not win the global innovation race for AI. But it has the chance to <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/59b9ef36-771f-4f91-89d1-ef89f4a2ec4e">write the global rules</a> according to its own values. This means it can make companies liable for the actions of their AI tools and transparent on the data used for training them. It also means it can require a company’s AI algorithms to be audited.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="TikTok app logo on a smartphone screen and flags of China and United States." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578988/original/file-20240229-22-cklp59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Short-form video hosting service TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/stone-uk-october-25-2019-tiktok-1541597285">Ascannio/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>But for the EU to write the new rules of AI, western companies must win the innovation race. The main competitor is China, where companies are given massive access to government data, including facial recognition. The Chinese government can largely <a href="https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/90/4/1701/6665906">choose its champions</a> by deciding who gets access to data. </p>
<p>China’s concerns about regulation could not be further away from those in Europe. China is not interested in improving transparency and fair political competition – it wants to use data to promote the policies of the <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2023/04/18/can-xi-jinping-control-ai-without-crushing-it">Chinese Communist Party</a>, and discipline and foster the national economy.</p>
<p>Far from a competition between Europe and the US for tech dominance, western democracies should see their different approaches as a unique opportunity to promote their shared values. In that context, the lack of large, global European tech leaders might actually be a blessing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224665/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Renaud Foucart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The lack of large, global European tech leaders might actually be a blessing.Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2244382024-03-04T13:41:42Z2024-03-04T13:41:42ZDemand for computer chips fuelled by AI could reshape global politics and security<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578585/original/file-20240228-18-rudxyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C0%2C6361%2C3592&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/close-silicon-die-being-extracted-semiconductor-2262331365">IM Imagery / Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A global race to build powerful computer chips that are essential for the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools could have a major impact on global politics and security. </p>
<p>The US is currently leading the race in the design of these chips, also known as semiconductors. But most of the manufacturing is carried out in Taiwan. The debate has been fuelled by the call by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI, for <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0">a US$5 trillion to US$7 trillion</a> (£3.9 trillion to £5.5 trillion) global investment to <a href="https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-wants-up-to-7-trillion-for-ai-chips-the-natural-resources-required-would-be-mind-boggling/">produce more powerful chips</a> for the next generation of AI platforms. </p>
<p>The amount of money Altman called for is more than the chip industry has spent in total since it began. Whatever the facts about those numbers, overall projections for the AI market are mind blowing. The data analytics company GlobalData <a href="https://www.globaldata.com/media/technology/generative-ai-will-go-mainstream-2024-driven-adoption-specialized-custom-models-multimodal-tool-experimentation-says-globaldata/">forecasts that the market will be worth US$909 billion</a> by 2030.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, over the past two years, the US, China, Japan and several European countries have increased their budget allocations and put in place measures to secure or maintain a share of the chip industry for themselves. China is catching up fast and is <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2023/09/china-boosts-semiconductor-subsidies-as-us-tightens-restrictions/">subsidising chips, including next-generation ones for AI</a>, by hundreds of billions over the next decade to build a manufacturing supply chain. </p>
<p>Subsidies seem to be the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/germany-earmarks-20-bln-eur-chip-industry-coming-years-2023-07-25/">preferred strategy for Germany too</a>. The UK government has announced its <a href="https://www.ukri.org/news/100m-boost-in-ai-research-will-propel-transformative-innovations/#:%7E:text=%C2%A3100m%20boost%20in%20AI%20research%20will%20propel%20transformative%20innovations,-6%20February%202024&text=Nine%20new%20research%20hubs%20located,help%20to%20define%20responsible%20AI.">plans to invest £100 million</a> to support regulators and universities in addressing challenges around artificial intelligence. </p>
<p>The economic historian Chris Miller, the author of the book Chip War, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/ai-chip-race-fears-grow-of-huge-financial-bubble/a-68272265">has talked about how powerful chips have become a “strategic commodity”</a> on the global geopolitical stage.</p>
<p>Despite the efforts by several countries to invest in the future of chips, there is currently a shortage of the types currently needed for AI systems. Miller recently explained that 90% of the chips used to train, or improve, AI systems are <a href="https://www.siliconrepublic.com/future-human/chip-war-semiconductors-supply-tech-geopolitics-chris-miller">produced by just one company</a>.</p>
<p>That company is the <a href="https://www.tsmc.com/english">Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)</a>. Taiwan’s dominance in the chip manufacturing industry is notable because the island is also the focus for tensions between China and the US. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-microchip-industry-would-implode-if-china-invaded-taiwan-and-it-would-affect-everyone-206335">The microchip industry would implode if China invaded Taiwan, and it would affect everyone</a>
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<p>Taiwan has, for the most part, <a href="https://www.taiwan.gov.tw/content_3.php#:%7E:text=The%20ROC%20government%20relocated%20to,rule%20of%20a%20different%20government.">been independent since the middle of the 20th century</a>. However, Beijing believes it should be <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-calls-taiwan-president-frontrunner-destroyer-peace-2023-12-31/">reunited with the rest of China</a> and US legislation requires Washington to <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/96th-congress/house-bill/2479#:%7E:text=Declares%20that%20in%20furtherance%20of,defense%20capacity%20as%20determined%20by">help defend Taiwan if it is invaded</a>. What would happen to the chip industry under such a scenario is unclear, but it is obviously a focus for global concern.</p>
<p>The disruption of supply chains in chip manufacturing have the potential to bring entire industries to a halt. Access to the raw materials, such as rare earth metals, used in computer chips has also proven to be an important bottleneck. For example, China <a href="https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report-2024/technology/">controls 60% of the production of gallium metal</a> and 80% of the global production of germanium. These are both critical raw products used in chip manufacturing.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Sam Altman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578592/original/file-20240228-30-178em0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called for a US$5 trillion to $7 trillion investment in chips to support the growth in AI.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/openai-ceo-sam-altman-attends-artificial-2412159621">Photosince / Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>And there are other, lesser known bottlenecks. A process called <a href="https://research.ibm.com/blog/what-is-euv-lithography">extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography</a> is vital for the ability to continue making computer chips smaller and smaller – and therefore more powerful. <a href="https://www.asml.com/en">A single company in the Netherlands, ASML</a>, is the only manufacturer of EUV systems for chip production.</p>
<p>However, chip factories are increasingly being built outside Asia again – something that has the potential to reduce over-reliance on a few supply chains. Plants in the US are being subsidised to the tune of <a href="https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report-2024/technology/">US$43 billion and in Europe, US$53 billion</a>. </p>
<p>For example, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC is planning to build a multibillion dollar facility in Arizona. When it opens, that factory <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-microchip-industry-would-implode-if-china-invaded-taiwan-and-it-would-affect-everyone-206335">will not be producing the most advanced chips</a> that it’s possible to currently make, many of which are still produced by Taiwan.</p>
<p>Moving chip production outside Taiwan could reduce the risk to global supplies in the event that manufacturing were somehow disrupted. But this process could take years to have a meaningful impact. It’s perhaps not surprising that, for the first time, this year’s Munich Security Conference <a href="https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report-2024/technology/">created a chapter devoted to technology</a> as a global security issue, with discussion of the role of computer chips. </p>
<h2>Wider issues</h2>
<p>Of course, the demand for chips to fuel AI’s growth is not the only way that artificial intelligence will make major impact on geopolitics and global security. The growth of disinformation and misinformation online has transformed politics in recent years by inflating prejudices on both sides of debates. </p>
<p>We have seen it <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26675075">during the Brexit campaign</a>, during <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231177943">US presidential elections</a> and, more recently, during the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-misinformation-fact-check-e58f9ab8696309305c3ea2bfb269258e">conflict in Gaza</a>. AI could be the ultimate amplifier of disinformation. Take, for example, deepfakes – AI-manipulated videos, audio or images of public figures. These could easily fool people into thinking a major <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/ai-deepfakes-disinformation-election">political candidate had said something they didn’t</a>.</p>
<p>As a sign of this technology’s growing importance, at the 2024 Munich Security Conference, 20 of the world’s largest tech companies <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/2024/02/16/technology-industry-to-combat-deceptive-use-of-ai-in-2024-elections/">launched something called the “Tech Accord”</a>. In it, they pledged to cooperate to create tools to spot, label and debunk deepfakes. </p>
<p>But should such important issues be left to tech companies to police? Mechanisms such as the EU’s Digital Service Act, the UK’s Online Safety Bill as well as frameworks to regulate AI itself should help. But it remains to be seen what impact they can have on the issue.</p>
<p>The issues raised by the chip industry and the growing demand driven by AI’s growth are just one way that AI is driving change on the global stage. But it remains a vitally important one. National leaders and authorities must not underestimate the influence of AI. Its potential to redefine geopolitics and global security could exceed our ability to both predict and plan for the changes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224438/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alina Vaduva is affiliated with the Labour Party, as a member and elected councillor in Dartford, Kent. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirk Chang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The effects of AI’s growth on global security could be difficult to predict.Kirk Chang, Professor of Management and Technology, University of East LondonAlina Vaduva, Director of the Business Advice Centre for Post Graduate Students at UEL, Ambassador of the Centre for Innovation, Management and Enterprise, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2168942023-11-05T23:10:02Z2023-11-05T23:10:02ZA new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557386/original/file-20231103-27-6s620e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=110%2C16%2C5402%2C3743&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/worms-eye-view-of-buildings-l5Tzv1alcps">Alex Wong/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded <a href="https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/">National Center for Supercomputing Applications</a>. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the <a href="https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/ncsa-mosaic/">Mosaic web browser</a>, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s. </p>
<p>Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021707/http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=741">acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion</a>. </p>
<p>Since then, through his venture capital firm <a href="https://a16z.com/about/">Andreessen Horowitz</a>, the outspoken billionaire has become one of the most influential wallets in Silicon Valley. His investments – in companies including <a href="https://a16z.com/portfolio/">Facebook, Foursquare, Github, Lyft, Oculus and Twitter</a> – have definitively shaped tech over the past 15 years. (He once <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man">described his approach</a> as “funding imperial, will-to-power people”.)</p>
<p>Because of all this, it’s worth paying attention to Andreessen’s recent “<a href="https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/">techno-optimist manifesto</a>”. Opening with the claim that “we are being lied to”, the lengthy blog post takes in a section on “becoming technological supermen”, musings on the meaning of life, and a long list of enemies. It offers a revealing glimpse into the philosophy of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, where more technology is the only way forward – and a warning about the kind of world they’re trying to build. </p>
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<h2>Tech utopia gone sour</h2>
<p>Since Silicon Valley’s birth in the 1960s, its promoters have held utopian ideas about technology, from the “<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html">new communalism</a>” of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog">Stewart Brand</a> to the <a href="https://techliberation.com/2009/08/12/cyber-libertarianism-the-case-for-real-internet-freedom/">cyber-libertarianism</a> of <a href="https://kk.org/">Kevin Kelly</a> and <a href="https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence">John Perry Barlow</a>. In the 1990s, supporters of this “<a href="https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology">Californian ideology</a>” saw the rise of the Internet as proof of the growing importance of technology (and the diminishing power of governments). </p>
<p>Andreessen’s essay shows what these ideals have become in 2023. The political and economic worldview beneath its ideas about technology is most visible towards the end of the manifesto, in a list of “enemies”. </p>
<p>Remarkably, these include “sustainability”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics” and “social responsibility”. According to Andreessen, who describes himself as an “<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/technology/we-are-conquerors-why-silicon-valley-s-latest-fad-is-its-deadliest-20231027-p5efho.html">accelerationist</a>”, such ideas are holding back the advance of technology and therefore human progress.</p>
<p>Although the manifesto purports to believe in democracy, what Andreessen really argues for is a kind of technocracy based on “economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength”.</p>
<p>This is a vision of dominance. By proposing to abolish concern with ethics and the environment, for example, individuals like Andreessen can have free rein to develop, promote and profit from their inventions (including those <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/17/silicon-valley-portrays-itself-hotbed-free-market-enterprise-new-book-explains-how-government-helped-build-it/">funded by taxpayers</a>) without interference.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A very large circular building with greenery around it viewed directly from above" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557387/original/file-20231103-29-ca7aiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Bird’s-eye view of Apple Park in California’s Silicon Valley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/silicon-valley-looking-down-aerial-view-2280061483">Faysal06/Shutterstock</a></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/silicon-valley-investors-want-to-create-a-new-city-is-california-forever-a-utopian-dream-or-just-smart-business-213062">Silicon Valley investors want to create a new city – is 'California Forever’ a utopian dream or just smart business?</a>
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<h2>A colonial vision</h2>
<p>We don’t have to look too deeply into history to find parallels to this kind of worldview. Simply put, it is the worldview of colonialism: it sees both nature and other people as domains to be conquered and exploited for “growth”. </p>
<p>Andreessen describes his mission in explicitly colonial terms: “mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community”. This is a worldview in which territories must be constantly expanded (“our descendants will live in the stars”) in a perpetual war for supremacy.</p>
<p>Technology has played an instrumental role in colonial conquest. Anthropologist Jared Diamond’s famous “<a href="http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html">guns, germs, and steel</a>” were all technologies vital to the European conquest of the Americas. We might add to this list ships (including slave ships), navigation instruments, telegraphs, and so on. </p>
<p>Even the technologies of the industrial revolution – so important to the narrative of technological progress imagined by Andreessen and his ilk – were enabled by the availability and exploitation of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1752-5209.2009.00032.x">cheap labour and markets in the Global South</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/colonialism-was-a-disaster-and-the-facts-prove-it-84496">Colonialism was a disaster and the facts prove it</a>
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<p>The mission of techno-optimists appears to be to pick up where the European and American empires of the 19th century left off, using technological, political and economic power to bully, coerce and bludgeon other societies into acquiescence.</p>
<p>For Andreessen, all this is supported, like colonialism, by a kind of <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/%7Etleonard/papers/myth.pdf">social Darwinism</a>. He sees an evolutionary war in which “smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure”. </p>
<p>Andreessen writes “technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof”. However, his talk of “America and her allies” and “our civilisation” suggests Andreessen himself cares quite a bit about these things. The West should, he implies, embrace its rightful place as the world’s technological (and civilisational) leader. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Illustration of a fictional Mars colony of round domes on a red planet with mountains in the background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557388/original/file-20231103-15-2sq5e0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Imaginary future colonies of people ‘living in the stars’ are reminiscent of a worldview where territories must constantly be expanded.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/colony-on-planet-mars-habitats-martian-2215202557">Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<h2>A warning</h2>
<p>All this reveals some of what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs really think of the rest of the world, and of us (non-techno-optimists). </p>
<p>We should take it as a warning about the kind of world that Silicon Valley technologists want. It will be a world built with technology, yes, but also a world that values power, force and wealth over all else.</p>
<p>Andreessen is right about one thing: we do need technology. We are unlikely to solve many of the problems facing our planet without it. </p>
<p>But the stripped-down, raw, blunt version of technology – a technology without ethics, without values, and without a conscience – is not the only way. Instead, we need to support technological innovation and at the same time support democratic participation, pluralism, ethics and our natural environment.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-it-wrong-to-steal-from-large-corporations-a-philosopher-debates-the-ethics-182193">Is it wrong to steal from large corporations? A philosopher debates the ethics</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216894/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hallam Stevens has previously received funding from the Ministry for Education (Singapore) and the National Heritage Board (Singapore). </span></em></p>Venture capitalist billionaire Marc Andreessen dreams of ‘becoming technological supermen’ in a ‘techno-optimist’ manifesto built on a dark colonial vision.Hallam Stevens, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2092832023-07-20T12:31:21Z2023-07-20T12:31:21ZCan you trust AI? Here’s why you shouldn’t<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538131/original/file-20230718-29-tmku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5040%2C3357&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">AI chatbots are becoming more powerful, but how do you know if they're working in your best interest?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/artificial-intelligence-chatbot-concept-royalty-free-image/1364050120">Carol Yepes/Moment via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-14/amazon-s-alexa-defends-company-honor-while-jabbing-rivals">saying it doesn’t know</a>. It doesn’t take much to make it <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-14/amazon-s-alexa-defends-company-honor-while-jabbing-rivals">lambaste the other tech giants</a>, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds.</p>
<p>When Alexa responds in this way, it’s obvious that it is putting its developer’s interests ahead of yours. Usually, though, it’s not so obvious whom an AI system is serving. To avoid being exploited by these systems, people will need to learn to approach AI skeptically. That means deliberately constructing the input you give it and thinking critically about its output.</p>
<p>Newer generations of AI models, with their more sophisticated and less rote responses, are making it harder to tell who benefits when they speak. Internet companies’ manipulating what you see to serve their own interests is nothing new. Google’s search results and your Facebook feed are <a href="https://www.marketingweek.com/ritson-digital-duopoly-2018/">filled with paid entries</a>. <a href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/chaos-machine-book-excerpt/">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html">TikTok</a> and others manipulate your feeds to maximize the time you spend on the platform, which means more ad views, over your well-being.</p>
<p>What distinguishes AI systems from these other internet services is how interactive they are, and how these interactions will increasingly become like relationships. It doesn’t take much extrapolation from today’s technologies to envision AIs that will plan trips for you, negotiate on your behalf or act as therapists and life coaches. </p>
<p>They are likely to be with you 24/7, know you intimately, and be able to anticipate your needs. This kind of conversational interface to the vast network of services and resources on the web is within the capabilities of existing generative AIs like ChatGPT. They are on track to become <a href="https://danielmiessler.com/p/ais-next-big-thing-is-digital-assistants/">personalized digital assistants</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://dblp.org/pid/s/BruceSchneier.html">security expert</a> and <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/nathan-sanders">data scientist</a>, we believe that people who come to rely on these AIs will have to trust them implicitly to navigate daily life. That means they will need to be sure the AIs aren’t secretly working for someone else. Across the internet, devices and services that seem to work for you already secretly work against you. Smart TVs <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/">spy on you</a>. Phone apps <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr20/presentation/egelman">collect and sell your data</a>. Many apps and websites <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/09/ftc-report-shows-rise-sophisticated-dark-patterns-designed-trick-trap-consumers">manipulate you through dark patterns</a>, design elements that <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-dark-patterns-an-online-media-expert-explains-165362">deliberately mislead, coerce or deceive website visitors</a>. This is <a href="https://www.schneier.com/books/data-and-goliath/">surveillance capitalism</a>, and AI is shaping up to be part of it.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">AI is playing a role in surveillance capitalism, which boils down to spying on you to make money off you.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>In the dark</h2>
<p>Quite possibly, it could be much worse with AI. For that AI digital assistant to be truly useful, it will have to really know you. Better than your phone knows you. Better than Google search knows you. Better, perhaps, than your close friends, intimate partners and therapist know you.</p>
<p>You have no reason to trust today’s leading generative AI tools. Leave aside the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/business/ai-chatbots-hallucination.html">hallucinations</a>, the made-up “facts” that GPT and other large language models produce. We expect those will be largely cleaned up as the technology improves over the next few years. </p>
<p>But you don’t know how the AIs are configured: how they’ve been trained, what information they’ve been given, and what instructions they’ve been commanded to follow. For example, researchers <a href="https://www.theverge.com/23599441/microsoft-bing-ai-sydney-secret-rules">uncovered the secret rules</a> that govern the Microsoft Bing chatbot’s behavior. They’re largely benign but can change at any time.</p>
<h2>Making money</h2>
<p>Many of these AIs are created and trained at enormous expense by some of the largest tech monopolies. They’re being offered to people to use free of charge, or at very low cost. These companies will need to monetize them somehow. And, as with the rest of the internet, that somehow is likely to include surveillance and manipulation.</p>
<p>Imagine asking your chatbot to plan your next vacation. Did it choose a particular airline or hotel chain or restaurant because it was the best for you or because its maker got a kickback from the businesses? As with paid results in Google search, newsfeed ads on Facebook and paid placements on Amazon queries, these paid influences are likely to get more surreptitious over time.</p>
<p>If you’re asking your chatbot for political information, are the results skewed by the politics of the corporation that owns the chatbot? Or the candidate who paid it the most money? Or even the views of the demographic of the people whose data was used in training the model? Is your AI agent secretly a double agent? Right now, there is no way to know.</p>
<h2>Trustworthy by law</h2>
<p>We believe that people should expect more from the technology and that tech companies and AIs can become more trustworthy. The European Union’s proposed <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230505IPR84904/ai-act-a-step-closer-to-the-first-rules-on-artificial-intelligence">AI Act</a> takes some important steps, requiring transparency about the data used to train AI models, mitigation for potential bias, disclosure of foreseeable risks and reporting on industry standard tests.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The European Union is pushing ahead with AI regulation.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Most existing AIs <a href="https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/06/15/eu-ai-act.html">fail to comply</a> with this emerging European mandate, and, despite <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/schumer-call-hands-deck-approach-regulating-ai-rcna90193">recent prodding</a> from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the U.S. is far behind on such regulation.</p>
<p>The AIs of the future should be trustworthy. Unless and until the government delivers robust consumer protections for AI products, people will be on their own to guess at the potential risks and biases of AI, and to mitigate their worst effects on people’s experiences with them. </p>
<p>So when you get a travel recommendation or political information from an AI tool, approach it with the same skeptical eye you would a billboard ad or a campaign volunteer. For all its technological wizardry, the AI tool may be little more than the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209283/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nathan Sanders is a volunteer contributor to the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement (MAPLE) project.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bruce Schneier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s difficult to see how artificial intelligence systems work, and to see whose interests they work for. Regulation could make AI more trustworthy. Until then, user beware.Bruce Schneier, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy SchoolNathan Sanders, Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2088102023-07-05T20:43:15Z2023-07-05T20:43:15ZCanada’s new Tech Talent Strategy aims to attract workers from around the world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535912/original/file-20230705-9428-vloj9y.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=21%2C31%2C7077%2C4693&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An attendee interacts with a stall at the Collision tech conference in Toronto on June 28, 2023. Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced a new tech talent recruitment strategy at the conference.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Canadian government <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2023/06/minister-fraser-launches-canadas-first-ever-tech-talent-strategy-at-collision-2023.html">has announced a new strategy to entice tech workers</a> from around the globe to work in Canada. The Tech Talent Strategy was announced by Immigration Minister Sean Fraser at the Collision technology conference in Toronto on June 27.</p>
<p>The new strategy is embedded within the broader <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/work-canada/hire-temporary-foreign/global-skills-strategy.html">Global Skills Strategy</a> program that helps businesses hire skilled workers from around the world.</p>
<p>The Tech Talent Strategy is built on several key pillars, including creating a work permit stream for U.S. <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b">H-1B visa holders</a> to work in Canada, expanding the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/work-canada/hire-temporary-foreign/international-mobility-program.html">International Mobility Program</a>, promoting Canada as a destination for “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-digital-nomads-strategy-talent-economy-1.6893150">digital nomads</a>” and improving the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/start-visa.html">Start-up Visa Program</a>. </p>
<p>These pillars are designed to ensure that Canada is not only filling in-demand jobs, but also attracting the talent necessary to create the jobs of tomorrow.</p>
<p>However, despite the commendable vision, it’s crucial to acknowledge the challenges that could impede the Tech Talent Strategy’s success.</p>
<h2>New visa work permit</h2>
<p>As part of the new strategy, the federal government will open a work permit stream for American H-1B visa holders to work in Canada. The H-1B visa program allows U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in specialized occupations. </p>
<p>The H-1B visa acts as a powerful magnet for tech professionals, who are enticed by the opportunities and salaries afforded by the U.S. tech industry.</p>
<p>This part of the strategy prompts a critical question: Can Canada really compete with the U.S. in the tech realm? </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="People enter a doorway before a U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services sign" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535061/original/file-20230630-14361-hdqwzk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The H-1B visa program allows U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in specialized occupations.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The U.S. tech industry is famed for its high salaries, making the financial aspect a significant consideration for H-1B recipients contemplating a move to Canada.</p>
<h2>Canada versus U.S. tech firms</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.levels.fyi/2022/">A 2022 tech industry salary report</a> found that entry-level engineers at top companies in New York and San Francisco earned around US$274,000 and US$266,000 respectively. While Canada’s tech industry is growing rapidly, it still has some way to go to match these salary levels.</p>
<p>Additionally, the disparity in scale between the tech industries in Canada and the U.S. presents another significant hurdle. The Canadian tech sector is still overshadowed by the size and influence of its American counterpart.</p>
<p>Shopify, one of the largest tech companies in Canada, is still significantly smaller than U.S. tech giants like <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/market-cap">Apple</a>, <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/market-cap">Microsoft</a> and <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/market-cap">Amazon</a> that all have market caps surpassing US$1 trillion. In comparison, Shopify’s market cap is only C$193.6 billion.</p>
<p>Canadian tech firms also face challenges when it comes to scaling up their operations to compete with U.S. firms. These challenges include finding and retaining talent, managing cash flow, maintaining a consistent company culture and dealing with increased competition.</p>
<p>Because Canadian tech firms often face challenges in scaling up due to a lack of capital-rich markets, they <a href="https://narwhalproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Class-of-2008.pdf">often move to the U.S. to access its tech sector infrastructure</a>.</p>
<p>The stark differences in scale between Canadian and U.S. tech firms could affect the effectiveness and appeal of Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy.</p>
<h2>Local impacts</h2>
<p>Another potential pitfall lies in the strategy’s local impacts. Encouraging an influx of foreign workers in a highly competitive industry like tech could inadvertently sideline local talent. Striking a balance between the interests of foreign tech professionals and local workers is paramount.</p>
<p>In addition, Canada’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-canada-plans-to-break-records-with-its-new-refugee-targets-193880">ambitious goal of admitting 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025</a> adds another layer of complexity to these challenges. </p>
<p>This immigration target could strain the local job market, especially in the tech sector. The Tech Talent Strategy must ensure it complements, rather than competes with, the development of local talent to create a harmonious tech ecosystem that benefits all.</p>
<p>Substantial infrastructure and resources are needed to sustain such an increase. Careful planning and investments are needed. </p>
<h2>Proceed with caution</h2>
<p>While Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy marks a promising development, it is far from a smooth ride. The success of this ambitious project hinges on numerous factors, including attracting H-1B visa holders, fulfilling immigration targets and balancing the needs of foreign and local workers. </p>
<p>This complex endeavour demands careful, strategic planning and execution. To ensure the strategy’s success, Canada needs to nurture more homegrown tech companies, restructure the industry’s scale, improve access to funding for tech firms and invest in local tech talent education.</p>
<p>With these strategies in place, Canada can genuinely foster a balanced tech ecosystem characterized by a diverse mix of small, medium and large companies, a network of tech-savvy investors and a system that balances immigration and local talent development.</p>
<p>It will be fascinating to see how the strategy evolves and the ensuing impact on Canada’s tech industry and the broader economy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208810/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Garros Gong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Canada’s Tech Talent Strategy aims to draw global tech talent to the country, but faces hurdles like U.S. salary competition and high living costs.Garros Gong, Ph.D. Student in Management Science, University of WaterlooLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2006252023-03-03T13:24:55Z2023-03-03T13:24:55ZThe retention problem: Women are going into tech but are also being driven out<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513069/original/file-20230302-98-hr8cj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5700%2C3797&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A sense of community and mutual support help women respond to toxic tech culture.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/high-angle-view-of-male-and-female-programmers-royalty-free-image/1387362037">Maskot/DigitalVision via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>By 2029, there will be 3.6 million computing jobs in the U.S., but there will only be enough college graduates with computing degrees to fill <a href="https://wpassets.ncwit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/13163828/1209_2021_BTN_FullSize.pdf">24% of these jobs</a>. For decades, the U.S. has <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/22/how-u.s.-gender-equality-funding-increase-can-actually-be-effective-pub-86686">poured resources into improving gender representation</a> in the tech industry. However, the numbers are not improving proportionately. Instead, they <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/women-making-gains-in-stem-occupations-but-still-underrepresented.html">have remained stagnant</a>, and initiatives are failing. </p>
<p>Women make up 57% of the overall workforce. Comparatively, women make up only <a href="https://wpassets.ncwit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/13163828/1209_2021_BTN_FullSize.pdf">27% of the workforce in the technology industry</a>. Of the 27% that join the technology industry, more than <a href="https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-134/Accenture-A4-GWC-Report-Final1.pdf">50% are likely to quit</a> before the age of 35, and <a href="https://www.spencerstuart.com/-/media/images/inline-images/womenintech-062116-graphic-large.jpg">56% are likely to quit by midcareer</a>.</p>
<p>So, questions arise: Why does the technology industry have a retention problem? Why are women who are employed by the technology industry quitting in such high volumes? What factors contribute to this low retention of women in the technology industry, and what kind of support do women need to stay and succeed in it? </p>
<p>I’m an <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xdJqYcsAAAAJ&hl=en">information science researcher</a> who studies gender and information technology, women in STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – online communities and open source software. My team at the University of Tennessee conducted research to address these questions. We found that retention plays a large role in the gender disparity in the tech field and that online and physical spaces that support women can boost retention.</p>
<h2>Women quitting the tech industry</h2>
<p>Research shows that women face many challenges in the tech industry. The <a href="https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/gender-pay-gap-in-tech/">gender pay gap</a> is severe. Women do not get the <a href="https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-134/Accenture-A4-GWC-Report-Final1.pdf">same opportunities as men</a>; for example, only 18% of the chief information officers/chief technology officers are women. And women receive unfair treatment. </p>
<p>My research team focused on the experiences of women in the tech industry with a particular focus on the treatment they receive in the workplace and the nature of support systems for women who succeed. We studied open-source software communities because open-source software communities are an extreme example of gender inequity. Seventy percent of all the software that supports technology infrastructure is open source, which makes open-source software integral to the future of the tech workforce. Yet women <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3510460">make up only 9.8%</a> of the people who contribute to open-source software projects.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman seated at a desk in front of a computer with her eyes closed and her left hand on her forehead" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513278/original/file-20230302-28-u0k3ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Women often have to deal with sexism, harassment and outright misogyny in tech workplaces.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/tired-businesswoman-with-head-in-hand-sitting-at-royalty-free-image/1073867488">Maskot via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In seeking answers to this retention problem of the tech industry, our research found that women’s negative experiences range from <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524501.3527602">minor to severe harassment, sexism, discrimination and misogyny to explicit death threats</a>. Their expertise is challenged, <a href="https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v5i3.36197">their contributions are not well-received</a> and their roles are diminished. They face <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524501.3527602">constant harassment and deal with normalized abuse</a>, often hearing that “guys will be guys,” and they deal with isolation because they are often severely outnumbered by men.</p>
<p>The impact of these negative experiences shows evidence of multiple levels of harm. For example, the individual harm that a woman faces leads to incidental harm of other women being discouraged from participation, resulting in further collective harm for the open-source software community in the form of fewer women participating. Overall, these negative experiences are detrimental to the retention of women in open-source software and the tech industry in general.</p>
<h2>The culture problem</h2>
<p>Mainstream media often reports on open-source software’s <a href="https://diginomica.com/ada-lovelace-day-tackling-toxic-tech-bro-culture">toxic “tech bro” culture</a>. In recent years, high-profile leaders in open-source software have been exposed for their abusive behavior. </p>
<p>Open-source software icon Linus Torvalds stepped aside from the Linux kernel after his toxic, abusive emails to other developers were highlighted in the media. His decision to step down came as a result of questions about his <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside">abusive behavior in discouraging women</a> from working as Linux kernel programmers.</p>
<p>Another towering figure in this field, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/17/computer-scientist-richard-stallman-resigns-mit-after-comments-about-epstein-scandal/">Richard Stallman</a>, was pushed into resigning from the Free Software Foundation and MIT after a very successful career in open-source software because of his views on pedophilia, as well as a multitude of <a href="https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-stallman-cancelled/">sexual harassment cases from students and faculty at MIT over the course of 30 years</a>. These types of public incidents of unprofessional behavior from tech industry leaders have a chilling effect on the participation of women and perpetuate toxic behavior.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QGo9v4TE8eo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Stark statistics about women in the tech field.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Support systems for women</h2>
<p>In our research about the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20883-7_7">support systems</a> for women in tech, we observed and documented the value of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00010">online spaces that focus on women</a> in the form of <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64033">social, emotional, technical and networking support</a>. Based on our results, key to supporting women in open-source software are online spaces that are focused on female participants and are readily accessible through the websites of open-source software organizations. The spaces help because they provide a sense of community for women working in open-source software. </p>
<p>These spaces are mainly but not exclusively for women. Examples include <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Women">Fedora Women</a> and <a href="https://www.debian.org/women/">Debian Women</a>. When women face discrimination and misogyny, these spaces allow them to reach out to other women and seek social and emotional support. Women guide and mentor each other to navigate the toxicity of the tech industry and find avenues to advocate for gender equality.</p>
<p>Additionally, we found that women flourish when supported by community guidelines, such as the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09543-w">codes of conduct for online spaces</a>, in-person events and professional organizations. We found that codes of conduct often become advocacy tools for women’s equal treatment in open-source software online communities. They serve as tools for women and allies alike. </p>
<p>When women are supported by mentors and allies and can network in their communities, and when they see role models who look like them succeeding in tech communities, they are <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524501.3527602">less likely to quit</a>. The retention problem can be addressed by tackling the gender disparities of the technology industry with online and physical spaces that focus on women, policies and practices to ensure equal treatment of women, and female mentors and role models.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vandana Singh has received funding for her research from NSF, IMLS, USGS, Google, and the University of Tennessee.</span></em></p>Women are severely underrepresented in tech. Strength in numbers – communities for women and women mentoring women – can counter tech’s sexist culture and help retain women in the field.Vandana Singh, Professor of Information Science, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1984182023-01-25T05:11:51Z2023-01-25T05:11:51ZBig Tech is firing employees by the thousands. Why? And how worried should we be?<p>Tech companies are always in the news, usually touting the next big thing. However, the tech news cycle recently hasn’t been dominated by the latest gadget or innovation. Instead, layoffs are in the headlines.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/tech-layoffs-microsoft-amazon-meta-others-have-cut-more-than-60000.html">the last year</a>, more than 70,000 people globally have been laid off by Big Tech companies – and that doesn’t count the downstream effect of contractors (and other organisations) losing business as budgets tighten. </p>
<p>What exactly led to this massive shakeout? And what does it mean for the industry, and you?</p>
<h2>What’s the damage?</h2>
<p>Since the end of the pandemic hiring spree, large numbers of employees have been fired from major tech companies, including <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/google-parent-lay-off-12000-workers-memo-2023-01-20/">Alphabet</a> (12,000 employees), <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/18/23560874/amazon-layoffs-18000-january-november">Amazon</a> (18,000), <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/12/07/meta-layoffsfacebook-continues-to-cut-costs-by-cutting-headcount/?sh=6c80c2828456">Meta</a> (11,000), <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-plans-further-layoffs-insider-2023-01-18/">Twitter</a> (4,000), <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/tech/microsoft-layoffs/index.html">Microsoft</a> (10,000) and <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/10/salesforce-turmoil-continues-into-new-year-as-recent-layoffs-attest/">Salesforce</a> (8,000). </p>
<p>Other household names share the spotlight, including Tesla, Netflix, Robin Hood, Snap, Coinbase and Spotify - but their layoffs are significantly less than those mentioned above. </p>
<p>Importantly, these figures don’t include the downstream layoffs, such as advertising agencies laying off staff as ad spend reduces, or manufacturers downsizing as tech product orders shrink – or even potential <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/01/23/big-tech-layoffs-15-20-percent-next-six-months-top-analyst-says/">layoffs yet to come</a>.</p>
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<p>And let’s not forget the folks leaving voluntarily because they don’t want to come <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/04/01/apple-employees-say-theyll-quit-over-tim-cooks-return-to-office-push/">into the office</a>, <a href="https://hbr.org/2022/08/quiet-quitting-is-about-bad-bosses-not-bad-employees">hate their managers</a>, or aren’t keen on Elon Musk’s “<a href="https://fortune.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-email-twitter-extremely-hardcore-long-hours-high-intensity/">hardcore work</a>” philosophy.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musks-hardcore-management-style-a-case-study-in-what-not-to-do-194999">Elon Musk's 'hardcore' management style: a case study in what not to do</a>
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<p>The knock-on effects of all of the above will be felt in the consulting, marketing, advertising and manufacturing spaces as companies reduce spending, and redirect it <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-is-spending-billions-on-ai-research-investors-should-keep-an-eye-out-11646740800">towards innovating in AI</a>. </p>
<h2>So what’s driving the layoffs?</h2>
<p>The canary in the coal mine was reduced advertising spend and revenue. Many tech companies are funded through advertising. So, for as long as that income stream was healthy (which was especially the case in the years leading up to COVID), so was expenditure on staffing. As advertising revenue decreased last year – in part due to <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/youtube-shrinking-ad-business-ominous-sign-for-online-ad-market.html">fears over a global recession</a> triggered by the pandemic – it was inevitable layoffs would follow.</p>
<p>Apple is one exception. It strongly resisted increasing its <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-growth-than-tech-peers-no-layoffs-yet.html">head count in recent years</a> and as a result doesn’t have to shrink staff numbers (although it hasn’t been immune to staff losses due to <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/09/apple-exec-ian-goodfellow-quits-over-return-to-office-policy/">work-from-home policy changes</a>).</p>
<h2>What does it mean for consumers?</h2>
<p>Although the headlines can be startling, the layoffs won’t actually mean a whole lot for consumers. Overall, work on tech products and services is still expanding.</p>
<p>Even Twitter, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2022/10/24/can-twitter-survive-elon-musk/?sh=11584a7314d6">which many predicted to be dead by now</a>, is looking to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/11/05/1134561542/twitter-blue-check-paid-verification-elon-musk#">diversify its</a> streams of revenue. </p>
<p>That said, some pet projects such as Mark Zuckerberg’s <a href="https://www.protocol.com/entertainment/meta-layoffs-reality-labs-metaverse">Metaverse</a> likely won’t be further developed the way their leaders had initially hoped. The evidence for this is in the layoffs, which are concentrated (at least at Amazon, Microsoft and Meta) in these big innovation gambles taken by senior leaders. </p>
<p>Over the past few years, low interest rates coupled with high COVID-related consumption gave leaders the confidence to invest in innovative products. Other than in AI, that investment is now slowing, or is dead.</p>
<h2>And what about the people who lost their jobs?</h2>
<p>Layoffs can be devastating for the individuals affected. But who is affected in this case? </p>
<p>For the most part, the people losing their jobs are educated and highly employable professionals. They are being given <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-amazon-microsoft-meta-twitter-severance-packages-compared.html">severance packages and support</a> which often exceed the minimum legal requirements. Amazon, for example, specifically indicated its <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1147034858/amazon-ceo-says-company-will-layoff-more-than-18-000-workers">losses would be in tech staff</a> and those who support them; not in warehouses.</p>
<p>Having a Big Tech employer on their CV will be a real advantage as these individuals move into a more competitive employment market, even if it doesn’t look like it will be <a href="https://hired.com/state-of-tech-salaries/2022/">quite as heated</a> as many had feared.</p>
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<h2>What does this mean for the industry?</h2>
<p>With experienced tech professionals looking for work once again, salaries are likely to deflate and higher levels of experience and education will be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/technology/tech-layoffs-millennials-gen-x.html">required to secure employment</a>. These corrections in the industry are potentially a sign it’s falling in line with other, more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/06/is-big-tech-now-just-too-big-to-stomach">established parts of the market</a>.</p>
<p>The recent layoffs are eye-catching, but they won’t affect the overall economy much. In fact, even if Big Tech laid off 100,000 workers, it would still be a fraction of the tech work force. </p>
<p>The numbers reported may seem large, but they’re often not reported as a proportion of overall wage spend, or indeed overall staffing. For some tech companies they are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/business/tech-layoffs.html">just a fraction</a> of the massive amount of new hires initially acquired during the pandemic.</p>
<p>Big Tech is still a big employer, and its big products will continue to impact many aspects of our lives.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198418/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The numbers are less concerning when viewed in the bigger picture.Nathalie Collins, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan UniversityJeff Volkheimer, Senior Director, Collaboration and Continuity Technologies, Duke Health, Duke UniversityPaul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1965332022-12-15T13:06:46Z2022-12-15T13:06:46ZWhat social media regulation could look like: Think of pipelines, not utilities<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500812/original/file-20221213-24281-u7oobq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C17%2C5946%2C3970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is the law coming for Twitter, Meta and other social media outlets?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/gavel-hammer-with-smartphone-on-blue-background-royalty-free-image/1351965013">new look casting/iStock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and his controversial <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/musk-twitter-fauci.html">statements</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/techscape-twitter-files-elon-musk">decisions</a> as its owner, have fueled a new wave of calls for <a href="https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/12/04/elizabeth-warren-will-work-with-lindsey-graham-to-regulate-twitter-she-says/">regulating social media companies</a>. Elected officials and policy scholars have argued for years that companies like Twitter and Facebook – now Meta – have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/opinion/elon-musk-twitter.html">immense power</a> over public discussions and can use that power to <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/manipulating-social-media-undermine-democracy">elevate some views and suppress others</a>. Critics also accuse the companies of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/06/tech/instagram-fine-teens-privacy/index.html">failing to protect users’ personal data</a> and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739">downplaying harmful impacts</a> of using social media.</p>
<p>As an economist who studies the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yxN_35oAAAAJ">regulation of utilities</a> such as electricity, gas and water, I wonder what that regulation would look like. There are many regulatory models in use around the world, but few seem to fit the realities of social media. However, observing how these models work can provide valuable insights.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Families across the U.S. are suing social media companies over policies that they argue affected their children’s mental health.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Not really economic regulation</h2>
<p>The central ideas behind economic regulation – safe, reliable service at fair and reasonable rates – have been around for <a href="https://mises.org/library/great-depression-14th-century">centuries</a>. The U.S. has a rich history of regulation since the turn of the 20th century. </p>
<p>The first federal economic regulator in the U.S. was the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was created by the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/interstate-commerce-act">Interstate Commerce Act of 1887</a>. This law required railroads, which were <a href="https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/railroads-in-late-19th-century/">growing dramatically</a> and becoming a highly influential industry, to operate safely and fairly and to charge reasonable rates for service. </p>
<p>The Interstate Commerce Act reflected concerns that railroads – which were monopolies in the regions that they served and provided an essential service – could behave in any manner they chose and charge any price they wanted. This power threatened people who relied on rail service, such as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1873/11/the-railroads-and-the-farms/630996/">farmers sending crops to market</a>. Other industries, such as bus transportation and trucking, would later be subjected to similar regulation.</p>
<p>Individual social media companies don’t really fit this traditional mold of economic regulation. They are not monopolies, as we can see from people leaving Twitter and jumping to alternatives like <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/12/06/business/after-trying-two-leading-twitter-alternatives-heres-what-we-found/">Mastodon and Post</a>.</p>
<p>While internet access is fast becoming an essential service in the information age, it’s debatable whether social media platforms provide essential services. And companies like Facebook and Twitter don’t directly charge people to use their platforms. So the traditional focus of economic regulation – fear of exorbitant rates – doesn’t apply.</p>
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<h2>Fairness and safety</h2>
<p>In my view, a more relevant regulatory model for social media might be the way in which the U.S. regulates <a href="https://www.ferc.gov/what-ferc-does">electricity grid and pipeline operations</a>. These industries fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and <a href="https://www.naruc.org/">state utility regulators</a>. Like these networks, social media carries a commodity – here it’s information, instead of electricity, oil or gas – and the public’s primary concern is that companies like Meta and Twitter should do it safely and fairly.</p>
<p>In this context, regulation means establishing standards for safety and equity. If a company violates those standards, it faces fines. It sounds simple, but the practice is far more complicated.</p>
<p>First, establishing these standards requires a careful definition of the regulated company’s roles and responsibilities. For example, your local electric utility is responsible for delivering power safely to your home. Since social media companies continuously adapt to the needs and wants of their users, establishing these roles and responsibilities could prove challenging.</p>
<p>Texas attempted to do this in 2021 with <a href="https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=872&Bill=HB20">HB 20</a>, a law that barred social media companies from banning users <a href="https://www.protocol.com/policy/hb-20-fifth-circuit-questions">based on their political views</a>. Social media trade groups sued, arguing that the measure infringed upon their members’ First Amendment rights. A federal appellate court <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/12/5th-circuit-temporarily-blocks-texas-social-media-law-00061555">blocked the law</a>, and the case is likely headed to the Supreme Court. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in a suit testifies before a congressional committee." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500817/original/file-20221213-21971-lciae2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Biden named Lina Khan, a prominent critic of Big Tech companies, as chair of the Federal Trade Commission in 2021. The agency investigates issues including antitrust violations, deceptive trade practices and data privacy lapses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/SenateNASA/a870a635ef574724b21624c1397b0ebc/photo">AP Photo/Saul Loeb</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Setting appropriate levels of fines is also complicated. Theoretically, regulators should try to set a fine commensurate with the <a href="https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/PolicyStatementonEnforcement.pdf">damage to society from the infraction</a>. From a practical standpoint, however, regulators treat fines as a deterrent. If the regulator never has to assess the fine, it means that companies are adhering to the established standards for safety and equity.</p>
<p>But laws often inhibit agencies from energetically policing target industries. For example, the Office of Enforcement at the <a href="https://www.ferc.gov/enforcement">Federal Energy Regulatory Commission</a> is concerned with safety and security of U.S. energy markets. But under a 2005 law, the office can’t levy civil penalties higher than <a href="https://www.ferc.gov/civil-penalties">US$1 million per day</a>. In comparison, the cost to customers of the California power crisis of 2000-2001, fueled partially by energy market manipulation, has been estimated at approximately <a href="https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/R_103CWR.pdf">$40 billion</a>. </p>
<p>In 2022 the Office of Enforcement <a href="https://www.ferc.gov/media/fy2022-oe-annual-report">settled eight investigations</a> of violations that occurred from 2017 to 2021 and levied a total of $55.5 million in penalties. In addition, it opened 21 new investigations. Clearly, the prospect of a fine from the regulator is not a sufficient deterrent in every instance.</p>
<h2>From legislation to regulation</h2>
<p>Congress writes the laws that create regulatory agencies and guide their actions, so that’s where any moves to regulate social media companies will start. Since these companies are controlled by some of the wealthiest people in the U.S., it’s likely that a law regulating social media would face legal challenges, potentially all the way to the Supreme Court. And the current Supreme Court has a <a href="https://minnesotalawreview.org/article/a-century-of-business-in-the-supreme-court-1920-2020/">strong pro-business record</a>.</p>
<p>If a new law withstands legal challenges, a regulatory agency such as the <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/">Federal Communications Commission</a> or the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/">Federal Trade Commission</a>, or perhaps a newly created agency, would have to write regulations establishing social media companies’ roles and responsibilities. In doing so, regulators would need to be mindful that changes in social preferences and tastes could render these roles moot.</p>
<p>Finally, the agency would have to create enforcement mechanisms, such as fines or other penalties. This would involve determining what kinds of actions are likely to deter social media companies from behaving in ways deemed harmful under the law. </p>
<p>In the time it would take to set up such a system, we can assume that social media companies would evolve quickly, so regulators would likely be assessing a moving target. As I see it, even if bipartisan support develops for regulating social media, it will be easier said than done.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196533/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Theodore Kury is the Director of Energy Studies at the University of Florida’s Public Utility Research Center, which is sponsored in part by the Florida electric and gas utilities and the Florida Public Service Commission, none of which has editorial control of any of the content the Center produces.</span></em></p>The US government regulates many industries, but social media companies don’t neatly fit existing regulatory templates. Systems that deliver energy may be the closest analog.Theodore J. Kury, Director of Energy Studies, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914032022-10-17T20:28:15Z2022-10-17T20:28:15ZPowerful women heading up dating apps are framed as young and sexy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489627/original/file-20221013-18-nftsei.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=275%2C17%2C5475%2C3811&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Whitney Wolfe Herd who heads up Bumble speaks during the TIME 100 Summit in New York, April 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Richard Drew)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>People are swiping on dating apps in record numbers and roughly half of these individuals identify as women, which may be the reason why the dating app industry recently assigned the top leadership roles to women.</p>
<p>Indeed, this past year, the most powerful dating apps in the world — <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/24404/most-popular-dating-apps-us/">Bumble and Tinder</a> — were both run by women. Whitney Wolfe Herd is at Bumble while Renate Nyborg was running Tinder. </p>
<p>As scholars who write about <a href="https://theconversation.com/does-it-really-empower-women-to-expect-them-to-make-the-first-move-175032">dating apps like Bumble</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-lust-and-digital-dating-men-on-the-bumble-dating-app-arent-ready-for-the-queen-bee-120796">dating and feminism</a>, we were interested to see how journalists reported on these two women leading the male-dominated, highly lucrative online dating industry and we wanted to compare that coverage with how the CEOs represented themselves on social media. </p>
<p>We looked at last year’s top 50 news stories for each woman that came up in search results. We found a pattern of sexist and patronizing coverage. We noted often repeated descriptors for the leaders and created three categories to describe them: “young tycoon,” “feminist revenge” and “sexy poster child.” </p>
<p>We also did a <a href="https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en">Google Image search</a> and looked at the top 100 results for each CEO to <a href="https://annenberg.usc.edu/news/diversity-and-inclusion/algorithms-oppression-safiya-noble-finds-old-stereotypes-persist-new">see how a Google search represented</a> these leaders. What we saw were visually distinct styles intricately tied to each brand. </p>
<p>In contrast, we observed more diverse and interesting accounts of gender and leadership in the women’s personal media spaces. These stories include notions of motherhood, inclusivity and equity. </p>
<p>It seems that significant tensions exist between news representations of women leaders in tech versus how they represent themselves.</p>
<h2>The Bumble sensation</h2>
<p>Both CEOs are depicted in news stories through the lens of sexism and sensationalism. In the case of Whitney Wolfe Herd, her youth as well as her scandalous past with Tinder are often highlighted.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489625/original/file-20221013-23-ncwrm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, right, stands with Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd during the launch party for Bumble in New Delhi, India in 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Pallav Paliwal)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wolfe Herd launched the feminist dating app Bumble in 2014, after leaving Tinder. She became the youngest self-made female billionaire. She’s also the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2021/02/11/bumble-founder-whitney-wolfe-herds-fortune-rockets-past-1-billion-as-dating-app-goes-public/?sh=5b43db80578d">youngest woman CEO to take a company public in the United States</a>. </p>
<p>Yet mainstream news and pop culture outlets focus on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/01/read-the-most-surprising-allegations-from-the-tinder-sexual-harassment-lawsuit/">her controversial past with Tinder</a> and the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/whitney-wolfe-settles-sexual-harassment-tinder-lawsuit-1-million-2014-11">sexual discrimination suit she filed</a> prior to leaving Tinder. </p>
<p>The language of competition, divisiveness and feminist backlash runs through many of these articles. <a href="https://time.com/4737036/dating-feminist-advice-bumble-founder-whitney-wolfe/">Bumble is framed as part of her larger feminist agenda</a> that is set on <a href="https://nypost.com/2015/03/11/scorned-tinder-co-founder-finally-gets-revenge-against-the-tech-bros/">revenge against the tech bros who dominate the dating app industry</a>.</p>
<h2>Renate Nyborg let go from Tinder</h2>
<p>Renate Nyborg’s ascent to the top of Tinder in 2021 made headlines primarily in financial and economic publications. Most stories highlight that <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/match-group-names-renate-nyborg-chief-executive-officer-of-tinder-301373226.html">she is Tinder’s first female CEO</a> and that she is a “poster-child” for the company since she met her husband on the app. An article in <a href="https://fortune.com/2022/05/18/tinder-ceo-online-dating-women-lgbtq-renate-nyborg/"><em>Fortune</em> magazine</a> calls her “the ultimate testament to Tinder’s ability to create healthy, long-term relationships.” </p>
<p>Other stories reflect <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/renate-nyborg-to-lead-dating-app-tinder-1030792698">optimism about Nyborg’s potential to grow the app due to previous start-up experience</a>. Tinder is positioned as the brand and most stories focus on Nyborg’s ability to advance the company. </p>
<p>Yet after less than a year, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/03/tinder-chief-leaves-dating-app-after-one-year-renate-nyborg">she was quietly released from her position</a> this August and the impact of her brief reign within the tech industry has been glossed over. </p>
<p>During her tenure, <a href="https://www.tinderpressroom.com/2022-07-14-Tinder-wins-three-2022-Comparably-Awards,-Including-Best-Career-Growth">Tinder won multiple awards, including Best CEO for Diversity</a>, and it <a href="https://www.tinderpressroom.com/2022-03-08-Tinder-Named-One-of-the-Worlds-Most-Innovative-Companies-in-2022-by-Fast-Company">was named one of the most innovative companies of 2022 by <em>Fast Company</em></a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1526872824505409536"}"></div></p>
<p>Given the importance of diversity and innovation in the tech industry, her dismissal is curious if growth in these areas was a corporate priority. It may be linked with the illusionary nature of empowerment within various aspects of the dating app industry and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211068130">Tinder’s lingering identity as a platform associated with hook-ups and misogyny</a>.</p>
<h2>Social media representations</h2>
<p>Compared to the limited and problematic portrayals of the CEOs in the news media, the women employ more diverse and personalized notions of gender and leadership on their social media platforms. </p>
<p>Wolfe Herd showcases her identity as Bumble CEO on her social media accounts, on Instagram especially and Twitter less so. She also flags her role as a mother who runs a company that’s central to her larger feminist mission. </p>
<p>Her <a href="https://girlboss.com/">narrative of female empowerment reminiscent of the “girl boss”</a> is prevalent. She constructs herself as the brand, with Bumble and its <a href="https://twitter.com/whitwolfeherd?lang=en">“women make the first move” philosophy</a> forming part of a larger feminist mission to revolutionize modern courtship. </p>
<p>Nyborg curates her leadership persona primarily on professional platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, and actively posts about leadership, tech blogs and gender diversity. She also highlights her excitement about leading the company.</p>
<p>Her social media accounts emphasize a broad framing of inclusivity to effect change. On her last day at Tinder, Nyborg shared a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/renatenyborg_swiperight-activity-6960374540644315136-QFZC/?trk=public_profile_like_view&originalSubdomain=es">post on LinkedIn to highlight her accomplishments, focusing on elevating women’s safety and inclusion at her former company</a>. </p>
<h2>Fashion and colour</h2>
<p><a href="https://financialpost.com/fp-work/women-embrace-colour-and-style-as-old-office-wear-rules-go-out-the-window">Fashion and colour are used strategically both in the news stories and also how these women style themselves</a> as powerful female executives performing important leadership roles. </p>
<p>Journalist Alexis Grenell, writing in <em>The Nation</em>, suggests that we have been conditioned to visually associate executive power with male fashion, namely the suit and tie. She writes: <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/hochul-garcia-power-visual/">“if we don’t note how women are redefining what executive power looks like … it’ll remain de facto male”</a>.</p>
<p>Bumble is synonymous with a sunny shade of yellow, which marks the company brand and is widely featured in Whitney Wolfe Herd’s posts. Herd uses images that project a “wholesome, girl next door” vibe with light lipsticks and muted, <a href="https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/bumble-shop-clothing-basics-collection/">college-inspired clothing</a>.</p>
<p>The Tinder flame logo is red, and this colour dominates Renate Nyborg’s images in news and her own media stories. She usually wears bold red lipstick to match her red outfits, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariaminor/2020/10/19/wear-red-show-your-strength-and-confidence/?sh=680f29d1821c">signaling strength</a>. </p>
<p>When it comes to matching fashion to corporate brands, the meanings associated with certain colours can have unintentional consequences for leaders. Whereas yellow may boost Wolfe Herd’s persona through <a href="https://www.talentedladiesclub.com/articles/how-to-wear-colour-to-work/">positive notions of happiness and creativity</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.5.1150">associations with red could be interpreted as sexual and aggressive</a> for Nyborg. </p>
<h2>Corporate culture remains male-driven</h2>
<p>Nyborg’s departure from Tinder suggests that it’s still hard for women to maintain high level executive positions in the tech industry, even when they’re the CEO. </p>
<p>Initial reflections of the news coverage show a persistent devaluing of women’s contributions in tech leadership </p>
<p>We need more stories about how women are challenging and changing male-driven corporate culture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191403/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two women ruled the dating app tech industry last year. How they were portrayed by mainstream media versus how they portrayed themselves in social media says a lot about how women leaders are viewed.Treena Orchard, Associate Professor, School of Health Studies, Western UniversityRiki Thompson, Associate Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing Studies, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1594082021-05-20T17:46:08Z2021-05-20T17:46:08ZEntrepreneurs aren’t taking their companies public — and it’s a problem for our economy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401713/original/file-20210519-15-7qf3bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C208%2C5568%2C3492&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A sign board in Toronto's financial district shows the Toronto Stock Exchange's market value and gain. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Stock markets in Canada and the United States <a href="https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/articles/why-the-market-is-booming-and-the-economy-is-struggling">are booming right now</a>. So why do so few companies want to join them? </p>
<p>With the exception of a couple of bad years, the last two decades have been a great time to be a public company. Valuations are at record highs and <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-in-2019-to-21-3-million-ceos-now-earn-320-times-as-much-as-a-typical-worker/">executive compensation has more than doubled as a percentage of corporate profits</a>. Nevertheless, <a href="https://www.investors.com/news/publicly-traded-companies-fewer-winners-huge-despite-stock-market-trend/#:%7E:text=Companies%20too%20small%20to%20compete,from%20S%26P%20Global%20Market%20Intelligence.">fewer and fewer companies and their managers want to take advantage of these opportunities</a>. </p>
<p>As we show <a href="https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/FMR11_Capital-Markets_Tingle-Pandes.pdf">in a recent research study</a>, the number of companies choosing to go public in Canada has been declining sharply since the late 1990s. In fact, so few companies have been interested in listing publicly that the total number of Canada’s public operating companies has declined by more than 40 per cent on a per capita basis. American public markets are not much better. They’re about half the size they were back in the 1990s.</p>
<p>There is surprisingly little concern about this development among Canada’s regulators and politicians. This inattention is probably a mistake. Canada has four times the number of public companies per capita as the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X03001259">United States and the United Kingdom</a>. It depends on its public markets to finance and grow new businesses in a way no other developed country does. </p>
<h2>Tech, pharma need public companies</h2>
<p>Even more important is the impact Canada’s public markets has on the ability to grow companies in high-value industries like technology or pharmaceuticals. <a href="http://itac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/StateofST2012_fullreportEN.pdf">Experts have pointed out</a> that Canada actually performs well at generating new ideas and starting new businesses. </p>
<p><a href="https://cca-reports.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2009-06-11-innovation-report-1.pdf">The country fails</a>, however, on scaling these new businesses up to a size where they can compete in world markets. Aside from one or two companies <a href="https://producthabits.com/shopify-grew-snowboard-shop-10b-commerce-ecosystem/">like Shopify</a>, we don’t create large technology, software, nanotechnology, biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Shopify headquarters" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401718/original/file-20210519-21-10anoeh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Shopify is the exception, not the rule, in terms of Canadian startup success stories.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Canada starts with technology that’s the best in the world in these sectors, but something happens before our companies become big enough to kick-start a new industry here. What happens? These valuable businesses get sold to larger companies within their industries, most of which aren’t Canadian.</p>
<p><a href="https://itac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Issue-Building-Stronger-Tech-Companies-in-Canada1.pdf">One study</a> found that of 164 acquisitions of Canadian technology companies between 2004 and 2012, only a single company was purchased by a Canadian buyer. This turns into a vicious cycle — because we don’t have large, mature companies in many industries, the buyers of our promising startups are foreign, and because our startups are acquired early in their development, we don’t grow into large, mature companies.</p>
<h2>No spin-off benefits</h2>
<p>This dynamic means we lose the spin-off benefits of mature companies: we don’t train our workers in things like enterprise software sales or commercial nanotechnology research, and we don’t get new business ideas from older companies. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have become what it is today without beginning with large, mature firms like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard. Most entrepreneurs get their world-class ideas from working with more established companies.</p>
<p>What does Canada’s failure to scale technology businesses have to do with our public market problem? When a startup raises capital from outsiders, it must eventually provide them with an exit strategy so they can sell their shares. There are basically two kinds of exit: selling the company, usually to a larger company in its line of business, or taking the company public. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/canadian-startups-need-to-focus-on-corporate-governance-to-grow-and-thrive-149253">Canadian startups need to focus on corporate governance to grow and thrive</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>A public listing allows a company to continue to grow while permitting its early investors to sell their shares in the stock market.</p>
<p>Over the past two decades, an increasing number of companies have decided they would rather sell themselves than go public. What happened? </p>
<h2>Explanations don’t hold up</h2>
<p>In our research, we find that the usual explanations for the public market decline aren’t plausible. They either don’t explain why the decline is happening both in Canada and the United States, or they contradict the dominant fact of the last two decades: public companies have been getting more and more valuable.</p>
<p>Instead, we look at the ways public markets have changed to make corporate governance more painful, less effective and higher risk.</p>
<p>The biggest change over the past two decades or so has been a revolution in the ways public companies are run. Generally, this has involved the <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3815139">transfer of power</a> from managers and boards of directors to less informed and incentivized third parties like <a href="https://www.fm-magazine.com/news/2019/nov/role-of-proxy-advisers-201922438.html">proxy advisers</a> and even <a href="https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/trading-investing/money-manager/">money managers</a>.</p>
<p>By and large, these initiatives <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3094049">haven’t improved corporate performance</a>, but they have significantly increased the unpleasantness of going public. They take decisions about compensation, board composition, strategy and selling the company out of the hands of the people who know the business best and, as summarized in our research, give it to outsiders who are less effective. </p>
<p>This transfer of power also disadvantages workers, creditors and other constituencies important to the ultimate success of any business.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A sign board in Toronto shows the closing number for the TSX with the CN Tower in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401884/original/file-20210520-23-18tzrtb.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The TSX needs to abandon majority voting requirements, a measure that makes going public unattractive.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The way forward</h2>
<p>In our recently published paper, we give a variety of concrete suggestions to reduce the penalties incurred by executives and boards if they take their companies public, and to make going public more attractive. </p>
<p>They include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Eliminating the majority voting requirements <a href="https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-ca/knowledge/publications/9b173865/tsx-provides-guidance-on-director-election-requirements#:%7E:text=recent%20voting%20guidelines.-,Majority%20voting,tender%20his%20or%20her%20resignation.">that were adopted by the TSX in 2014</a>, which can make directors more vulnerable to shareholder action</p></li>
<li><p>Introducing effective staggered boards to give corporations the option to provide their managers greater independence from shareholder pressure</p></li>
<li><p>Eliminating an executive compensation disclosure regime that has produced precisely the opposite results from those intended</p></li>
<li><p>Abandoning any suggestion there are one-size-fits-all corporate governance best practices</p></li>
<li><p>Reining in the power of proxy advisers, who have become the de facto sources of corporate governance and executive compensation regulation in this country. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>These steps would clearly remove major barriers to Canadian companies choosing to scale up in this country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159408/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I have previously received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Securities Institute Research Foundation. But I do not currently have funding from them. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bryce Tingle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Why are so many entrepreneurs in Canada avoiding going public, and what are the consequences for our economy?Bryce Tingle, N. Murray Edwards Chair in Business Law, University of CalgaryJ. Ari Pandes, Associate Professor of Finance, University of CalgaryLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1596222021-04-27T12:11:25Z2021-04-27T12:11:25ZFTC warns the AI industry: Don’t discriminate, or else<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/396892/original/file-20210423-19-1kbxh05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5982%2C3979&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The FTC put companies that sell AI systems on notice: Cross the line with biased products and the law is coming for you.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/arrested-robot-with-handcuffs-royalty-free-illustration/636870131?adppopup=true">Maciej Frolow/Stone via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The U.S. Federal Trade Commission just fired a shot across the bow of the artificial intelligence industry. On April 19, 2021, a staff attorney at the agency, which serves as the nation’s leading consumer protection authority, wrote a blog post about biased AI algorithms that included a blunt warning: “Keep in mind that if you don’t hold yourself accountable, the FTC may do it for you.” </p>
<p>The post, titled “<a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2021/04/aiming-truth-fairness-equity-your-companys-use-ai">Aiming for truth, fairness, and equity in your company’s use of AI</a>,” was notable for its tough and specific rhetoric about discriminatory AI. The author observed that the commission’s authority to prohibit unfair and deceptive practices “would include the sale or use of – for example – racially biased algorithms” and that industry exaggerations regarding the capability of AI to make fair or unbiased hiring decisions could result in “deception, discrimination – and an FTC law enforcement action.”</p>
<p>Bias seems to pervade the AI industry. Companies large and small are selling <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency">demonstrably biased systems</a>, and their customers are in turn applying them in ways that disproportionately affect the vulnerable and marginalized. Examples of areas where they are being abused include <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/real-life-examples-of-discriminating-artificial-intelligence-cae395a90070">health care, criminal justice and hiring</a>.</p>
<p>Whatever they say or do, companies seem <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05469-3">unable or unwilling to rid their data sets and models of the racial, gender and other biases</a> that suffuse society. Industry efforts to address fairness and equity have come under fire as inadequate or poorly supported by leadership, sometimes <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/google-ethical-ai-group-s-turmoil-began-long-before-public-unraveling">collapsing entirely</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5PcO_84AAAAJ&hl=en">researcher who studies law and technology</a> and a longtime observer of the FTC, I took particular note of the not-so-veiled threat of agency action. Agencies routinely use formal and informal policy statements to put regulated entities on notice that they are paying attention to a particular industry or issue. But such a direct threat of agency action – get your act together, or else – is relatively rare for the commission.</p>
<h2>What the FTC can do – but hasn’t done</h2>
<p>The FTC’s approach on discriminatory AI stands in stark contrast to, for instance, the early days of internet privacy. In the 1990s, the agency embraced a more <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/1999/07/self-regulation-and-privacy-online-ftc-report-congress">hands-off, self-regulatory paradigm</a>, becoming more assertive only after years of privacy and security lapses.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A seated woman gestures with her left hand as she speaks into a microphone" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397160/original/file-20210426-17-3ar78c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tech industry critic Lina Khan’s nomination to be a commissioner on the FTC is further evidence of the Biden administration’s intention to use the agency to regulate the industry.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/SenateFTC/6683f1a88cee46a983b9d136a11cb0d3/photo?Query=Federal%20Trade%20Commission&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=434&currentItemNo=10">Graeme Jennings/Pool via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How much should industry or the public read into a blog post by one government attorney? In my experience, FTC staff generally don’t go rogue. If anything, that a staff attorney apparently felt empowered to use such strong rhetoric on behalf of the commission confirms a broader basis of support within the agency for policing AI.</p>
<p>Can a federal agency, or anyone, define what makes AI fair or equitable? Not easily. But that’s not the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc">FTC’s charge</a>. The agency only has to determine whether the AI industry’s business practices are unfair or deceptive – a standard the agency has <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/public-statements/2003/05/ftcs-use-unfairness-authority-its-rise-fall-and-resurrection">almost a century of experience enforcing</a> – or otherwise in violation of laws that Congress has asked the agency to enforce.</p>
<h2>Shifting winds on regulating AI</h2>
<p>There are reasons to be skeptical of a sea change. The <a href="https://news.bloombergtax.com/privacy-and-data-security/ftcs-demand-for-tech-company-data-shows-underutilized-power">FTC is chronically understaffed</a>, especially with respect to technologists. The Supreme Court recently <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-508_l6gn.pdf">dealt the agency a setback</a> by requiring additional hurdles before the FTC can seek monetary restitution from violators of the FTC Act. </p>
<p>But the winds are also in the commission’s sails. Public <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/16/public-attitudes-toward-computer-algorithms/">concern over AI</a> is growing. Current and incoming commissioners – there are five, with three Democratic appointees – have been <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftc-nominee-khan-signals-support-for-aggressive-approach-on-big-tech-11619029550">vocally skeptical</a> of the technology industry, as is <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/09/biden-loads-administration-with-big-techs-most-prominent-critics.html">President Biden</a>. The same week as this Supreme Court decision, the commissioners found themselves <a href="https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/4/strengthening-the-federal-trade-commission-s-authority-to-protect-consumers">before the U.S. Senate</a> answering the Commerce Committee’s questions about how the agency could do more for American consumers.</p>
<p>I don’t expect the AI industry to change overnight in response to a blog post. But I would be equally surprised if this blog post were the agency’s last word on discriminatory AI.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand key political developments, each week.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s election newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159622/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ryan Calo co-founded research organizations that receive funding from Microsoft, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other sources. He is affiliated with various non-profit organizations, including R-Street, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Future of Privacy Forum, and AI Now.</span></em></p>The Federal Trade Commission is rattling its saber at the technology industry over growing public concern about biased AI algorithms. Can the agency back up its threats?Ryan Calo, Professor of Law, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1481892020-10-16T06:32:25Z2020-10-16T06:32:25ZApple’s iPhone 12 comes without a charger: a smart waste-reduction move, or clever cash grab?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363875/original/file-20201016-15-xi755k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C25%2C995%2C624&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Apple has released its new smartphone, the iPhone 12, without an accompanying <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/14/21516121/apple-iphone-earpods-wired-headphones-wall-charger-prices-cut-10-dollars">charger or earbuds</a>. Users have <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8840611/Apple-customers-outraged-learning-799-iPhone-12-NOT-include-charger-EarPods.html">harshly criticised</a> the company for this move and will have to purchase these accessories separately, if needed.</p>
<p>While some see it as cost-cutting, or a way for Apple to profit further by forcing customers to buy the products separately, the technology giant said the goal was to <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-introduces-iphone-12-pro-and-iphone-12-pro-max-with-5g/">reduce its carbon footprint</a>.</p>
<p>This is the first time a major smartphone manufacturer has released a mobile without a charger. Earlier this year, reports emerged of <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21317304/samsung-smartphone-chargers-2021-cost-environment">Samsung</a> considering a similar move, but it has yet to follow through.</p>
<p>But even if abandoning chargers is a way for Apple to save money, the action could have a significant, positive impact on the environment. </p>
<p>Australians, on average, buy a new mobile phone every <a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-chuck-that-old-mobile-phone-theres-gold-in-there-52074">18-24 months</a>. In Australia, there are about 23 million phones <a href="https://recyclingnearyou.com.au/phones/">sitting unused</a> — and therefore likely a similar number of accompanying chargers.</p>
<p>Just as single-use shopping bags contribute to plastic waste, unused and discarded electronic appliances contribute to electronic waste (e-waste).</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-chuck-that-old-mobile-phone-theres-gold-in-there-52074">Don't chuck that old mobile phone, there's gold in there</a>
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<h2>You can reuse a shopping bag, so why not your phone charger?</h2>
<p>Just over a decade ago, Australia started to ban single-use plastic bags, starting with South Australia. Today, <a href="https://www.environmentlawinsights.com/2020/04/30/moves-towards-banning-single-use-plastics-in-australia/">every</a> state and territory in Australia has enforced the ban except New South Wales — which intends to do so by the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-to-join-all-other-states-in-banning-single-use-plastic-bags-20200308-p5480b.html">end of 2021</a>. </p>
<p>Since South Australia implemented its ban in 2008, state government estimates <a href="https://www.greenindustries.sa.gov.au/_literature_165559/Life_cycle_analysis_of_plastic_bag_alternatives_(2009)">suggest</a> it has avoided 8,000kg of marine litter each year — and abated more than 4,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.</p>
<p>The benefits for the environment have been clear. So, why are we so hesitant to do the same for e-waste? </p>
<h2>E-waste is a real, but fixable, environmental issue</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195925505000466">E-waste</a> includes different forms of discarded electric and electronic appliances that are no longer of value to their owners. This can include mobile phones, televisions, computers, chargers, keyboards, printers and earphones.</p>
<p>Currently there are about 4.78 billion mobile phone users globally (61.2% of the world’s <a href="https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world">population</a>). And mobile phone chargers alone generate more than <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20140307IPR38122/meps-push-for-common-charger-for-all-mobile-phones">51,000 tonnes</a> of e-waste per year. </p>
<p>On this basis, the environment would greatly benefit if more users reused phone chargers and if tech companies encouraged a shift to standardised charging that works across different mobile phone brands. </p>
<p>This would eventually lead to a reduction in the manufacturing of chargers and, potentially, less exploitation of natural resources.</p>
<h2>Who needs a charger with an Apple logo anyway?</h2>
<p>Citing an increase in e-waste and consumer frustration with multiple chargers, the <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070_EN.html">European Parliament</a> has been pushing for standardised chargers for mobile phones, tablets, e-book readers, smart cameras, wearable electronics and other small or medium-sized electronic devices. </p>
<p>This would negate the need for users to buy different chargers for various devices. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Electronics 'sprout' from the ground." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363893/original/file-20201016-21-1jg67wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Digital consumption is on the rise and unlikely to slow down any time soon. Recycling is one option, but how else can tech companies innovate to reduce environmental harm?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, there’s no doubt phone companies want people to regularly buy new phones. Apple themselves have <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/12/22/16807056/apple-slow-iphone-batteries">been</a> <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/02/apple-agrees-to-settlement-of-up-to-500-million-from-lawsuit-alleging-it-throttled-older-phones/">accused</a> of building a feature into phones that slows them down as they get older. Apple responded by saying this was simply to keep devices running as their batteries became worn down. </p>
<p>But even if this is the case, Apple’s decision to ship phones without chargers would still reduce the use of precious materials. A smaller product box would let Apple fit up to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR0g-1hnQPA">70%</a> more products onto shipping pallets — reducing carbon emissions from shipping. </p>
<p>However, it remains to be seen exactly how much this would assist in Apple’s environmental goals, especially if many consumers end up buying a charger separately anyway. </p>
<p>Apple equates its recent “climate conscious” changes to the iPhone 12 with removing <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-introduces-iphone-12-pro-and-iphone-12-pro-max-with-5g/">450,000 cars</a> from the road annually. The company has a target of becoming <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-100-percent-carbon-neutral-for-its-supply-chain-and-products-by-2030/">carbon-neutral</a> by 2030. </p>
<h2>Are wireless chargers the answer?</h2>
<p>It’s worth considering whether Apple’s main incentive is simply to cut costs, or perhaps push people towards its own wireless charging devices.</p>
<p>These concerns are not without merit. Apple is one of the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/apple-reaches-2-trillion-market-cap.html">richest companies in the world</a>, with most of its market capital made with <a href="https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/07/apple-q3-2020-results-everything-up/">hardware sales</a>. </p>
<p>Without a shift to a standardised plug-in charger, a wireless charging boom could be an environmental disaster (even though it’s perhaps <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/15/2034383/0/en/The-Global-Wireless-Charging-Market-size-is-expected-to-reach-25-6-billion-by-2026-rising-at-a-market-growth-of-28-4-CAGR-during-the-forecast-period.html">inevitable</a> due to its convenience). Wireless charging consumes around <a href="https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-48afdde70ed9">47%</a> more power than a regular cable. </p>
<p>This may be a concern, as the sustainability advantages of not including a charger could come alongside increased energy consumption. Currently, the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) sector is responsible for about <a href="https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/467/20130107/ict-sector-account-2-percent-global-carbon.htm">2% of the world’s energy consumption</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Unused electronic devices in a pile." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363889/original/file-20201016-21-9a8omy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How many unused devices do you have lying around the house?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The case for a universal plug-in charger</h2>
<p>Perhaps one solution to the dilemma is device trade-in services, which many companies already offer, including Apple and <a href="https://www.samsung.com/au/tradeup/">Samsung</a>.</p>
<p>Apple gives customers a discount on a new device if they <a href="https://www.apple.com/au/trade-in/">trade in their older model</a>, instead of throwing it out. Similar services are offered by third parties such as <a href="https://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/deals/trade-in">Optus</a>, <a href="https://www.telstra.com.au/plans-devices/trade-in">Telstra</a>, <a href="https://mobilemonster.com.au/">MobileMonster</a> and <a href="https://www.boomerangbuyback.com.au/">Boomerang Buy Back</a>.</p>
<p>Ultimately, however, the best solution would be for tech giants to agree on a universal plug-in charger for all small or medium-sized electronic devices, including mobile phones. </p>
<p>And hopefully, just as we all now take reusable bags to the grocer with us, in a few years we’ll be able to use a common charger for all our devices — and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/apple-releases-fast-5g-iphones-but-not-for-australia-and-were-lagging-behind-in-getting-there-148102">Apple releases fast 5G iPhones, but not for Australia. And we're lagging behind in getting there</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148189/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Apple’s newest release comes without a wall charger and earpods. While the shift could reduce the company’s carbon footprint, users shifting to wireless charging will use more energy.Michael Cowling, Associate Professor - Information & Communication Technology (ICT), CQUniversity AustraliaRitesh Chugh, Senior Lecturer/Discipline Lead – Information Systems and Analysis, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1464212020-09-18T12:58:57Z2020-09-18T12:58:57ZWhy Arm’s sale to Nvidia has stunned the tech industry<p>Arm, the Cambridge-based microchip designer is a British tech success story. The firm designs software and semiconductors that are used in a multitude of consumer favourites, including Apple and Samsung smartphones, Nintendo consoles and many more. Its chip designs are increasingly used in the growing Internet of Things industry. </p>
<p>Much of Arm’s success comes from its neutrality, as it doesn’t compete with any of the companies it licenses its designs to. But there are fears this could all change. Arm’s owners, Softbank have announced a deal with tech giant Nvidia <a href="https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai">worth up to US$40 billion</a> (£31 billion). A closer look at Arm’s success reveals why the tech industry is stunned by the news and why it poses potential problems for Arm going forward.</p>
<p>Arm defied the traditional notion of how a technology company competes in the global market place. To begin with, it does not manufacture any of its products. This is in sharp contrast to competitors Intel and AMD, who spend a lot of time, money and effort in manufacturing and marketing the microchips that they design. Instead, Arm licenses its patented designs to customers who can then easily modify, manufacture and market microchips around them. </p>
<p>Further, Arm has been a pioneer in building an ecosystem around itself, which currently consists of thousands of partners, vendors and manufacturers. This is a collaborative ecosystem, where many of Arm’s customers and partners have built their business models around Arm’s designs, secure in the knowledge that it is not a competitor.</p>
<h2>The Switzerland of semiconductors</h2>
<p>Arm’s model of collaborating instead of competing has resulted in a 90% share of the smartphone market alongside a reach that greatly exceeds that of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36827769">rivals Intel and AMD</a>. It is one of a handful of firms in the world that have successfully scaled a multibillion-dollar business built solely around research and development (R&D). </p>
<p>Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-15/nvidia-deal-threatens-arm-s-status-as-the-switzerland-of-chips">describes</a> the company as “the Switzerland of the semiconductor industry” because of this neutral approach. With this ethos holding strong for 30 years, thousands of companies have pegged their products to Arm’s R&D efforts. </p>
<p>This is in stark contrast to how the tech industry usually works. R&D investment is normally used as a tool to beat competitors, and it is quite common for large tech firms to compete fiercely with their own partners and customers. For example, Microsoft builds laptops and tablets that compete with many of the companies it sells its software to. Similarly, Google sells its Android software to other smartphone makers, while also competing with these customers with its Pixel phones.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Stylised microchip on circuitboard" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358807/original/file-20200918-14-112hp2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arm’s chip designs are in 90% of smartphones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/ai-circuit-board-technology-background-central-1196754286">Shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Arm’s acquisition by Nvidia puts its Switzerland position at an obvious risk. Hauser said as much <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/14/arm-holdings-sale-nvidia-uk-us-security-job-losses">to the Guardian newspaper</a>: “It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to kill Arm.” </p>
<p>Nvidia has <a href="https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/13/jensen-employee-letter-arm/">promised to</a> keep the Arm brand, maintain its neutrality and continue licensing its chip designs to customers. But many clients are concerned, with none of Arm’s big customers publicly backing the deal. </p>
<p>Nvidia is a US-based chip maker. It is the market leader in graphics processing units (GPUs), which power high-fidelity video games and increasingly handle data-intensive machine learning tasks. Leaps in microchip designs is one of the main ways it competes in its industry. </p>
<p>If this acquisition completes as planned, Nvidia would have gained a treasure trove of IP and patents that give it unparalleled power in the industry. Arm’s customers fear that they will become second-class citizens, with Nvidia first in line to its innovative new chip designs.</p>
<p>Another dimension to this deal is the fact that Nvidia is taking over Arm in the middle of the US-China trade war. This could put pressure on Arm’s China business, which represents about <a href="https://www.sourcetoday.com/supply-chain/article/21867077/arm-divests-majority-stake-in-chinese-operations-for-775-million">20% of its revenues</a>. In fact, in 2018, Arm divested its majority ownership in its China operations to give peace of mind to Beijing, which was increasingly worried about its dependence on foreign designed microchips. Such bold moves seem unlikely under Nvidia.</p>
<p>The deal will take up to 18 months to go through, as both Nvidia and Arm will have to get formal approval from competition commissions in the US, China, Europe and other major markets to proceed. But Nvidia’s <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/13/nvidia-confirms-40b-purchase-of-arm-bringing-together-two-chip-giants/#:%7E:text=Nvidia%20is%20buying%20all%20of,core%20mobile%20chip%20design%20business.">assurances</a> that it will keep Arm in Cambridge and expand its chip research there should go a long way toward assuage the British government at least.</p>
<p>In terms of Arm giving up its neutrality, <a href="https://www.kearney.com/mergers-acquisitions/article/?/a/transformation-through-m-a-integration">research shows</a> that mergers and acquisitions of this size can change acquiring companies as much as the targets they acquire. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has alluded to his <a href="https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/13/jensen-employee-letter-arm/">plans</a> to sell Nvidia’s GPU designs to Arm’s clients as part of a bundled offering. He also consistently speaks about his admiration of Arm’s unique place in the microchip ecosystem, and says he has no intentions to disrupt it. </p>
<p>Perhaps Arm will make Nvidia more neutral rather than the other way around. We will find out soon enough.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146421/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hamza Mudassir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Arm defied the traditional notion of how a technology company competes in the global market place. That could all change.Hamza Mudassir, Visiting Fellow in Strategy, Cambridge Judge Business SchoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1440162020-09-11T13:26:20Z2020-09-11T13:26:20ZHow tech billionaires’ visions of human nature shape our world<p>In the 20th century, politicians’ views of human nature shaped societies. But now, <a href="https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian">creators of new technologies</a> increasingly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/28/bezos-zuckerberg-us-tech-billions">drive societal change</a>. Their view of human nature may shape the 21st century. We must know what technologists see in humanity’s heart.</p>
<p>The economist <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/thomas-sowell/a-conflict-of-visions/9780465002054/">Thomas Sowell</a> proposed two visions of human nature. The <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290730/the-blank-slate-by-steven-pinker/">utopian vision</a> sees people as naturally good. The world corrupts us, but the wise can perfect us. </p>
<p>The tragic vision sees us as inherently flawed. Our sickness is selfishness. We cannot be trusted with power over others. There are no perfect solutions, only imperfect trade-offs.</p>
<p>Science <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290730/the-blank-slate-by-steven-pinker/">supports the tragic vision</a>. So does history. The <a href="https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/david-andress/the-terror/9780349115887/">French</a>, <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/timothy-snyder/bloodlands/9780465032976/">Russian</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/maos-great-famine-9780802779281/">Chinese</a> revolutions were utopian visions. They paved their paths to paradise with 50 million dead.</p>
<p>The USA’s founding fathers held the tragic vision. They <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290730/the-blank-slate-by-steven-pinker/">created checks and balances</a> to constrain political leaders’ worst impulses.</p>
<h2>Technologists’ visions</h2>
<p>Yet when Americans founded online social networks, the tragic vision was forgotten. Founders were trusted to juggle their self-interest and the public interest when designing these networks and gaining vast data troves.</p>
<p>Users, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23736992.2018.1477047">companies</a> and <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf">countries</a> were trusted not to abuse their new social-networked power. Mobs were <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/">not constrained</a>. This led to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326034">abuse</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2018.1477047">manipulation</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.eubios.info/UNESCO/precprin.pdf">Belatedly</a>, social networks have adopted <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2018/Serving_Healthy_Conversation.html">tragic visions</a>. Facebook <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575158/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-full-transcript-kara-swisher">now acknowledges regulation</a> is needed to get the best from <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp.10.1.33_1">social media</a>. </p>
<p>Tech billionaire Elon Musk dabbles in both the tragic and utopian visions. He thinks “<a href="https://sonix.ai/resources/full-transcript-joe-rogan-experience-elon-musk/">most people are actually pretty good</a>”. But he supports <a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-rogan-elon-musk-podcast-transcript-may-7-2020">market, not government control</a>, wants competition to <a href="https://surfcoderepeat.com/elon-on-governments">keep us honest</a>, and <a href="https://sonix.ai/resources/full-transcript-joe-rogan-experience-elon-musk/">sees evil in individuals</a>. </p>
<p>Musk’s tragic vision <a href="https://www.spacex.com/">propels us to Mars</a> in case short-sighted selfishness destroys Earth. Yet his utopian vision assumes people on Mars could be entrusted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBfi2AcGrTY&list=PLKof9YSAshgyPqlK-UUYrHfIQaOzFPSL4&index=4">with the direct democracy</a> that America’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/">founding fathers feared</a>. His utopian vision also assumes giving us tools to <a href="https://neuralink.com/">think better</a> won’t simply enhance our Machiavellianism.</p>
<p>Bill Gates leans to the tragic and tries to create a better world within humanity’s constraints. Gates <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/2008/01/24/bill-gates-world-economic-forum-2008/">recognises our self-interest</a> and supports market-based rewards to help us behave better. Yet he believes “creative capitalism” can tie self-interest to our inbuilt desire to help others, benefiting all. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Peter Tiel stood in front of screen displaying computer code." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357446/original/file-20200910-25-174iq53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Peter Thiel considers the code of human nature.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/heisenbergmedia/14051014116/">Heisenberg Media/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A different tragic vision lies in the writings of Peter Thiel. This billionaire tech investor <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">was influenced by</a> philosophers <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/">Leo Strauss</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/carl-schmitt-nazi-era-philosopher-who-wrote-blueprint-for-new-authoritarianism-59835">Carl Schmitt</a>. Both believed evil, in the form of a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Cloaked-in-Virtue-Unveiling-Leo-Strauss-and-the-Rhetoric-of-American-Foreign/Xenos/p/book/9780415950893">drive for dominance</a>, is part of our nature.</p>
<p>Thiel dismisses the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">Enlightenment view of the natural goodness of humanity</a>”. Instead, he approvingly cites the view that humans are “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">potentially evil or at least dangerous beings</a>”. </p>
<h2>The consequences of seeing evil</h2>
<p>The German philosopher <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/ie/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-texts/nietzsche-beyond-good-and-evil-prelude-philosophy-future?format=PB">Friedrich Nietzsche warned</a> that those who fight monsters must beware of becoming monsters themselves. He was right.</p>
<p>People who believe in evil are more likely to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.09.037">demonise, dehumanise, and punish</a> wrongdoers. They are more likely to support violence <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213496282">before</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213500997">after</a> another’s transgression. They feel that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213500997">redemptive violence</a> can eradicate evil and save the world. Americans who believe in evil are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213500997">more likely to support</a> torture, killing terrorists and America’s possession of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Technologists who see evil risk creating coercive solutions. Those who believe in evil are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213496282">less likely to think deeply</a> about why people act as they do. They are also <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.09.037">less likely to see</a> how situations influence people’s actions. </p>
<p>Two years after 9/11, Peter Thiel founded <a href="https://www.palantir.com/">Palantir</a>. This company creates software to analyse big data sets, helping businesses fight fraud and the US government combat crime.</p>
<p>Thiel is a Republican-supporting libertarian. Yet, he appointed a Democrat-supporting <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/">neo-Marxist</a>, Alex Karp, as Palantir’s CEO. Beneath their differences lies a shared belief in the inherent dangerousness of humans. Karp’s PhD thesis argued that we have a fundamental aggressive drive towards <a href="https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/">death and destruction</a>.</p>
<p>Just as believing in evil is associated with supporting pre-emptive aggression, Palantir doesn’t just wait for people to commit crimes. It <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170293847A1">has patented</a> a “crime risk forecasting system” to predict crimes and has <a href="https://harvardcrcl.org/minority-report-why-we-should-question-predictive-policing/#:%7E:text=The%20predictive%20policing%20system%20Palantir,'t%20completely%20new%2C%20either.&text=Predictive%20policing%20tries%20to%20make,take%20steps%20to%20prevent%20it.">trialled predictive policing</a>. This has <a href="https://harvardcrcl.org/minority-report-why-we-should-question-predictive-policing/#:%7E:text=The%20predictive%20policing%20system%20Palantir,'t%20completely%20new%2C%20either.&text=Predictive%20policing%20tries%20to%20make,take%20steps%20to%20prevent%20it.">raised concerns</a>.</p>
<p>Karp’s tragic vision acknowledges that Palantir needs constraints. He stresses the judiciary must put “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zHUXGd4gJU">checks and balances on the implementation</a>” of Palantir’s technology. He says the use of Palantir’s software should be “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zHUXGd4gJU">decided by society in an open debate</a>”, rather than by Silicon Valley engineers.</p>
<p>Yet, Thiel cites philosopher Leo Strauss’ suggestion that America <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">partly owes her greatness</a> “to her occasional deviation” from principles of freedom and justice. Strauss <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">recommended hiding</a> such deviations under a veil. </p>
<p>Thiel <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt6qq?turn_away=true">introduces the Straussian argument that</a> only “the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services” can support a US-led international peace. This recalls Colonel Jessop in the film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/">A Few Good Men</a>, who felt he should deal with dangerous truths in darkness.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Can we handle the truth?</span></figcaption>
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<p>Seeing evil after 9/11 led technologists and governments to overreach in their surveillance. This <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data">included using the formerly secret XKEYSCORE computer system</a> used by the US National Security Agency to colllect people’s internet data, which is <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/">linked to Palantir</a>. The American people rejected this approach and <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/06/03/us-modest-step-curb-spy-excesses">democratic processes</a> increased oversight and limited surveillance.</p>
<h2>Facing the abyss</h2>
<p>Tragic visions pose risks. Freedom may be unnecessarily and coercively limited. External roots of violence, like <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.07.007">scarcity</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309619/">exclusion</a>, may be overlooked. Yet if <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/against-edenism">technology creates economic growth</a> it will address many external causes of conflict.</p>
<p>Utopian visions ignore the dangers within. Technology that only changes the world is insufficient to save us from our selfishness and, as I argue in a forthcoming book, <a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/spite-hb.html">our spite</a>.</p>
<p>Technology must change the world working within the constraints of human nature. Crucially, <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000119312520230013/d904406ds1.htm#rom904406_6">as Karp notes</a>, democratic institutions, not technologists, must ultimately decide society’s shape. Technology’s outputs must be democracy’s inputs.</p>
<p>This may involve us acknowledging hard truths about our nature. But what if society does not wish to face these? Those who cannot handle truth make others fear to speak it. </p>
<p>Straussian technologists, who believe but dare not speak dangerous truths, may feel compelled to protect society in undemocratic darkness. They overstep, yet are encouraged to by those who see more harm in speech than its suppression.</p>
<p>The ancient Greeks had a name for someone with <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403986689">the courage to tell truths that could put them in danger</a> - the parrhesiast. But the parrhesiast needed a listener who promised to not to react with anger. This <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403986689">parrhesiastic contract</a> allowed dangerous truth-telling.</p>
<p>We have shredded this contract. We must renew it. Armed with the truth, the Greeks felt they could <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403986689">take care of themselves and others</a>. Armed with both truth and technology we can move closer to fulfilling this promise.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon McCarthy-Jones receives funding from the US-based Brain and Behavior Research Foundation</span></em></p>What world will tech billionaires move us towards if they believe that humans are fundamentally dangerous?Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1412522020-06-23T13:21:10Z2020-06-23T13:21:10ZUber, WeWork, Airbnb – how coronavirus is bursting the tech bubble<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343476/original/file-20200623-188886-1katr1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Coronavirus losers.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/milan-italy-june-10-2016-close-443281492">easy camera / Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A handful of technology companies have benefited from coronavirus. Amazon has profited handsomely, as have streaming and video conferencing platforms <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-your-guide-to-winners-and-losers-in-the-business-world-134205">like Netflix and Zoom</a>. But the pandemic has laid bare the shaky foundations of a number of other platforms that bill themselves as technology companies and have enjoyed the high valuations that come with this label. </p>
<p>Major losers from the pandemic include the ride hailing apps: <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uber-coronavirus-chaos">Uber</a>, <a href="https://www.cityam.com/ride-hailing-app-grab-cuts-300-jobs-amid-coronavirus-hit/">Grab</a> (in South East Asia), <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/softbank-backed-ola-lays-off-1400-employees-due-to-coronavirus-crisis.html">Ola</a> (India) and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/83a065e2-5ed5-11ea-8033-fa40a0d65a98">Didi Chuxing</a> (China). Quite simply, people are not taking taxis. Office sharing businesses such as WeWork (which was, of course, <a href="https://theconversation.com/wework-ipo-why-investors-are-beginning-to-question-the-office-rental-firms-value-121949">already struggling</a>) are also in trouble with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/14/wework-coronavirus-impact-business-not-as-usual">virtually no occupancy</a>. A similar situation is occurring in the accommodation sector with <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-coronavirus-losses">Airbnb</a> and hotel bookings start-up <a href="https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-covid-19-oyo-hotels-uk-redundancies-exclusive-155109993.html">Oyo</a>. </p>
<p>As a result, investment in tech businesses is crumbling. But at the same time this is clearing the way for the few winners to buy bigger stakes in those that are struggling.</p>
<h2>Swimming naked</h2>
<p>Two decades on from the dot-com collapse there is the likelihood of another crash in the technology sector. As with the build up to the dot-com bubble, an abundance of venture capital funding <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/52a272dd-6575-4623-9ca4-18889bebad2d">has fuelled speculation</a> and encouraged investors to make bets on the next Google or Amazon. </p>
<p>As Warren Buffett <a href="https://money.com/swimming-naked-when-the-tide-goes-out/">once said</a>: “Only when the tide goes out will we see who has been swimming naked.” In effect, the tide has gone out and lots of start-ups that were billed as revolutionary technology companies are all in significant trouble. </p>
<p>The only redeeming feature at the moment is how much cash many start-ups have to withstand the collapse. How long they have will vary. WeWork will struggle to survive a year <a href="https://www.dailybeatny.com/2020/04/02/weworks-future-bleak/">without further investment</a>. The ride hailing apps meanwhile are <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/uber-expects-4-billion-in-cash-reserve-in-worst-case-scenario">well funded</a> but may also find this to be a very difficult year. They are under pressure to cut their losses and break even but this goal is even further away now. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343477/original/file-20200623-188911-1mgjbtv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">More of a property company than a technology company?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/san-mateo-causa-may-10-2020-1728168679">jejim / Shutterstock.com</a></span>
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<p>The secretive Airbnb has recently been <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/bc26db3c-34dd-4ba9-bf0b-2ef422bfd3b6">raising money at high cost</a>. This suggests investors see a significant risk to the business and so cash is limited. The proposed listing this year is now <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/06/airbnb-turns-to-private-equity-to-raise-1-billion/">highly unlikely</a>. </p>
<p>A major problem with lots of the start-ups that are now struggling is that they look like technology businesses but they have merely used new technology to disrupt existing industries. Uber follows the dynamics of the taxi industry, WeWork the office rental industry, and Airbnb the accommodation booking industry.</p>
<h2>Winner takes all</h2>
<p>Facebook, Amazon and Google differ in that they all started new industries. They created network effects – where the more people that use the platform, the better it becomes – from which they benefited enormously.</p>
<p>Network effects can create a winner takes all situation. The more of your friends and colleagues who are on a particular social network the more likely you are to join and use it. Similarly the more suppliers who compete to sell on Amazon, the more choice and competitive prices is offered to customers. Having more customers attracts more sellers.</p>
<p>It is harder to see the network effects in businesses <a href="https://theconversation.com/wework-ipo-why-investors-are-beginning-to-question-the-office-rental-firms-value-121949">like WeWork</a> – there are few reasons to be loyal and the entry barriers to market for competitors are low. Even with taxi ride hailing apps, in which Uber was a first mover, all taxi firms now have an app and network effects are quite limited once a level of responsiveness has been achieved – it’s easy for customers and drivers to switch to competition apps. </p>
<p>Similarly, accommodation booking sites are all accessed in the same way now via an app, and it is very easy to compare accommodation availability and costs. Airbnb was a first mover in home rental but this sector has been beset by <a href="https://fortune.com/longform/airbnb-deaths-fraud-safety-experiences-ipo-2020/">issues relating to fraud and safety</a>. </p>
<p>Hence all these markets are going to remain very competitive in the longer term and this means low margins and low returns. It is no surprise the share prices of ride hailing businesses have halved. In these industries technology is no longer a competitive advantage as almost all the competitors now have similar technology. The technology is simply infrastructure.</p>
<h2>Cash flow and consolidation</h2>
<p>Stock markets <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/business/markets/coronavirus">are shaky</a> and Airbnb has <a href="https://www.valuethemarkets.com/2020/03/17/airbnb-ipo-could-be-the-biggest-casualty-of-the-2020-stock-market-collapse/">cancelled its initial public offering</a>. The appetite for new listings is weak and is likely to remain this way, suggesting it will be difficult for venture capital investors to exit their investments. If there is no exit route to make money, then why invest? </p>
<p>A consequence is that there is likely to be a reduction in investment in technology start-up businesses. Cash will be in much shorter supply and venture capital investors will have to choose more carefully where to invest. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, we are already seeing the real technology giants move in. Amazon, for example, was the biggest investor in distressed UK takeaway app Deliveroo’s <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48306172">latest round of fundraising</a>. This month also saw the merger of two other food delivery services, with Europe-based Takeaway.com, fresh from buying Just Eat, now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/11/just-eat-uber-grubhub-takeover-food-delivery-service">buying US-based Grubhub</a>. We can expect more consolidation in the months ahead.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141252/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Colley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Investment in tech businesses is crumbling but the winners are eyeing up the losers.John Colley, Professor of Practice, Associate Dean, Warwick Business School, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1257852019-10-25T12:33:02Z2019-10-25T12:33:02ZWeWork debacle exposes why investing in a charismatic founder can be dangerous<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298579/original/file-20191024-170484-6foi43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">WeWork wanted to be a lot more than a shared workspace. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/new-york-nyusamay-10-2018-wework-1278091729?src=9xiaJ5BmEePlhpkb52WWiA-1-12">rblfmr/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>WeWork went from <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-of-wework-how-a-startup-darling-came-unglued-11571946003">unicorn darling</a> with a nearly US$50 billion valuation to a cautionary tale for gullible investors <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-to-take-control-of-wework-11571746483?mod=hp_lead_pos2">worth just $8 billion</a> in a matter of months. It did so in part by wrapping its real estate sublet business in the cloak of a tech startup destined to “change the world.”</p>
<p>Were investors like SoftBank and JPMorgan duped by the hype of a charismatic founder, as happened with <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/hbos-the-inventor-how-elizabeth-holmes-fooled-people-about-theranos.html">Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos</a>? </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/fs/vita.aspx?id=25472">lecturer in finance</a> and someone who managed investments for 20 years, I believe that there was some of that, coupled with <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050813/4-behavioral-biases-and-how-avoid-them.asp">behavioral biases</a> that lead people to make bad decisions. But I also think something else was going on that should give investors pause the next time they stumble across a visionary founder promoting a “change the world” branding strategy. </p>
<h2>‘We’ will change the world</h2>
<p>WeWork was founded in 2011 as a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-founding-story-of-wework-2015-10">co-working venture</a>. </p>
<p>But Adam Neumann crafted and pitched a vision for his company that went well beyond office sharing and real estate. He said the “we” culture he was building would change the world.</p>
<p>“The influence and impact that we are going to have on this Earth is going to be so big,” <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-not-the-way-everybody-behaves-how-adam-neumanns-over-the-top-style-built-wework-11568823827?shareToken=st3fcd4c5c55d94ffc80b5721a8aa6ffa2">he told staff</a> during a music festival-like retreat, where he suggested the company could “solve the problem of children without parents” and even eradicate world hunger. </p>
<p>Such statements weren’t uncommon from him. But moreover, they fit neatly in the messianic-like Silicon Valley tech world, where companies believe their inventions can actually <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/the-most-bullshit-motivational-slogans-in-silicon-valley">“free the world.”</a> </p>
<p>Neumann’s ambitious plans hit reality recently as <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-22/neumann-clings-to-billionaire-status-after-wework-gets-a-bailout">investors soured on the company</a> in the runup to a planned initial public offering. On Oct. 23, existing investor SoftBank agreed to rescue the embattled company with <a href="https://group.softbank/en/corp/set/data/news/press/sb/2019/20191023_01/pdf/20191023_01.pdf">billions in additional capital</a> in exchange for increasing its ownership stake to 80%. The deal pushed out Neumann, who will get US$1.7 billion despite burning through earlier investments. </p>
<p>Neumann’s “exit” package may be unusual in its scale, but otherwise similar fates have befallen numerous other founders, such as Theranos’ Holmes and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/30/inside-new-uber-weak-coffee-vanishing-perks-fast-deflating-morale/">Uber’s Travis Kalanick</a>. Even Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, often seems to be <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-shocking-quotes-tweets-2018-10">one outrageous tweet</a> away from his own ignominious end. </p>
<p>Each of these leaders embodied varying traits that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/05/20/silicon-valleys-ceo-worship-problem/">inspired almost cult-like followings</a> among investors who forked over billions to be a part of their rise. In cases like Tesla and Uber, the companies have managed to become successful despite their CEOs’ shortcomings. Theranos and WeWork are examples of what can go wrong when the founder is both owner and executive in a venture capital-backed startup.</p>
<h2>Principals and agents</h2>
<p>Finance scholars like myself think about this in terms of the <a href="https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/foundation/2014/the-principalagent-problem-in-finance">principal-agent relationship</a>, an issue that is crucial to the management of almost every business and organization. </p>
<p>The principal is a party or group that enlists the agent to manage some asset or process in their best interest.</p>
<p>In a healthy corporate structure, the alignment of principal and agent is accomplished through governance and executive compensation policies that provide management incentives to act in the best interest of owners. For example, the CEO’s compensation might include stock in the company that vests over some period of years and is dependent upon specific performance targets. </p>
<p>In the case of WeWork, Neumann was acting in both roles: He was principal as the investor with the controlling stake and agent as the executive tasked with running the company. Even the <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1533523/000119312519220499/d781982ds1.htm#toc781982_1">prospectus</a> for the company’s ill-fated IPO included language that would have given him <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-19/we-looks-out-for-our-selves">control for life</a>.</p>
<h2>Why it’s a problem</h2>
<p>You might wonder what the problem is with this arrangement given that it’s common for managers to be owners, as is the case with small businesses and family-owned companies. </p>
<p>When it’s their own money at stake, surely they’ll be looking out for their own best interests, right? In those situations, yes, and the downside risk is assumed by the owner-managers. </p>
<p>The difference between those types of companies and the likes of WeWork and Theranos is that startups typically have significant outside investment capital. SoftBank, for one, was also a principal in WeWork. In such situations, the interest of a founder like Neumann may not necessarily align with those of the company itself and its other investors. </p>
<p>During WeWork’s buildup, for example, Neumann borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-to-take-control-of-wework-11571746483?mod=hp_lead_pos2%20%22%22">against his stock in the company</a>, leaving himself and WeWork exposed depending on the shares’ future valuation. He also charged his own company $5.9 million for trademark rights to the word “we” – <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-gives-back-millions-from-we-trademark-after-criticism-2019-9">a sum he gave back</a> after intense criticism.</p>
<p>Even in leaving the company, he was able to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do-you-like-we-now">negotiate a generous go-away package</a>, including the ability to cash out almost $1 billion in stock and receive a $185 million consulting fee. This at the same time that the company’s future is uncertain and it’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/15/wework-sack-staff-workers-adam-neumann">laying off 2,000 workers</a> – which it delayed doing because <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-offers-to-put-6-5b-into-wework-including-5b-loan-11571687872">it couldn’t afford their severance</a>. </p>
<p>Unemployed workers and wasted capital are the collateral damage when investors fall prey to the principal-agent problem. And unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the last time.</p>
<p>[ <em>You respect facts and expertise. So do The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=yourespect">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125785/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Greg Putnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Adam Neumann both controlled and managed the co-working company he founded in 2011. A finance scholar explains why that can be a serious problem in venture capital-backed startups.Greg Putnam, Lecturer in Finance, University of North Carolina WilmingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1219492019-09-09T12:01:43Z2019-09-09T12:01:43ZWeWork IPO: why investors are beginning to question the office rental firm’s value<p>WeWork looked set to become the latest tech startup to launch on the stock market at an astronomic valuation. It still could. The office rental company was initially valued around US$47 billion. Now there’s talk of this <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/05/wework-shares-ipo-value-halved">being halved to US$20 billion</a>. Even that is still a lot of money.</p>
<p>Following the recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/overpriced-tech-ipos-sell-grand-visions-but-arent-worth-their-valuations-117292">collapse of Uber and Lyft shares</a> after their initial public offerings (IPOs) potential investors in WeWork will have some valid questions: how much is it really worth behind the slick marketing? Will it be successful in the long run? </p>
<p>Many industries disrupted by tech newcomers have historically been highly competitive or prone to cyclical demand. With WeWork, it is not clear whether the new technology it introduces changes the traditional vulnerabilities of the industry.</p>
<p>A big question surrounding WeWork is the extent that it is really a technology business, as it bills itself to be, or simply a space rental business. There’s a WeWork app through which short-term office rental can be booked, starting at around one month for a desk, office, or space. But there are plenty of other companies that take out long-term leases on offices and refit the space for short-term rental at higher rates. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, WeWork captures the current trend of small early stage businesses that can’t afford permanent space but want something better than a coffee shop to work from. It also provides flexibility for more mature businesses to flex their office requirements. And it’s very popular – it has <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-work-startup-valuation-adam-neumann-interview">250,000 members in 72 cities worldwide</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291317/original/file-20190906-175700-1tuwfu9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">WeWork in Washington DC.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/22526649@N03/32051734591">Ted Eytan / flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The risk WeWork takes is that any collapse in demand will see them struggle to pay their landlords. This could be a recession or social changes in the nature of office demand. Balancing long-term liabilities that are paid for by short-term contracts comes with risks. </p>
<p>Fundamentally, WeWork’s finances do not look good. Apart from receiving major investor backing to become the biggest renter in many cities worldwide, it is still a long way from profitability and lost US$1.9 billion <a href="https://fortune.com/2019/08/14/weworks-ipo-filing-reveals-revenue-growth-and-cash-burn/">on sales of US$1.8 billion in 2018</a>. So for every dollar of revenue it makes, it spends two dollars.</p>
<h2>Risk of competition</h2>
<p>It is also relatively easy for others to enter the market, perhaps in less costly parts of the city. If WeWork is worth US$47 billion or even US$20 billion, this gives others an incentive to raise significant funds to compete with them. And, because WeWork offers short-term contracts, it is easy for tenants to move elsewhere if a better deal comes along. </p>
<p>There are no strong reasons to be loyal to WeWork. It has introduced a subscription service, which creates credits against future rentals. This does create some loyalty from customers, although it still remains relatively easy to cancel and move to a cheaper competitor. Switching costs are low unless WeWork can offer a variety of complementary services which others would have difficulty providing. </p>
<p>The problem is, WeWork is highly subsidised to attract its customers. This means the company will probably have to raise prices in the future to make money.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291320/original/file-20190906-175668-cpu9bg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The trendy interior of a WeWork in Japan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.behance.net/gallery/79991777/Shark-neon-Pixel-wallpaper">Behance</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Highly subsidised rentals may attract people but many of them may not be interested at higher prices. This is the key issue with ride hailing and takeaway food delivery. Customers are initially subsidised to get them on board but what happens when investors want a return? Prices have to increase, which will reduce demand. The key issue is by how much? Many models simply do not work at higher prices, WeWork may also be such a model.</p>
<h2>No first mover advantage</h2>
<p>The main drivers of tech valuations are Facebook, Google, and Amazon which were among the very first in creating industries that did not exist previously. Facebook began the social media movement subsequently creating the industry, while Google was among the first search engines. Both benefited enormously from the move online of advertising from other media. </p>
<p>Most subsequent competition to Facebook is owned by Facebook (which bought Instagram and WhatsApp), while late entrant Snapchat is <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/snap-is-struggling-in-one-area-where-it-needs-to-succeed-2019-04-23">struggling to make money</a>. Amazon was again among the first in creating a book trading platform which has diversified to almost anything which can go in the post, and similarly attracted major resource to grow rapidly.</p>
<p>Even if we were to consider WeWork a tech company, it isn’t the same as the big companies above. WeWork is not the first in this space but has arrived with the backing of significant resources at a time when there is a trend for cheap short-term office rental for startup businesses and others. And it does not have the network effects that have been crucial to the success of big tech companies like Amazon and Facebook. This is where the more customers that use them, the greater the value generated to other customers. </p>
<p>Ultimately, to be successful, tech startups need to be among the very first inventing an industry and attract substantial resources to grow rapidly. The ability to create network effects with high switching costs is important as otherwise competitors will rapidly follow. </p>
<p>Ride hailing, food delivery, short-term office rental and many other startup platforms are unlikely to fully satisfy these criteria for success and will suffer from later entrants competing on price. Indeed, WeWork fails on nearly all the criterion which determine whether a tech startup is likely to be successful in the long term.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121949/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Colley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fundamentally, WeWork’s finances do not look good. It is still a long way from profitability.John Colley, Professor of Practice, Associate Dean, Warwick Business School, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1121952019-03-13T11:10:19Z2019-03-13T11:10:19ZBrexit may usher in point of no return for UK tech start-up scene<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263366/original/file-20190312-86696-slu82h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Other European cities have been quick to sense opportunities from Brexit.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/charles_hawley/status/750275297740816384">Charles Hawley/Twitter</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sifting through the noise to really understand what impact Brexit and all the uncertainty that it brings is having on the UK’s technology start-up scene, it’s possible to see a picture emerging. It is one that should cause serious concern for anyone with an interest in keeping the UK at the centre of Europe’s technology sector. </p>
<p>In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the American Bill Gorton says to Mike Campbell, a Scot: “How did you go bankrupt?”</p>
<p>“Two ways,” Mike replies. “Gradually, then suddenly”. </p>
<p>This seems very appropriate, given that there are a number of factors that, combined, could now usher in the beginning of a collapse of the thriving ecosystem of high-tech start-ups which has been one of the few rays of hope in a moribund UK economy over the past ten years. What happens in the days, weeks and months to come will determine whether that collapse accelerates.</p>
<h2>1. End of free movement</h2>
<p>It is estimated that approximately <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-brexit-dilemma-will-londons-start-ups-stay-or-go/">20% of staff in London-based start-ups are from the EU</a>, something the core EU principle of free movement of labour has undoubtedly encouraged. The UK government should want to continue to encourage highly skilled workers to come to the UK, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/02/uk-immigration-what-is-the-government-proposing">recent pronouncements by ministers confirm this</a>. </p>
<p>However, other government commitments to reduce immigration levels to under 100,000 a year alongside lobbying from other sectors that rely heavily on migrant labour such as agriculture, healthcare and teaching, could see start-ups struggle to find the right skills. There is also a perception issue among young EU workers: that the UK is not such a friendly place to live and work. While <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/27/million-skilled-eu-workers-planning-to-leave-uk-brexit">reports of this are largely anecdotal</a>, perception matters.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263367/original/file-20190312-86690-13xxd0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Might ‘Silicon Roundabout’ be, in the future, just a roundabout?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-england-9-may-2015-view-702239383">Vicky Jirayu/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Decline in early stage funding</h2>
<p>UK investment tracking company Beauhurst monitors venture capital and public funding of start-ups, and records that overall funding <a href="http://www.cityam.com/272725/british-startups-hit-funding-drop-last-year-fintech-bucks">fell from £8.27 billion in 2017 to £7 billion in 2018</a>. This is not necessarily a cause for concern in itself as 2017 had been an exceptional year. But there has also been a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/02/05/early-stage-funding-uk-startups-drops-15pc-four-year-low/">15% fall in seed stage funding</a>, and this is more worrying. </p>
<p>Seed funding for very early stage companies forms the beginning of the overall investment pipeline, and declines here will create shockwaves that will ripple through the UK innovation landscape for years to come. As Beauhurst acknowledge, a significant and sustained drop in seed funding could be the canary in the coalmine for the longer term health of the UK tech scene.</p>
<h2>3. Fall in EU research funding</h2>
<p>EU funding for academic research at UK universities is an important source of income. Between 2007 and 2013 the EU contributed <a href="https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/uk-research-and-european-union/role-of-EU-in-funding-UK-research/how-much-funding-does-uk-get-in-comparison-with-other-countries/">€8.8 billion to UK academic research</a> and the current Horizon 2020 programme has awarded <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/horizon-2020-funding-if-theres-no-brexit-deal/horizon-2020-funding-if-theres-no-brexit-deal--2">almost €5 billion so far</a>. To what extent UK universities are able to access EU finds in the future will depend on what, if any, deal is struck. </p>
<p>A no-deal scenario would certainly have a serious negative impact on a range of important research programmes and projects in the UK. Universities are a vital source of expertise for start-ups, particularly in high-growth areas such as artificial intelligence, data modelling and machine learning. Like seed funders, they form a vital first stage in the pipeline of innovation.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"750275297740816384"}"></div></p>
<h2>4. Incentives from EU cities</h2>
<p>While the overall impact of Brexit on the economy looks likely to be a negative one, it is an opportunity for other EU member states. Financial incentives offered by capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and Lisbon are proving attractive for businesses considering locations to start a company, or for those looking to relocate from London. We have yet to see large numbers of companies move abroad, but a recent survey of 100 early stage London-based start-ups <a href="https://thefintechtimes.com/heres-what-london-startups-are-saying-about-brexit-uncertainty/">said they have considered relocating their operations</a>.</p>
<p>Ultimately, whether they act on these concerns will depend on whether a Brexit deal is reached or not, and how that plays out in the legal realm. In a sector that is heavily dependent on the collection, manipulation and commercialisation of data, much of it personal, the extent to which the UK adheres to the European GDPR data protection regime will be an important factor. A need to conform to EU data protection rules in order to access European markets could make relocating to an EU member state a much more attractive proposition.</p>
<p>So as with most things Brexit there is still a large degree of uncertainty to how high-tech start-ups will react to the changes that are coming. But if Hemingway was right in his view of bankruptcy then a point may occur when the UK suddenly loses its appeal as a European hub for innovation, and all the job and wealth creation that goes with it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin De Saulles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Always delicate balancing act, ensuring London maintains its appeal to tech start-ups will prove more difficult after Brexit.Martin De Saulles, Principal Lecturer, University of BrightonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/858102017-11-16T01:41:16Z2017-11-16T01:41:16ZHow Silicon Valley industry polluted the sylvan California dream<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192293/original/file-20171027-2402-15ejnas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Aerial view of San Jose, California, 2016.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gordon-s/29670306746/in/photolist-ZHvaXX-Uo5oeM-RcXnY3-UjXT4J-N7tLMF-T9Tnno-Xea8Ym-McS5uS-Ui2ybJ-qEMBub-PfD9EU-e9RRfi-VWgfbi-QiHUXk-S4wGvz-LzFHTp-S64S7H-VWge8X-ABtoak-qg77S5-URsuhd-SrcUo8-eUPCUc-AePQJj-qzF7PW-Vy2pDG-pjpyPc-BE9Ed4-Rvoc4U-szHCZC-QBgQpX-Hg3Lgy-PtWFnc-Gjc4CG-PJMPp1-Liz43E-TTfx1R-ML7E2u-Sht5zW-eTpurL-TgKPJq-S64THD-8hxSP2-8hBsFA-Jy7ccp-TLXcao-pjb9gm-hskJKv-ACsLw6-rqdGgk">Gordon-Shukwit</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Labor Day 1956, a caravan of moving trucks wound their way into Santa Clara County, just south of San Francisco, carrying the possessions of 600 families and equipment for the missile and space labs of the Lockheed Corporation. One month later, Lockheed’s Sunnyvale campus opened for business. Many of the arriving families were relocating to Sunnyvale from the company’s facility in Burbank, in Southern California.</p>
<p>The draw included good jobs in the emerging businesses of electronics research and development, as well as manufacturing of semiconductors and other electronic components for machinery and computers. Affordable housing, a pastoral landscape and a pleasant environment proved very attractive for newcomers. Local boosters, corporate executives and new residents alike <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KwvEBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT54&dq=Margaret+O%27Mara+environmental+contradictions&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDxbPal7LXAhUS3YMKHbuvBiwQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">envisioned a modern future</a> in stark contrast with the declining dirty urban industrial model of the Northeast and Midwest. </p>
<p>This type of industrial work and manufacturing didn’t need smokestacks, large warehouses, or other markers of the industrial age. The Santa Clara Valley’s promise for leading Northern California into a bright economic future quickly brought the area the nickname “Silicon Valley.” But in the book I am writing, I note that if this convergence of natural surroundings, suburban homes and high-tech industrialization represented a facet of the California dream, it also betrayed it.</p>
<h2>A bright illusion of the future</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191217/original/file-20171020-13995-1qaicjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A promising advertisement for homes in San Jose.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">San Jose Mercury, January 18, 1956</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In addition to jobs in electronics and aerospace, the emerging suburbs of Silicon Valley promised newcomers a countryside experience. David Beers, whose father worked at the Sunnyvale Lockheed campus, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=bVMuLOrHoU8C&pg=PT50&dq=Beers+%22all-year+garden%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz7KDatP_WAhWB64MKHRy-BGgQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Beers%20%22all-year%20garden%22&f=false">remembered</a> the chamber of commerce brochures claiming an “all-year garden” and “the most beautiful valleys in the world.” Such advertisements were common, assuring home buyers “good living,” the “calm of the country” and “a beautiful walnut and cherry orchard” that “the builder is leaving … for your enjoyment.” The white-collar workers of high tech could make their homes in what appeared to be the countryside.</p>
<p>Workplaces, too, were different, with manufacturing happening in places that didn’t look like the old industries of the East. The Stanford Industrial Park, founded in the early 1950s, had <a href="https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/58349">strict building guidelines</a> that made it look more like a suburban area than a manufacturing center. Crucially, 60 percent of each lot had to be preserved as open green space, and no smokestacks were allowed. “Everyone thought of smokestacks,” <a href="https://purl.stanford.edu/dv559gn8984">recalled Alf Brandin</a>, Stanford’s business manager in the 1940s and 1950s. “These new people who came out from the East and settled here thought, ‘Don’t change it. We just left all the smoke and all that junk. Don’t change this.’”</p>
<p>The overall feeling was of much more than just a good job and a nice place to live: a new world was opening, based on computing. Promising young engineers could come west, buy a home and work in the future of the nation’s industry. “There’s a sense of being pioneers here,” Mark Leslie, founder of Synapse Computers, <a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/19820901/3259.html">told a reporter</a> in 1982. “I view myself as the kind of guy who would have been living in Detroit in 1910. The future depends on high technology, and we are spearheading it.”</p>
<p>Recent college graduates and white-collar workers flocked to the valley to work at companies like Fairchild, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machines and Lockheed. The county’s population <a href="http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea70.htm">more than quadrupled</a> in 30 years, from 290,547 in 1950 to 1,265,200 in 1980. But the clean, gleaming future they imagined was already being tarnished.</p>
<p><iframe id="GAWiv" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/GAWiv/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Fairchild contamination</h2>
<p>Semiconductor manufacturing involves very carefully connecting microscopic electrical components to each other on large plates of silicon. Pieces of dust can block sensitive circuits, and the smallest scratches can render everything useless. So to clean the silicon wafers and the parts joined to them, manufacturers used <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-L0ODAAAQBAJ&pg=PA185&dq=semiconductor+chemical+solvents+cleaning+TCE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxra6JuP_WAhXE1IMKHUqAD6cQ6AEINzAD#v=onepage&q=semiconductor%20chemical%20solvents%20cleaning%20TCE&f=false">harsh chemical solvents</a> like <a href="https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/risk-management-trichloroethylene-tce">1,1,1 trichloroethane</a>, <a href="https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mmg/mmg.asp?id=291&tid=53">xylene</a> and <a href="https://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/text_version/chemicals.php?id=77">methanol</a>. These chemicals were stored on-site in containers designed to safely hold them.</p>
<p>But in December 1981, construction workers discovered a leaking chemical solvents tank at Fairchild Semiconductor’s southern San José facility. A cancer-causing chemical, TCE, had found its way into <a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/19820901/3259.html">nearby drinking-water wells</a>. The water company promptly shut off pumping water from those wells. A month later, the San Jose Mercury broke the story of the chemical leak. TCE accumulated in wells at nearly 20 times the permissible limit established by the Environmental Protection Agency. Over the course of two years, <a href="https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/9100976C.txt?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&Client=EPA&Index=1986%20Thru%201990&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&UseQField=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5CZYFILES%5CINDEX%20DATA%5C86THRU90%5CTXT%5C00000020%5C9100976C.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=hpfr&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=4">more than 60,000 gallons</a> of toxic chemicals had leaked from the tank, spreading underground more than half a mile into the surrounding neighborhood of Los Paseos.</p>
<h2>Neighbors speak up</h2>
<p>For the residents of the Los Paseos neighborhood, just across the street from Fairchild, the news of the chemical leak suddenly explained the stories of birth defects among their neighbors. <a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/19820901/3259.html">Lorraine Ross</a>, whose daughter had her first open-heart surgery at nine months old, couldn’t help but wonder if the four birth defects, two miscarriages and one stillbirth of Los Paseos in the past two years were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/20/us/leaking-chemicals-in-california-s-silicon-valley-alarm-neighbors.html">connected to water contamination</a>. She organized others in the neighborhood to ask questions, eventually partnering with a young lawyer, Ted Smith, who founded a new advocacy organization called the <a href="http://svtc.org/">Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition</a>. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition was designed to advocate for neighborhoods, helping draft new county and city ordinances related to the storage, transportation and disposal of chemicals and gases in Santa Clara County.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=359&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=359&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=359&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190905/original/file-20171018-32348-9u7c5d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition flyer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt2b69r7hf/">Folder 3, Box 11, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Papers, San Jose State University</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>News of the Fairchild leak captured the attention of the San Francisco Bay Area. The presence of these chemicals and synthetics were a revelation. “There was no doubt in my mind that this was a clean industry,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/20/us/leaking-chemicals-in-california-s-silicon-valley-alarm-neighbors.html">remarked</a> San José Mayor Janet Gray Hayes. Lorraine Ross echoed this sentiment, telling a reporter that “we thought we were living with a clean industry.” But it wasn’t true.</p>
<h2>Widespread pollution</h2>
<p>Fairchild wasn’t alone in leaking pollution into the vibrant environment and thriving communities around its industrial sites. By 1992, one study found that <a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/">57 private and 47 public drinking wells</a> were contaminated. Santa Clara County authorities determined that 65 of the 79 companies they investigated had contaminated the soil beneath their facilities. Several companies were forced to pay several million dollars for the cleanup of polluted sites, as well as install new monitoring equipment to prevent leaks for occurring again. Fairchild Semiconductor and other companies in the Los Paseos area found to have contaminated the water agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar settlement to 530 residents in southern San José.</p>
<p>The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency eventually <a href="http://dissertation.jasonheppler.org/visualizations/companies/">determined 29 polluted sites were eligible for Superfund</a> cleanup money over the course of the 1980s – 24 of which resulted from high-tech industries. Under <a href="https://www.epa.gov/superfund">Superfund</a>, polluted sites that particularly threaten wildlife or human health become eligible for federal funding to help clean up hazardous and contaminated sites. By the end of the 1980s, Santa Clara County had <a href="https://qz.com/1017181/silicon-valley-pollution-there-are-more-superfund-sites-in-santa-clara-than-any-other-us-county/">more Superfund sites</a> than any other county in the United States. <a href="https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live">Twenty-three of the sites</a> remain in remediation today.</p>
<p>By accident and by neglect, the promise of clean industrialization proved elusive. Thousands of people migrated to the Santa Clara Valley hoping to take part in the remarkable convergence of affordable housing and new jobs. And while smokestacks were absent from electronics manufacturing, the presence of highly toxic chemicals – trichloroethane and chlorinated solvents – shattered the illusion behind the tech industry’s green image. The industry permanently altered the land and human bodies.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85810/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jason A. Heppler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Silicon Valley brought together natural surroundings, suburban homes and futuristic high-tech work. But industrial pollution betrayed the California dream.Jason A. Heppler, Digital Engagement Librarian and Assistant Professor of History, University of Nebraska OmahaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/831852017-08-31T00:06:43Z2017-08-31T00:06:43ZWhat is the online equivalent of a burning cross?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184062/original/file-20170830-927-1qf7sdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Online hate isn't always as easy to spot as it might appear.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/word-hate-written-red-keyboard-buttons-328962281">Lukasz Stefanski/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>White supremacy is woven into the tapestry of American culture, online and off – in both physical monuments and online domain names. A band of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/white-nationalists-rally-charlottesville-virginia.html?mcubz=0">tiki-torch-carrying white nationalists</a> gathered first online, and then at the site of a Jim Crow-era Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia.</p>
<p>Addressing white supremacy is going to take much more than toppling a handful of <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/19/544678037/duke-university-removes-robert-e-lee-statue-from-chapel-entrance">Robert E. Lee statues</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/magazine/how-hate-groups-forced-online-platforms-to-reveal-their-true-nature.html">shutting down a few white nationalist websites</a>, as technology companies have started to do. We must wrestle with what freedom of speech really means, and what types of speech go too far, and what kinds of limitations on speech we can endorse.</p>
<p>The First Amendment right to free speech was never meant to protect the kind of hate-filled rhetoric that summoned the mass gathering in Charlottesville, during which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/woman-killed-at-white-supremacist-rally-in-charlottesville-named">anti-racist demonstrator Heather Heyer</a> was killed. In 2003, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-1107.ZS.html">the Supreme Court ruled</a>, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black">Virginia v. Black</a>, that “cross burning done with the intent to intimidate has a long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence.” In other words, there’s no First Amendment protection because a burning cross is meant to intimidate, not start a dialogue. But what constitutes a burning cross in the digital era?</p>
<h2>Stormfront, the epicenter of hate online</h2>
<p>I’ve been researching white supremacists for more than 20 years, and that work has straddled either side of the digital revolution. In the 1990s, I explored their movement through printed newsletters culled from the Klanwatch archive at the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>. As the web grew, my research shifted to the way these groups and their ideas moved onto the internet. My studies have included two white supremacist websites, one decommissioned and the other still active – Stormfront and martinlutherking.org. One is widely viewed as having run afoul of free speech protections; the other, at least as disturbing, has not yet been seen that way.</p>
<p>The Stormfront website, the online progenitor of (as its tagline touted) “white pride worldwide,” launched in 1995. Over more than two decades, Stormfront amassed more than <a href="http://mashable.com/2017/08/28/stormfront-white-supremacist-site-down/">300,000 registered users</a> and offered a haven for hate online. Since 2009, there have been nearly <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/stormfront">100 homicides</a> attributable to registered members of the site, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center to call it “the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide">murder capital</a> of the internet.” </p>
<p>All that time it was largely ignored by the tech companies that effectively allowed it to exist, by selling server space and offering domain name registration.</p>
<p>Since July 2017, the <a href="https://lawyerscommittee.org/mission/">Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law</a>, a civil rights nonprofit founded at the <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zFtYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YPoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6608,1876816&dq=lawyers+committee+for+civil+rights+under+law&hl=en">suggestion of President John F. Kennedy</a>, had been trying to focus tech companies’ attention on the violent and hateful content on Stormfront. The argument the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and its allies made was that “Stormfront crossed the line of permissible speech and incited and promoted violence,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/29/stormfront-neo-nazi-hate-site-murder-internet-pulled-offline-web-com-civil-rights-action">the group’s executive director told the Guardian</a>. </p>
<p>In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, that effort gained significant traction, ultimately chasing Stormfront off the internet. First, there was a move to <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/racist-daily-stormer-goes-down-again-as-cloudflare-drops-support/">boot The Daily Stormer</a>, a different white supremacist site, offline. Then, Network Solutions responded to the Lawyers’ Committee’s requests and <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/28/another-neo-nazi-site-stormfront-is-shut-down/">revoked Stormfront’s domain name</a>. Without an active domain name, ordinary web users can’t access the site, even though the content still remains on Stormfront’s servers. </p>
<p>(The sites have not been completely silenced: Some of their content is accessible to <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/24/daily-stormer-has-officially-retreated-to-the-dark-web/">people using the Tor Network</a>, and some <a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/what-happens-when-the-internet-tries-to-silence-white-supremacy-20170828">is being posted on the social networking site Gab</a>, which supporters are then distributing on larger social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.)</p>
<p>With its decades-long trail of destruction, Stormfront is certainly a digital-era version of a cross burning. That makes it a soft target for fighting white supremacy online: Of course we should hold its hosting companies accountable and demand that its advocacy of white supremacist terror and violence be taken offline.</p>
<p>But more foreboding in some ways, and more difficult to address, are what are called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105345">cloaked sites</a>,” those that conceal their authorship to disguise a political agenda – a precursor to today’s “fake news” sites.</p>
<h2>Looking for Dr. King</h2>
<p>At first glance, the martinlutherking.org website appears to be a clumsy tribute to the civil rights leadership of <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html">Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr</a>. “It looks, you know, just like an individual created it,” said one of the young people <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742561588/Cyber-Racism-White-Supremacy-Online-and-the-New-Attack-on-Civil-Rights">I interviewed</a> about their impressions of the site. Only at the very bottom of the page – where most people would never see it – does the page reveal its true source: “Hosted by Stormfront.” </p>
<p>Don Black, an <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/don-black">ideologically committed white supremacist</a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-thomson/white-supremacist-site-ma_b_809755.html">launched this cloaked site in 1999</a>, a few years after he started Stormfront, and it has been online continuously since then. As of August 30, the site <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170830180836/http://martinlutherking.org/">remains online</a>.</p>
<p>The site’s invitation to “Join the MLK Discussion Forum” might seem innocuous, but the discussion is not only about King himself or racial justice in America. The topics in the forum read like excerpts from the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html">FBI’s efforts</a> to <a href="http://www.salon.com/2000/01/24/mlk/">defame King</a>, alleging communism, plagiarism and sexual infidelity. The site is an attempt to undermine hard-won legal, political, social and moral <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/initiatives/civil-rights-history-project">victories of the civil rights era</a>. </p>
<h2>The harm of white supremacy</h2>
<p>The fact that Stormfront is offline but martinlutherking.org isn’t suggests that we aren’t very sophisticated yet in our thinking about what kinds of risks white supremacy poses. While Stormfront is an obvious, overt threat to people’s lives, the cloaked site is a more subtle and insidious threat to the underlying moral argument for civil rights. Both are dangers to democracy. </p>
<p>White supremacy is corrosive. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/01/02/i-dont-think-were-free-in-america-an-interview-with-bryan-stevenson/">Bryan Stevenson</a>, a legal scholar, activist and a leading critic of our failure to address racism in the U.S., <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30545-bryan-stevenson-on-mass-incarceration-racial-injustice-we-all-need-mercy-we-all-need-justice">says</a> “the era of slavery created a lasting ideology of white supremacy; a doctrine of ‘otherness’ got assigned to people of color with dreadful consequences. That narrative has never seriously been confronted.” </p>
<p>What is at stake in both the fight over monuments and domain names is the same: our collective decision to perpetuate – or undo – the system of ideas that claims those in the category “white” are more deserving than everyone else of citizenship, voting, jobs, health, safety, of life itself.</p>
<p>If Americans are serious about wanting to dismantle white supremacy (and this remains an open question), then we are going to have to learn to see burning crosses in our midst, and seriously confront how this destructive set of ideas is part of the fabric of our culture. But if we want a society that respects human rights and rejects white supremacy, we can begin, in my view, by refusing to grant platforms for harmful ideas, on white nationalist websites and in monuments to the Confederacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessie Daniels has received funding from The MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation. </span></em></p>Two websites, one taken offline, the other still active, raise hard questions about how prepared Americans are to deal with free speech about white supremacy, in both monuments and domain names.Jessie Daniels, Professor, City University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/824792017-08-16T01:36:12Z2017-08-16T01:36:12ZDoes biology explain why men outnumber women in tech?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182132/original/file-20170815-6110-1og4pid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=151%2C43%2C2897%2C2140&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who's missing from this picture?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lws/3263880963">Lawrence Sinclair</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s no secret that <a href="https://techcrunch.com/tag/diversity-report/">Silicon Valley employs</a> many <a href="http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-data/">more men than women</a> <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/reports/hightech/">in tech jobs</a>. What’s much harder to agree on is why.</p>
<p>The recent <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-the-citations-for-the-anti-diversity-manifesto-circulating-at-google">anti-diversity memo</a> by a now former Google engineer has pushed this topic into the spotlight. The writer argued there are ways to explain the gender gap in tech that don’t rely on bias and discrimination – specifically, biological sex differences. Setting aside how this assertion would affect questions about how to move toward greater equity in tech fields, how well does his wrap-up represent what researchers know about the science of sex and gender?</p>
<p>As a social scientist who’s been conducting psychological research about sex and gender for almost 50 years, I agree that biological differences between the sexes likely are part of the reason we see fewer women than men in the ranks of Silicon Valley’s tech workers. But the road between biology and employment is long and bumpy, and any causal connection does not rule out the relevance of nonbiological causes. Here’s what the research actually says.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182138/original/file-20170815-21358-10smx34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Is she a computer natural?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorgnetwerknederland/9423176668">Micah Sittig</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Are girls just born less suited for tech?</h2>
<p>There is no direct causal evidence that biology causes the lack of women in tech jobs. But many, if not most, psychologists do give credence to the general idea that prenatal and early postnatal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/jnr.23832">exposure to hormones</a> such as testosterone and other androgens <a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-015-0022-1">affect human psychology</a>. In humans, testosterone is ordinarily elevated in males from about weeks eight to 24 of gestation and also during early postnatal development. </p>
<p>Ethical restraints obviously preclude experimenting on human fetuses and babies to understand the effects of this greater exposure of males to testosterone. Instead, researchers have studied individuals exposed to hormonal environments that are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022492106974">abnormal</a> because of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2007.05.015">unusual genetic conditions</a> or hormonally active drugs <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0923-z">prescribed to pregnant women</a>. Such studies have suggested that early androgen exposure does have masculinizing effects on girls’ juvenile play preferences and behavior, aggression, sexual orientation and gender identity and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.01.022">possibly on spatial ability</a> and responsiveness to cues that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0125">certain behaviors are culturally female-appropriate</a>.</p>
<p>Early hormonal exposure is only one part of a complex of biological processes that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/jnr.23884">contribute to sexual differentiation</a>. Driven by both direct and roundabout messages from the X and Y chromosomes, the effects of these processes on human psychology are largely unknown, given the early stage of the relevant science.</p>
<p>Other studies inform the nature-nurture question by comparing the behaviors of boys and girls who are so young that socialization has not exerted its full influence.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.33">Early sex differences emerge mainly</a> on <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2012.00254.x">broad dimensions of temperament</a>. One such dimension is what psychologists call “surgency”; it’s greater in boys and manifests in motor activity, impulsivity and experiencing pleasure from high-intensity activities. The other dimension is in what we term “effortful control”; it’s greater in girls and emerges in the self-regulatory skills of greater attention span, ability to focus and shift attention and inhibitory control. This aspect of temperament also includes greater perceptual sensitivity and experience of pleasure from low-intensity activities.</p>
<p>This research on temperament does suggest that nature instills some psychological sex differences. But scientists don’t fully understand the pathways from these aspects of child temperament to adult personality and abilities.</p>
<h2>Is there a gender divide on tech-relevant traits?</h2>
<p>Another approach to the women-in-tech question involves comparing the sexes on traits thought most relevant to participation in tech. In this case, it doesn’t matter whether these traits follow from nature or nurture. The usual suspects include mathematical and spatial abilities.</p>
<p>The sex difference in average mathematical ability that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2333-8504.1971.tb00807.x">once favored males</a> has <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160364">disappeared in the general U.S. population</a>. There is also a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.09.003">decline in the preponderance of males</a> among the very top scorers on demanding math tests. Yet, males tend to score <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.10.011">higher on most tests of spatial abilities</a>, especially tests of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9215-x">mentally rotating three-dimensional objects</a>, and these skills appear to be <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0016127">helpful in STEM fields</a>.</p>
<p>Of course people choose occupations based on their interests as well as their abilities. So the robust and large sex difference on measures of people-oriented versus thing-oriented interests deserves consideration.</p>
<p><a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0017364">Research shows that</a>, in general, women are more interested in people compared with men, who are more interested in things. To the extent that tech occupations are concerned more with things than people, men would on average <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.09.007">be more attracted to them</a>. For example, positions such as computer systems engineer and network and database architect require extensive knowledge of electronics, mathematics, engineering principles and telecommunication systems. Success in such work is not as dependent on qualities such as social sensitivity and emotional intelligence as are positions in, for instance, early childhood education and retail sales.</p>
<p>Women and men also differ in their life goals, with women placing a higher priority than men on <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868316642141">working with and helping people</a>. Jobs in STEM are in general not viewed as providing much opportunity to satisfy these life goals. But technology does offer specializations that prioritize social and community goals (such as designing healthcare systems) or reward social skills (for instance, optimizing the interaction of people with machines and information). Such positions may, on average, be <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025199">relatively appealing to women</a>. More generally, women’s overall <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057988">superiority on reading</a> <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221325.2015.1036833">and writing</a> as well as <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628191.006">social skills</a> <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0017286">would advantage them</a> in many occupations.</p>
<p>Virtually all sex differences consist of overlapping distributions of women and men. For example, despite the quite large sex difference in average height, some women are taller than most men and some men are shorter than most women. Although psychological sex differences are statistically smaller than this height difference, some of the differences most relevant to tech are substantial, particularly interest in people versus things and spatial ability in mental rotations. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182136/original/file-20170815-26751-uke216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Silicon Valley has been faulted for its ‘brogrammer’ culture, which can be unwelcoming to women.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorgnetwerknederland/9423176668">Zorgnetwerk Nederland</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>If not biology, then what are the causes?</h2>
<p>Given the absence of clear-cut evidence that tech-relevant abilities and interests flow mainly from biology, there’s plenty of room to consider socialization and gender stereotyping.</p>
<p>Because humans are born undeveloped, parents and others provide extensive socialization, generally intended to promote personality traits and skills they think will help offspring in their future adult roles. To the extent that women and men have different adult lives, caregivers tend to <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.109.2.267">promote sex-typical activities and interests</a> in children – dolls for girls, toy trucks for boys. Conventional socialization can <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12569">set children on the route</a> to conventional career choices.</p>
<p>Even <a href="https://doi.org/10.1068/p3331">very young children</a> form <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0163-6383(94)90037-X">gender stereotypes</a> as <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037215">they observe women and men</a> enacting their society’s division of labor. They <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1128709">automatically learn about gender</a> from what they see adults doing in the home and at work. Eventually, to explain the differences they see in what men and women do and how they do it, children draw the conclusion that the sexes to some extent have different underlying traits. Divided labor thus conveys the message that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1006/drev.1993.1007">males and females have different attributes</a>.</p>
<p>These <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-6402.t01-1-00066">gender stereotypes usually include</a> beliefs that women excel in qualities such as warmth and concern for others, which psychologists label as communal. Stereotypes also suggest men have higher levels of qualities such as assertiveness and dominance, which psychologists label as agentic. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167200262001">These stereotypes are shared</a> in cultures and shape individuals’ <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-394281-4.00002-7">gender identities as well as societal norms</a> about appropriate female and male behaviors.</p>
<p>Gender stereotypes set the stage for prejudice and discrimination directed toward those who deviate from gender norms. If, for example, people accept the stereotype that women are warm and emotional but not tough and rational, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199363643.013.7">gatekeepers may close out women</a> from many engineering and tech jobs, even those women who are atypical of their sex. In addition, women talented in tech may falter if they themselves <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-0045.2014.00075.x">internalize societal stereotypes</a> about <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9375-x">women’s inferiority in tech-relevant attributes</a>. Also, women’s <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0012702">anxiety that they may confirm</a> these negative stereotypes can <a href="https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446269930.n26">lower their actual performance</a>.</p>
<p>It’s therefore not surprising that research provides <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xPCQM6g7CQ0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=XKHVbPVdIO&sig=L2ZncU0XyBEph7ujaLq4usXSmTY#v=onepage&q&f=false">evidence that women generally</a> have to <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0036734">meet a higher standard</a> to attain jobs and recognition in fields that are culturally masculine and dominated by men. However, there is some recent evidence of <a href="https://doi.org/10.17226/12062">preferential hiring of women in STEM</a> at U.S. research-intensive institutions. Qualified women who apply for such positions have a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than do male job candidates. <a href="https://theconversation.com/women-preferred-for-stem-professorships-as-long-as-theyre-equal-to-or-better-than-male-candidates-49411">Experimental simulation of hiring</a> of STEM faculty yielded similar findings.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182140/original/file-20170815-28398-au0sfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Any career depends on training and education that build on innate interest and talent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/24929786@N02/2367468669">Todd Ludwig</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why not both nature and nurture?</h2>
<p>Many pundits make the mistake of assuming that scientific evidence favoring sociocultural causes for the dearth of women in tech invalidates biological causes, or vice versa. These assumptions are far too simplistic because most complex human behaviors reflect some mix of nature and nurture. </p>
<p>And the discourse is further compromised as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/technology/the-culture-wars-have-come-to-silicon-valley.html?_r=0">debate becomes</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-google-memo-isnt-the-interesting-part-of-the-story/2017/08/11/de3f8876-7ecb-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html">more politicized</a>. Arguing for sociocultural causes seems the more progressive and politically correct stance today. Arguing for biological causes seems the more conservative and reactionary position. Fighting ideological wars distracts from figuring out what <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732214549471">changes in organizational practices and cultures</a> would <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/opinion/silicon-valley-women-hiring-diversity.html">foster the inclusion of women in tech</a> and in the scientific workforce in general.</p>
<p>Politicizing such debates threatens scientific progress and doesn’t help unravel what a fair and diverse organization is and how to create one. Unfortunately, well-meaning efforts of organizations to <a href="https://theconversation.com/tech-companies-spend-big-money-on-bias-training-but-it-hasnt-improved-diversity-numbers-44411">promote diversity and inclusion</a> can be ineffective, often because they are too <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122415596416">coercive and restrictive of managers’ autonomy</a>. The outrage in James Damore’s manifesto suggests that Google might want to take a close look at its diversity initiatives.</p>
<p>At any rate, neither nature-oriented nor nurture-oriented science can fully account for the underrepresentation of women in tech jobs. A coherent and open-minded stance acknowledges the possibility of both biological and social influences on career interests and competencies.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether nature or nurture is more powerful for explaining the lack of women in tech careers, people should guard against acting on the assumption of a gender binary. It makes more sense to treat individuals of both sexes as located somewhere on a continuum of masculine and feminine interests and abilities. Treating people as individuals rather than merely stereotyping them as male or female is difficult, given how quickly our automatic stereotypes kick in. But working toward this goal would foster equity and diversity in tech and other sectors of the economy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82479/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice H. Eagly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Here’s what research actually says about differences between males and females – and the question of what’s innate and what’s acquired.Alice H. Eagly, Professor of Psychology; Faculty Fellow Institute for Policy Research; Professor of Management and Organizations, Northwestern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/824542017-08-15T13:35:29Z2017-08-15T13:35:29ZSoundCloud survives but it’s bad news for musicians<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182054/original/file-20170815-16750-ep7dyc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Recently saved.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SoundCloud_logo,_orange_color,_plain.svg">SoundCloud</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Audio streaming website SoundCloud has survived its <a href="https://www.axios.com/soundcloud-asks-investors-to-support-rescue-deal-2471398461.html">do or die moment</a>. In the face of serious financial trouble, it <a href="http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7898062/soundcloud-funding-round-new-ceo-kerry-trainor-interview">secured</a> US$169.5m of investment from merchant bank The Raine Group and investment firm Temasek Holdings. As its CEO and co-founder Alexander Ljung <a href="https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/08/11/exciting-news-future-soundcloud/">said</a>: “SoundCloud is here to stay.”</p>
<p>Ljung is not, however. He’s to be replaced by Kerry Trainor, former CEO of video-sharing site Vimeo. And, perhaps more importantly, it is unlikely that the SoundCloud that many musicians have known and loved (myself included) will live on. </p>
<p>Prior to securing the cash injection it desperately needed, SoundCloud’s future was hanging in the balance. The tech company, founded in 2007, recently closed two of its offices and laid off <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1065213c-6269-11e7-91a7-502f7ee26895">around 40% of its workforce</a>. To survive it desperately needed to monetise and clear its debts. With new investment and new management, the focus is likely to shift even more to sound business choices over the community of users that the site has long fostered. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182086/original/file-20170815-28964-k8wsrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Alexander Ljung, SoundCloud co-founder and former CEO.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/10556411746/in/photolist-aUcGzi-aUcFTM-aUcJqM-aUcGc4-aUcGTr-PoL3k-dyr8ne-dyr8Fg-dyr848-dyr7Vk-dysM3i-dyr7NV-dyyfv1-aT9Ku8-dywBhf-dyyfr7-824FQn-81kXsL-aUgzCK-aUcHgR-2mbvUH-cic8jy-aUgx5T-h5Qf2K-h5NvH6-h5Qzt9-h5Qne1-h5QmTG-h5QzV1-h5Qnr5-HfYbg-h5RAix-h5QA9C-h5NvMK-h5ZbSk-h5Qfhp-h5QzPj-cic7ZU-h5NvR2-aUgynv-aUgvUD-h5QfeP-cic8Nd-h5QAeN-cic7KL-cic7d3-cic8zy-NegXJ-PzHyV-6mskkg">TechCrunch</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since its inception, SoundCloud was a popular home for outlaw music on the web – DJ sets, remixes, mashups, underground hip hop mixtapes, sound collages. The kind of music that can’t be sold or broadcast anywhere else due to binding copyright rules. </p>
<p>But it didn’t just service outlaws. For independents, amateurs and industry outsiders, it provided a space for marginal new music and sound-art scenes to not only exist, but flourish in a global network. SoundCloud incubated and encouraged new music styles that are now recognised in today’s cultural landscape: Dubstep, Chillwave/Glo-Fi, Vaporwave, EDM, Witch House, the recent resurgence of Deep House, the emergence of lo-fi influenced <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/look-at-me-the-noisy-soundcloud-revolution-changing-rap-w485101">“Soundcloud Rap”</a>. </p>
<p>It allowed users to make their music streams private and invite-only (accessible by a link). It made the sharing of not-yet-released new music easy for record labels, independent artists and publicists to access. Its waveform widget, with its ability to place a comment anywhere on the track’s timeline, encouraged listener engagement. It was also easy to embed in websites and social media pages – saving music creators the hassle of hosting the audio on their own websites, and with the convenient bonus of collecting listener data in one place. </p>
<h2>Never good with money</h2>
<p>SoundCloud made it easy to share your musical creations with millions of potential listeners on the web. For listeners, SoundCloud was a valuable tool for discovery; their <a href="https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/06/22/introducing-suggested-tracks/">“suggested tracks” feature</a>, uses machine learning to analyse listening habits and suggests new music from artists from every level, not just the mainstream or most popular.</p>
<p>But for all of the ways in which SoundCloud has been popular with users and successful in terms of its cultural contribution, it has <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/07/23/soundcloud-music-streaming-troubles/">never been good with money</a>. Just like those outlaw music formats that SoundCloud found a home for – music that exists outside of the music industry system – SoundCloud itself had difficulty monetising its service. </p>
<p>It has had numerous rounds of investment in the past ten years but failed to provide a return, failed to extract subscription money from users, failed to provide a transparent royalty-based income stream for its music creators and copyright holders. And where SoundCloud struggled, its rival Spotify <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999172/soundcloud-business-model-future-spotify-streaming">went from strength-to-strength</a>. Ultimately, many music creators found that they could earn more money from their music on Spotify and another one of SoundCloud’s competitors, Bandcamp. Following deals with the major labels, it began to clamp down on illegal copyright infringements – pushing away a number of its original user base, DJs, to other platforms such as Mixcloud.</p>
<h2>Never the same again</h2>
<p>I’m a composer that uses SoundCloud as a portfolio, a way of sharing my work with the world. I embed the SoundCloud player on my website and social media accounts, and I use it as a means to connect with my listeners and discover other musicians that I otherwise would never have known about. I also use SoundCloud in my teaching and for listening research, to explore underground cultures; to get inspired. </p>
<iframe width="100%" height="450" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/278938109&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true"></iframe>
<p>For me, the magic of SoundCloud was that it existed outside of the music industry and its obsession with money. It seemed to be about sharing and community, about evolving culture, creating global networks based on aesthetics, practice, creative philosophy.</p>
<p>No doubt, SoundCloud’s new investors will seek to transform the currently debt-ridden company into a money-making enterprise. This will require a radical restructuring. </p>
<p>As a result, SoundCloud is unlikely to be the same again. This is bad news for the listeners and music creators who rely on the service for documentation and discovery. So too for those who use the platform as a place to develop new music styles, push musical and sonic aesthetics and build online communities. Underground, outlaw, outsider, and any variety of unprofitable music will need to find somewhere else to live.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leah Kardos does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>SoundCloud has been saved by its biggest injection of cash yet.Leah Kardos, Senior Lecturer in Music, Kingston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/822362017-08-11T00:55:21Z2017-08-11T00:55:21ZWhat the Google gender ‘manifesto’ really says about Silicon Valley<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181597/original/file-20170809-32154-xnrsxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Oh the terrible irony.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/histoftech/status/876368174480060416">Photo by Mar Hicks</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Five years ago, Silicon Valley was rocked by a wave of “<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brogrammer-culture-sexist-sxsw/">brogrammer</a>” bad behavior, when overfunded, highly entitled, mostly white and male startup founders did things that were juvenile, out of line and just plain stupid. Most of these activities – such as putting pornography into PowerPoint slides – revolved around the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/tech/web/brogrammers/index.html">explicit or implied devaluation and harassment</a> of women and the assumption that heterosexual men’s privilege could or should define the workplace. The recent “<a href="https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320">memo</a>” scandal out of Google shows how far we have yet to go. </p>
<p>It may be that more established and successful companies don’t make job applicants deal with <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brogrammer-culture-sexist-sxsw/">“bikini shots” and “gangbang interviews.”</a> But even the tech giants foster an environment where heteronormativity and male privilege is so rampant that an engineer could feel comfortable <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html">writing and distributing a screed</a> that effectively harassed all of his women co-workers en masse.</p>
<p>This is a pity, because tech companies say they want to change this culture. This summer, I gave a talk at Google UK about my work as a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/memo-to-the-google-memo-writer-women-were-foundational-to-the-field-of-computing/2017/08/09/76da1886-7d0e-11e7-a669-b400c5c7e1cc_story.html">historian of technology and gender</a>. I thought my talk might help change people’s minds about women in computing, and might even help women and <a href="http://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-non-binary-gender">nonbinary</a> folks working at Google now. Still, the irony was strong: I was visiting a multibillion-dollar tech company to talk about how women are undervalued in tech, for free.</p>
<h2>Facing common fears</h2>
<p>I went to Google UK with significant trepidation. I was going to talk about the subject of my upcoming book, “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality">Programmed Inequality</a>,” about how <a href="http://listen.datasociety.net/care-failure-british-computing-industry/">women got pushed out of computing</a> in the U.K. In the 1940s through the early 1960s, most British <a href="http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D">computer workers were women</a>, but over the course of the ’60’s and ’70’s their numbers dropped as women were subjected to <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/hidden-figures-british-computer-industry">intentional structural discrimination</a> designed to push them out of the field. That didn’t just hurt the women, either – it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/memo-to-the-google-memo-writer-women-were-foundational-to-the-field-of-computing/2017/08/09/76da1886-7d0e-11e7-a669-b400c5c7e1cc_story.html">torpedoed</a> the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/may/29/onlinesupplement.columnists">once-promising British computing industry</a>.</p>
<p>In the worst-case scenario, I imagined my talk would end with a question-and-answer period in which I would be asked to face exactly the points the Google manifesto made. It’s happened before – <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/anita-sarkeesian-gamergate-interview-20141017">and not just to me</a> – so I have years of practice dealing with harsh critics and tough audiences, both <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/fionarutherford/people-are-fighting-against-stereotypes-in-academia-with-ilo">in the classroom and outside of it</a>.</p>
<p>As a result of that experience, I know how to handle situations like that. But it’s more than just disheartening to have my work misunderstood. I have felt firsthand the damage the phenomenon called “<a href="http://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx">stereotype threat</a>” can wreak on women: Being assumed to be inferior can make a person not only feel inferior, but actually <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/intelligence-and-the-stereotype-threat.html">subconsciously do things</a> that confirm their own supposed lesser worth. For instance, women students <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1131100">do measurably worse on math exams</a> after reading articles that suggest women are ill-suited to study math. (A related phenomenon, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/your-money/learning-to-deal-with-the-impostor-syndrome.html?_r=0">impostor syndrome</a>, <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/why-do-some-academics-feel-like-frauds/2010238.article">runs rampant through academia</a>.)</p>
<h2>A surprising reaction</h2>
<p>As it happened, the audience was familiar with, and interested in, my work. I was impressed and delighted with the caliber and thoughtfulness of the questions I got. But one question stood out. It seemed like the perfect example of how the culture of the tech industry is so badly broken today that it destroys or significantly hinders much of its talent pool, inflicting stereotype threat on them in large numbers.</p>
<p>A Google engineer asked if I thought that women’s biological differences made them innately less likely to be good engineers. I replied in the negative, firmly stating that this kind of pseudoscientific evolutional psychology has been <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(76)90019-6">proven incorrect</a> <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/08/08/the-ugly-pseudoscientific-history-behind-that-sexist-google-manifesto/">at every turn</a> by history, and that biological determinism was a dangerous cudgel that had been used to deprive <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/books/review/a-history-of-race-and-racism-in-america-in-24-chapters.html?_r=0">black people</a>, <a href="http://www.nwhp.org/resources/womens-rights-movement/detailed-timeline/">women</a> and <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/roots/overview.html">many others</a> of their civil rights – and even their lives – for centuries.</p>
<p>The engineer posing this question was a woman. She said she felt she was unusual because she thought she had less <a href="http://www.danielgoleman.info/topics/emotional-intelligence/">emotional intelligence</a> and more intellectual intelligence than most other women, and those abilities let her do her job better. She wondered if most women were doomed to fail. She spoke with the uncertainty of someone who has been <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/04/429362127/sexist-reactions-to-an-ad-spark-ilooklikeanengineer-campaign">told repeatedly</a> that “normal” women aren’t supposed to do what she does, or be who she is.</p>
<p>I tried to empathize with her, and to make my answer firm but not dismissive. This is how <a href="http://s3.computerhistory.org/core/core-2016.pdf#page=30">structural discrimination</a> works: It seeps into all of us, and we are barely conscious of it. If we do not constantly guard ourselves against its insidious effects – if we do not have the tools to do so, the courage to speak out, and the ability to understand when it is explained to us – it can turn us into ever worse versions of ourselves. We can become the versions that the negative stereotypes expect. But the bigger problem is that it doesn’t end at the level of the individual.</p>
<h2>A problem of structure</h2>
<p>These misapprehensions bleed into every aspect of our institutions, which then in turn nurture and (often unwittingly) propagate them further. That was what happened when <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html">the Google manifesto emerged</a>, and in the media frenzy that followed. </p>
<p>That the manifesto was taken as a potentially interesting or illustrative opinion says something not just about Silicon Valley, but about the political moment in which we find ourselves. The media is complicit too: Some media treated it as noteworthy <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/dreadful_people_the_google_manifesto_pulled_out_of_woodwork/?page=3">only for its shock value</a>. And others, rather than identifying the screed as an example of the writer’s misogyny, lack of historical understanding, and indeed – as <a href="https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788">some computer professionals have pointed out</a> – lack of understanding of the field of engineering, handled the document as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/09/google-fired-engineer-gender-sexism-conservative-reaction">think piece deserving consideration and discussion</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/heres-why-im-not-reading-the-google-employees-anti_us_598a05f5e4b08a4c247f262d">many people</a> who said openly and loudly that it was <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2143285-memo-to-all-tech-bros-sexism-not-biology-holds-women-back/">nothing of the sort</a> are to be commended. But the fact that they had to waste time even addressing it shows how much <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality">damage casual, unreflective sexism and misogyny</a> do to every aspect of our society and our economy.</p>
<h2>The corporate response</h2>
<p>Google, for its part, has now <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/08/07/a-googlers-manifesto-is-the-hr-departments-worst-nightmare/">fired the writer</a>, an expected move after the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/08/techs-sexism-doesnt-stay-in-silicon-valley-its-in-the-products-you-use/">bad publicity</a> he has helped rain down on the company. But Google has also – and in the very same week that I gave my talk there – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit">refused to comply</a> with a U.S. Department of Justice order to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/dol-google-pay-discrimination/522411/">provide statistics on how it paid its women workers</a> in comparison to men. The company claims that it might cost an estimated US$100,000 to compile that data, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/26/google-gender-discrimination-case-salary-records">complains</a> that it’s too high a cost for their multibillion dollar corporation to bear.</p>
<p>The company will not expend a pittance – especially in relation to <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabet-earnings-keep-google-investors-in-dark-2017-07-24">its earnings</a> – to work to correct allegedly egregious gender-biased salary disparities. Is it any surprise that some of its employees – both men and women – view women’s contributions, and their very identities, as being <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/google-gender-struggle-tech/">somehow less inherently valuable</a> or well suited to tech? Or that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/">many more silently believe it</a>, almost in spite of themselves?</p>
<p>People take cues from our institutions. Our governments, corporations, universities and news media <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2013.3">shape our understandings and expectations of ourselves</a> in ways we can only partially understand without intense and sustained self-reflection. For the U.K. in the 20th century, that collective, institutional self-awareness <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-programmed-inequality-marie-hicks-mit-press">came far too late to save its tech sector</a>. Let’s hope the U.S. in the 21st century learns something from that history. At a time when technology and governance are increasingly converging to define who we are as a nation, we are living through a perfect – if terrifying – teachable moment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82236/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie Hicks has received past funding from Duke University and Illinois Institute of Technology.</span></em></p>Five years after a major sexism scandal, Silicon Valley’s misogynist culture remains strong and pervasive – and history reveals the stakes could be as high as the entire US tech sector.Marie Hicks, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-MadisonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/696092016-12-02T03:00:08Z2016-12-02T03:00:08Z10 ways the tech industry and the media helped create President Trump<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148154/original/image-20161130-17028-4q04op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/80038275@N00/20734564355">Michael Vadon/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Three weeks after Donald Trump won a historic victory to become the 45th president of the United States, the media postmortems continue.</p>
<p>In particular, the role played by the media and technology industries is coming under heavy scrutiny in the press, with Facebook’s role in the <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/10/12/facebook-fake-news/">rise of fake news</a> <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/11/16/13626318/viral-fake-news-on-facebook">currently</a> enjoying <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+news+facebook&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ1bX4_7zQAhVX1mMKHcGnA8gQ_AUICygE">considerable</a> coverage. This represents a shift from earlier in the campaign, when the volume of media airtime given to Trump was <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/blame-rise-trump-failure-tv-news-516162">often</a> <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/06/14/harvard-study-confirms-media-s-role-trump-s-political-rise/210955">held culpable</a> for “The Apprentice” star’s political ascendancy.</p>
<p>In truth, a Trump presidency is – in part – a reflection of the status and evolution of the media and tech industries in 2016. Here are 10 ways that they combined to help Trump capture the White House in a manner not previously possible. Without them, Trump might not have stood a chance.</p>
<h2>Inside the tech industry’s role</h2>
<p>1) Fake news looks a lot like real news. This is <a href="http://www.cjr.org/feature/before_jon_stewart.php">not a new issue</a>, but it’s a hot topic, given the <a href="http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/">social media-led explosion</a> of the genre. As BuzzFeed found, <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook">fake news can spread more quickly than real reporting</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/20/barack-obama-facebook-fake-news-problem">President Obama has weighed in</a> on the problem, as have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-journalists-opportunity-comes-in-clicks-and-bucks/2016/11/20/d58d036c-adbf-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html">investigative reporters</a>. And The New York Times found that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html">fake news can “go viral” very quickly</a>, even if it’s started by an unassuming source with a small online following – who subsequently debunks their own false story. </p>
<p>2) Algorithms show us more of what we like, not what we need to know. Amazon, Netflix and Spotify demonstrate how powerful <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/17/11030200/netflix-new-recommendation-system-global-regional">personalization and recommendation engines</a> can be. But these tools also remove serendipity, reducing exposure to anything outside of our comfort zone.</p>
<p>Websites like <a href="http://www.allsides.com/">AllSides</a>, and the Wall Street Journal’s <a href="http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/">Red vs Blue feed</a> experiment – which let users “See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side” – show how narrow our reading can become, how different the “other side” looks, and how hard it can be to expose ourselves to differing viewpoints, even if we want to.</p>
<p>3) Tech doesn’t automatically discern fact from fiction. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/10/facebook-news-media-editor-vietnam-photo-censorship">Facebook doesn’t have an editor</a>, and Mark Zuckerberg <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/10/25/facebook-says-its-not-a-media-company/92744614/">frequently says</a> that <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13655102/facebook-journalism-ethics-media-company-algorithm-tax">Facebook is not a media company</a>. It’s true that Facebook content comes from users and partners, but Facebook is nonetheless a major media distributor. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/">More than half of Americans get news from social media</a>; Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. “The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there,” <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/">Pew notes</a>, “amount to 44 percent of the general population.” But its <a href="http://www.cjr.org/tow_center/facebook_zuckerberg_trump_election.php">automatic algorithms can amplify falsehoods</a>, as happened when a false story about Megyn Kelly <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/facebook-steps-in-it/497915/">trended on Facebook</a> this summer.</p>
<p>4) The rise of robots. It’s not just publications and stories that can be fake. <a href="http://politicalbots.org/?p=787">Twitter bots</a> can look the same as real Twitter users, <a href="http://www.recode.net/2016/11/1/13488020/trump-bots-clinton-twitter-third-debate-twitterbots-election">spreading</a> <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/17/how-pro-trump-twitter-bots-spread-fake-news.html">falsehoods</a> and rumors and <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/20/twitter-bots-rampant-during-election/">amplifying</a> messages (just as humans do). Repeat a lie often enough and – <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022537177800121">evidence suggests</a> – it becomes accepted as fact. This is just as true online as it is on the campaign trail. </p>
<p>My mother always warned me not to believe everything I read in the papers. We need to instill the <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576">same message</a> in our children (and adults) about social media.</p>
<p>5) Tech has helped pull money away from sources of real reporting. Google, Facebook, Craigslist and others have <a href="https://www.baekdal.com/blog/what-killed-the-newspapers-google-or-facebook-or/">created new advertising markets</a>, diverting traditional ad revenues from newspapers in the process. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="http://digiday.com/platforms/what-is-programmatic-advertising/">programmatic advertising</a>, which uses computer algorithms to buy – and place – online ads, is changing the advertising dynamic yet again. This <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/facebook-and-google-wont-let-fake-news-sites-use-their-ads-platforms/507737/">can</a> <a href="http://digiday.com/publishers/breitbart-ad-tech-complex-enables-brand-of-news/">mean</a> companies <a href="https://digiday.com/agencies/site-blacklists-often-fail-programmatic-ad-buying/">unintentionally</a> buy ads on sites – such as those from the alt-right – which don’t sit with their brand or values; and that they would not typically choose to support.</p>
<h2>The media played its part, too</h2>
<p>1) Fewer ad dollars means fewer journalistic boots on the ground. Data from the American Society of News Editors show that <a href="http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=140&sl=129&contentid=129">in 2015 the total workforce for U.S. daily newspapers was 32,900</a>, down from a peak of 56,400 in 2001. That’s 23,500 jobs lost in 14 years.</p>
<p>Though some of these roles have migrated to <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/the-growth-in-digital-reporting/">online outlets</a> that didn’t exist years ago, this sector is also starting to <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/04/newsonomics-with-new-roadblocks-for-digital-news-sites-what-happens-next/">feel the cold</a>. A reduced workforce has inevitably led to less original journalism, with fewer “on the beat” local reporters, shuttered titles and the rise of <a href="http://streetfightmag.com/2014/06/26/despite-many-local-news-sites-media-deserts-are-a-stubborn-reality/">media deserts</a>. Cable news, talk radio, social networks and conservative websites – channels that predominantly focus on commentary rather than original reporting – have, in many cases, stepped in to fill these gaps.</p>
<p>2) Unparalleled airtime helped Trump build momentum. A study by The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">concluded</a> that in his first nine months of campaigning, Trump earned <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2-billion-free-media_us_56e83410e4b065e2e3d75935">nearly US$2 billion</a> in free media. This dwarfed the $313 million earned by Ted Cruz and the $746 million secured by Hillary Clinton. The Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1">noted</a> this was already “about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history.”</p>
<p>Wall-to-wall coverage wasn’t just beneficial to Trump. “The money’s rolling in,” CBS Chairman Les Moonves <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001">told</a> an industry conference this year, noting that a Trump candidacy “<a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/leslie-moonves-donald-trump-may-871464">may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS</a>.” </p>
<p>3) Did all the investigative journalism and fact-checking make a difference? Great work by NPR, The New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and others didn’t slow Trump’s momentum. <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/304606-final-newspaper-endorsement-count-clinton-57-trump-2">Just two</a> of the country’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed Trump, but <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/trump-i-won-popular-vote-i-did-i-did-i-did">more than 62 million people voted</a> for him anyway. </p>
<p>We need to understand whether these journalistic efforts changed any opinions, or simply reinforced existing voter biases. As Fortune journalist <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/media-trump-failure/">Mathew Ingram observed</a>: “Trump supporters and the mainstream media both believed what they wanted to believe.”</p>
<p>4) Many journalists were <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/media-trump-failure/">out of step</a> with the mood of much of the country. We need a <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/11/whites-more-likely-than-nonwhites-to-have-spoken-to-a-local-journalist/">greater plurality</a> of voices, opinions and backgrounds to inform our news coverage. </p>
<p>A 2013 study from <a href="http://journalism.indiana.edu/">Indiana University’s School of Journalism</a> revealed that <a href="http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/american-journalist-in-the-digital-age.shtml">journalists as a whole</a> are older, whiter, more male and better-educated than the American population overall. This means journalists can be disconnected from communities they cover, giving rise to mutual misunderstandings and wrong assumptions. </p>
<p>5) The <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/21/trump_s_hamilton_tweets_were_not_some_brilliant_ploy.html">jury’s out</a> on whether Trump is a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/were-trumps-hamilton-tweets-weapons-of-mass-distraction/2016/11/21/4367dfda-af8a-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html">master of deflection</a>. But despite his fabled <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all">short attention span</a>, too often it’s the media that is distracted and dragged off-course. </p>
<p>In March, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/">the Washington Post’s editorial board</a> astonishingly allowed Trump to play out the clock when he ducked a question on tactical nuclear strikes against ISIS by simply asking – with just five minutes of the meeting remaining – if people could go around the room and say who they were.</p>
<p>More recently he led the press corps and <a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/twitterati">Twitterati</a> on a merry dance, after his <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/20/politics/donald-trump-hamilton-feud/">“Hamilton” tweet</a> got more coverage than the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-trump-university-20161118-story.html">$25 million settlement against Trump University</a>. He repeated the trick when <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/28/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-millions-illegal-vo/">tweets alleging illegal voters</a> turned the spotlight away from discussions about potential <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/us/politics/donald-trump-international-business.html">conflicts of interest</a> between his presidency and his property empire.</p>
<h2>The next four years</h2>
<p>There were other factors, of course, that helped Republicans win the Electoral College. These include a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/exit-poll-americans-cast-ballots-while-holding-their-noses/2016/11/08/73239c86-a612-11e6-ba46-53db57f0e351_story.html">desire for change in Washington</a>, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/hillary-clinton-trump-email-strategy-227347">Clinton’s ultra-safe campaign</a> and Trump’s ability to project the image of “<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2016/11/18/donald-trump-white-working-class-voters-election-2016-519095.html">blue-collar billionaire</a>” who understood economically and politically disenfranchised communities.</p>
<p>Trump capitalized on these opportunities, prospering despite myriad pronouncements and behaviors (<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/all-the-women-accusing-trump-of-rape-sexual-assault.html">accusations of assault</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-trump-tax-returns-explained-wont-release-hiding-bombshell-a7324306.html">unpublished tax returns</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/18/donald-trump-john-mccain-vietnam-iowa-republicans">criticism of John McCain’s war record</a>, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/08/01/trump-khan-feud-timeline/87914108/">feuding with a Gold Star family</a>, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-s-worst-offense-mocking-disabled-reporter-poll-finds-n627736">mocking a disabled reporter</a> and routinely offending <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/15-most-offensive-things-trump-campaign-feminism-migration-racism/">Muslims</a>, <a href="http://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/">Mexicans</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-insults-women_us_57a0f8fde4b0e2e15eb7a1f0">women</a>) that would have buried any other candidate.</p>
<p>Trump’s use of media and technology means his presidency promises to be <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-twitter-231959">like no other</a>. </p>
<p>In the past few days we’ve finally started to see <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/30/is-there-an-optimal-response-to-the-provoker-in-chief/?utm_term=.80ad3b5b0faa">discussions emerge</a> about how the media should respond to this. Suggestions include <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/30/13767174/case-for-normalizing-trump">focusing on policy, not personality</a>; <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-media-coverage-new-rules-214485">ignoring deflecting tweets</a>; and a <a href="http://www.poynter.org/2016/here-are-28-ideas-for-covering-president-elect-donald-trump/440532/">raft of other ideas</a>. To these, I would add the need to promote <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/18/american-media-journalism-donald-trump">greater media literacy</a>, a more diverse media and tech workforce and improving the <a href="https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/what-we-mean-when-we-talk-about-engagement-a4816f22902f">audience engagement</a> skills of reporters. </p>
<p>Journalists and technologists will need to redouble their efforts if we are to hold the White House accountable and rebuild trust across these two industries. This promises to be a bumpy ride, but one that we all need to saddle up for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69609/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Damian Radcliffe continues to engage in freelance creative and consulting work related to his expertise on media and technology matters. He is a member of the Online News Association and has received funding from the Agora Journalism Center and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism to research innovation and civic engagement in local media.</span></em></p>Facebook’s role is under scrutiny, a shift from earlier in the campaign, when the press was often blamed for Trump’s ascendancy. Both played a part.Damian Radcliffe, Caroline S. Chambers Professor in Journalism, University of OregonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/672642016-10-20T05:36:43Z2016-10-20T05:36:43ZWill AI spell the end of humanity? The tech industry wants you to think so<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142190/original/image-20161018-15103-1c6rp6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Stephen Hawking has warned AI could be a threat to humanity.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwpkommunikacio/16203367706">Lwp Kommunikáció/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Star physicist Stephen Hawking has reiterated <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-stephen-hawking-right-could-ai-lead-to-the-end-of-humankind-34967">his concerns</a> that the rise of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems could spell the end for humanity. Speaking at the launch of the University of Cambridge’s <a href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-future-of-intelligence-cambridge-university-launches-new-centre-to-study-ai-and-the-future-of">Centre for the Future of Intelligence</a> on 19 October, he did, however, acknowledge that AI equally has the potential to be one of the best things that could happen to us.</p>
<p>So are we on the cusp of creating <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-the-superintelligence-revolution-might-happen-32124">super-intelligent machines</a> that could put humanity at existential risk? </p>
<p>There are those who believe that AI will be a boom for humanity, improving health services and productivity as well as freeing us from mundane tasks. However, the most vocal leaders in academia and industry are convinced that the danger of our own creations turning on us is real. For example, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, <a href="http://wakingscience.com/2016/05/elon-musk-funds-1-billion-dollar-project-save-mankind-artificial-intelligence/">has set up</a> a billion-dollar non-profit company with contributions from tech titans, such as Amazon, to prevent an evil AI from bringing about the end of humanity. Universities, such as <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/08/29/center-for-human-compatible-artificial-intelligence/">Berkeley</a>, <a href="https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/">Oxford</a> and <a href="http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/centre">Cambridge</a> have established institutes to address the issue. Luminaries like Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Ray Kurzweil have all <a href="http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence/">raised the alarm</a>. </p>
<p>Listening to this, it seems the end may indeed be nigh unless we act before it’s too late.</p>
<h2>The role of the tech industry</h2>
<p>Or could it be that science fiction and industry-fuelled hype have simply overcome better judgement? The cynic might say that the AI doomsday vision has taken on religious proportions. Of course, doomsday visions usually come with a path to salvation. Accordingly, Kurzweil claims we will be virtually immortal soon through <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3551403/Would-want-live-forever-Expert-claims-extend-lives-virtually-immortal-soon-2029.html">nanobots that will digitise our memories</a>. And Musk recently proclaimed that it’s a near certainty that we are <a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-says-were-probably-living-in-a-computer-simulation-heres-the-science-60821">simulations within a computer akin to The Matrix</a>, offering the possibility of a richer encompassing reality where our “programs” can be preserved and reconfigured for centuries. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142198/original/image-20161018-15103-gskdnc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elon Musk is concerned about a robot future.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steve Jurvetson - Flickr: FANUC Robot Assembly Demo</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tech giants have cast themselves as modern gods with the power to either extinguish humanity or make us immortal through their brilliance. This binary vision is buoyed in the tech world because it feeds egos – what conceit could be greater than believing one’s work could usher in such rapid innovation that history as we know it ends? No longer are tech figures cast as mere business leaders, but instead as the chosen few who will determine the future of humanity and beyond. </p>
<p>For Judgement Day researchers, proclamations of an “existential threat” is not just a call to action, but also attracts generous funding and an opportunity to rub shoulders with the tech elite.</p>
<p>So, are smart machines more <a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-is-right-we-need-to-talk-about-artificial-intelligence-33577">likely to kill us</a>, save us, or simply <a href="https://theconversation.com/amazon-echo-will-bring-genuinely-helpful-ai-into-our-homes-much-sooner-than-expected-65495">drive us to work</a>? To answer this question, it helps to step back and look at what is actually happening in AI.</p>
<h2>Underneath the hype</h2>
<p>The basic technologies, such as those recently employed by Google’s DeepMind to <a href="https://theconversation.com/googles-go-victory-shows-ai-thinking-can-be-unpredictable-and-thats-a-concern-56209">defeat a human expert at the game Go</a>, are simply refinements of technologies developed in the 1980s. There have been no qualitative breakthroughs in approach. Instead, performance gains are attributable to larger training sets (also known as big data) and increased processing power. What is unchanged is that most machine systems work by maximising some kind of objective. In a game, the objective is simply to win, which is formally defined (for example capture the king in chess). This is one reason why games (checkers, chess, Go) are AI mainstays – it’s easy to specify the objective function.</p>
<p>In other cases, it may be harder to define the objective and this is where AI could go wrong. However, AI is more likely to go wrong for reasons of incompetence rather than malice. For example, imagine that the US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War was under control of an AI to thwart sneak attack by the Soviet Union. Due to no action of the Soviet Union, a nuclear reactor meltdown occurs in the arsenal and the power grid temporarily collapses. The AI’s sensors detect the disruption and fallout, leading the system to infer an attack is underway. The president instructs the system in a shaky voice to stand down, but the AI takes the troubled voice as evidence the president is being coerced. Missiles released. End of humanity. </p>
<p>The AI was simply following its programming, which led to a catastrophic error. This is exactly the kind of deadly <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831">mistakes that humans almost made during the Cold War</a>. Our destruction would be attributable to our own incompetence rather than an evil AI turning on us – no different than an auto-pilot malfunctioning on a jumbo jet and sending its unfortunate passengers to their doom. In contrast, human pilots have purposefully killed their passengers, so perhaps we should welcome self-driving cars.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142192/original/image-20161018-15096-1l0skek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">I’m a player not a killer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/121483302@N02/14696937320">Global Panorama</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, humans could design AIs to kill, but again this is people killing each other, not some self-aware machine. Western governments have already released computer viruses, such as <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/">Stuxnet</a>, to target critical industrial infrastructure. Future viruses could be more clever and deadly. However, this essentially follows the arc of history where humans use available technologies to kill one another. </p>
<p>There are real dangers from AI but they tend to be economic and social in nature. Clever AI will create tremendous wealth for society, but <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12155808/Robots-will-take-over-most-jobs-within-30-years-experts-warn.html">will leave many people without jobs</a>. Unlike the industrial revolution, there may not be jobs for segments of society as machines may be better at every possible job. There will not be a flood of replacement “AI repair person” jobs to take up the slack. So the real challenge will be how to properly assist those (most of us?) who are displaced by AI. Another issue will be the fact that people will not look after one another as machines permanently displace entire classes of labour, such as healthcare workers.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the governments may prove more level-headed than tech celebrities if they choose to listen to nuanced advice. A recent report by the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the risks of AI, for example, focuses on economic, social and ethical concerns. The take-home message was that AI will make industry more efficient, but may also destabilise society. </p>
<p>If we are going to worry about the future of humanity we should focus on the real challenges, such as climate change and weapons of mass destruction rather than fanciful killer AI robots.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67264/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bradley Love does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The vision that AI will either end or save humankind is buoyed in the tech world because it feeds egos. What we really should worry about is humans.Bradley Love, Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.