This Was the Year Tech Became the Bad Guy

IN THE FIRST season of Veep, the brilliant political comedy from HBO, Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gets, um, wind that in the coming year, a hurricane will share her name. “Shit!” she says. “What if it hits and we get headlines saying, ‘Selina causing large-scale devastation?'” Needless to say, her staff eventually gets the name of the storm changed.

It’s hilarious, and it’s consistent with the show’s portrayal of much of Washington as an endless cycle of image control and crisis management. How much should we trust it?

Tech, it turns out, is very much about image. It’s about power. And it’s about politics.

In 2015, we learned that the tech industry in many ways is a lot like Washington. As much as Silicon Valley likes to portray itself as a noble practitioner of well-intentioned entrepreneurship and innovation, that image itself is largely the product of spin. Tech, it turns out, is very much about image. It’s about power. And it’s about politics.

Consider just a few of the most prominent examples:

• Uber pushing its way into yet more cities and lobbying until regulators relent, which may largely be thanks to having a consummate political insider, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, on the payroll.
• Amazon PR boss Jay Carney—Obama’s former press secretary—dropping a weird, defensive blog post in response to an August New York Times exposé on the online retailer’s brutal workplace culture.
• The Wall Street Journal‘s in-depth report detailing the grossly underdelivered promises of blood test company Theranos and exposing the problem with tech’s hype cycle.
• Airbnb running an ill-conceived ad campaign in San Francisco congratulating itself for obeying the law like everybody else.
• The daily fantasy sports sites DraftKings and FanDuelcoming under fire from regulators who said their supposedly new kind of contest amounted to little more than old-school gambling.
• Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, would put most of their wealth into a new philanthropic organization that journalists pointed out would be structured as an LLC, giving the couple far more control than they first let on.

In short, tech companies can no longer take for granted that the public will hail them as brave disruptors of the status quo, the noble entrepreneurs on whom much of society has bet its optimism. These days, it seems, a lot of that optimism has given way to cynicism. Tech, it turns out, can also be the bad guy.

Pushing Back

Some of this souring has to do with the nature of the new kinds of businesses technology has bred. Nowadays, tech success isn’t necessarily predicated on building whole economies around new industries, as Amazon did with online retail, for instance, or Facebook and Twitter did with social networking. Instead, many wildly successful startups of today—the Ubers and Airbnbs and FanDuels—depend on seeking out legal ambiguity and exploiting it.

And these companies have recognized that when they’re playing in the world of public policy, political savvy matters at least as much as innovative technology. “Most of the political campaigns that are happening are from the companies that are facing some kind of government scrutiny or regulation of their industry,” says Matt Stempeck, director of civic technology at Microsoft.