Siva Vaidhyanathan: Mark Zuckerberg, you know, the picture is where he’s focused. It has a lot to do with the vision that Google has, that Microsoft has, that Amazon has, that Apple has, to some degree. They are all in a race to become what I had called in my book “the operating system of our lives.” If any of these companies become dominant, that kind of concentration of power should make us all worried deeply.
Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society, in turn, is shaping the web.
My guest today is Siva Vaidhyanathan, who you just heard talking about how big tech companies have expanded to serve a much bigger purpose in our lives than they originally did.
Siva is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. The Center publishes the Virginia Quarterly Review and produces several podcasts including Democracy in Danger, which is now in its third season. Siva is the author of The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry), published by University of California Press in 2011, as well as Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, first published by Oxford in 2018. He has written several other books, has also appeared in several documentary films, and written for many major periodicals. He is currently a regular columnist for The Guardian. In 2012, he was a keynote speaker at the annual ACM Web Science Conference. Welcome, Siva.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: Oh, thank you, Nosh. It’s really good to reconnect with you and to be part of this conversation.
Noshir Contractor: Well, thank you again for joining us. It’s been a while since you connected and presented your work, back in 2012, to the ACM Web Science Conference, and that happened to be shortly after the publication of the book The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). In retrospect, 10 years later, that was pretty prescient. Tell us what got you interested in writing this book and what prompted you to use the phrase “the Googlization of everything.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan: You might remember back in 2004, there were pretty big headlines about Google’s effort to scan in the entire collection of the University of Michigan library and substantial portions of, like, six other libraries, including the Harvard’s library and Oxford’s library and Stanford’s library.
Noshir Contractor: Yes.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: That was the early version of what ultimately became Google Books. At that moment, Google was six years old. Google had been around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had been married, and that didn’t last. And all of these libraries and major universities around the world were saying, by all means, take control of how we will encounter and discover centuries of knowledge and centuries of culture, and I thought this was bizarre, because remember, Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And that’s a lovely mission statement for Oxford University or for Harvard University or the University of Michigan. Why were those libraries not just outsourcing this project, but yielding control to a commercial service which violated, from my point of view, all of the ethics and norms and values of librarianship? There were going to be privacy issues, copyright issues. Now, like everybody else in 2004, I loved Google, I used Google constantly. But of course we all were learning quickly that there are biases built into the search process by virtue of the record of us using the search service, but also the algorithmic choices that Google’s engineers had made along the way and were constantly tweaking. This was going to be an opaque system, as every corporate system is. It was going to be without accountability. It was going to have tremendous power over what we think is true and beautiful and good. And I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s figure out what values we would want in a global digital library,” and, if so, ask ourselves, is Google the right agent? It started out of a conversation with librarians, who were immediately appalled by the fact that their bosses had signed these one-sided contracts. So the other question was, like, who knows what’s going to happen to Google? Why would you put this impressive, bold vision for the organization of the world’s knowledge on a company so young, so inexperienced, so locked in itself, so arrogant, when you have thousands of trained librarians and millions, maybe billions of dollars, if you collectively pursued a project. So I looked at, for instance, the Human Genome Project, which was a knowledge organization challenge that had really hit its peak around 2000. It was about who would map the human genome, and there was a company called Celera that had come in and said, we’ve got this shotgun method of examining the genome and we are going to do it faster than any of the publicly funded projects. The governments of the world, they set up a project that ended up tying Celera in the race. And I said to myself, why can’t we do that with all of the poetry, and all of the history, and all of the almanacs that sit in these libraries? But then I had to figure out, what does Google mean to us, like what does it do to us, how do we live through it. What happens if it becomes more important in our lives than it was in 2004? So ultimately, it came out of 2011 at a moment when people weren’t ready to start questioning Google. I was fortunate in the sense that I could raise some very crucial questions that now are part of everyday discourse.
Noshir Contractor: So today, as you look back, what is the one thing you regret not worrying about then that has now become a worry?
Siva Vaidhyanathan: YouTube. YouTube, which Google had bought a few years before I finished the book, was important, and yet it had not become the corrosive force that it is now. It had not yet clearly shown itself as a recruitment tool for extremism around the world. I also didn’t do much with Android. I didn’t foresee the notion that the Googlization of everything included the Googlization of our operating systems for most of the world, right, you step outside the United States and Western Europe, nobody uses iPhones, right they all use Android devices. An update for 2021, I think half of the book or more would have been about YouTube, and maybe a substantial chapter would have been on Android as well. It would have been a very different book, but similar themes, issues of concentration of power, both over knowledge and politics, issues of the ways algorithmic choices and values are baked in
Noshir Contractor: And after you had begun to till and plow the concerns with Googlization, in 2018, you published a book titled Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. What prompted the switch to Facebook?
Siva Vaidhyanathan: The election of 2016 came. The Trump campaign had exploited Facebook quite deftly and had done so under the radar of political journalists, who were used to following television buys, right, they would report weekly on what states Clinton and Trump were up, you know, the same story they had been writing since 1968. And I said to myself, they are missing what really happened, that the Trump campaign had no professional politicians working for it except for, you know, Paul Manafort. So if you’re dealing with amateurs, Trump is notoriously cheap, you’re hiring all these people from the Trump Organization, which is basically a Facebook ad scam company, and it’s been selling steaks and ties on Facebook for years. That’s what those people knew. They knew how to do Facebook marketing. They spent very little money, because you can do that on Facebook, and they precisely attach themselves to motivate voters who are otherwise unlikely to vote thus increasing turn out slightly for their own side, while using Facebook ads and targeted content to disengage voters who might otherwise have voted for Clinton. It only took a total of 80,000 votes split over Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, to make Trump President. Now that’s the Trump story, but Narendra Modi had done the same thing two years earlier in India right and had done more with Facebook and done worse things on Facebook. And we saw in early 2016 in the Philippines Rodrigo Dutarte doing the same kind of campaign. It became clear to me that if you’re that kind of political candidate running that kind of movement that depends on inciting fears and passions, Facebook is the perfect system for you, because that’s what it amplifies. I wanted to make the claim that Facebook is undermining democracy, because when you look globally, it is creating or amplifying or increasing the coarseness of political discourse and crowding out any form of political discourse that can be rich and deliberative and humane, and while that’s a long and slow process and Facebook is but one actor in that process, it’s deadly to anybody who believes in the future of a democratic republic.
Noshir Contractor: So, unlike The Googlization of Everything book, in the case of the anti-social media book you did provide an update in 2021. What was the takeaway from the update?
Siva Vaidhyanathan: By 2018, by the time the book comes out, journalists had caught on to the story. They also dug deeper or helped me understand things deeper in other places, and we had extra stories. All of the sudden, by 2021, we can add Brazil, we can add Mexico, which a lot of people ignore the effect of Facebook and Whatsapp in Mexico and AMLO and his authoritarian tendencies as well, right, so now I have more data points to tell my own story. So I knew that there had to be factual updates about Facebook. For instance, we had gone from 2 billion users to nearly 3 billion users in the three years that I had written that book, so that had to change. And there was so much more to talk about in terms of the potential or at least interest in regulation. In 2018 I was very bullish on antitrust as a way we could reduce the power of Facebook and Google, but specifically Facebook, and I no longer think that. And I made those arguments in a series of articles that I’ve written making what are sort of counterintuitive arguments, like that quitting Facebook isn’t going to do any good and you might actually do more to limit the power Facebook by staying on it.
Noshir Contractor: Well let’s talk about some of those recent columns, so let’s focus on 2021. Back in January, as you mentioned, you wrote a column in the New Republic titled “Making sense of the Facebook menace: Can the largest media platform in the world ever be made safe for democracy?” In July, you wrote an article in WIRED magazine titled “What if regulating Facebook fails? It seems increasingly likely that antitrust and content moderation tools aren’t up to the task.” I see a more and more ominous sense from you, as we progress through your columns in 2021. Talk about this.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: As I watched both the tone and the substance of regulatory debates in Brussels, in London, in Ottawa, in the United States, and in New Delhi, I started to lose faith in any sense that a company as big and powerful and wealthy and embedded in our lives as Facebook could be sufficiently restrained by the toolkit we have brought forward from the 20th century. All the discussions were about employing 20th century means to address a company that didn’t exist in the 20th century. The best example of this is competition law in Europe or antitrust in the U.S., where you know you can fine Google or Facebook for anti-competitive behavior, and that takes them a week to make back. The notion that breaking up Facebook the way that Standard Royal was broken up in 1910, the way that AT&T was broken up in 1984, none of that tracked for me well. Facebook’s sins and crimes against competition are unlike those companies. You can’t make the case that Facebook is restricting or holding back innovation, which is an important economic argument one has to make within antitrust, you can’t make the case that advertising is more expensive or less effective since Facebook rose. I became dissatisfied also just with the notion that American public discourse can’t seem to grasp the idea that Facebook matters more in the world’s largest democracy than it matters in this democracy, the world’s largest economy. I am willing to bet that when Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and logs in in the morning, his first thought is about India, and his second thought is about the United States. India has nearly 300 million Facebook users and WhatsApp users. That’s only one third of its population. The potential for growth in India is astronomical, and clearly the future, if not the present of Facebook is India. You have to include Egypt, you have to include Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, one of the countries we tend to ignore. You think Facebook cares about its own image in the United States? Facebook already achieved the level of user penetration it was ever going to achieve back in 2010 or 2009 in this country. I wanted to make the case: we need to think bolder and more radically about regulation and we need to think more globally about what we are confronting.
Noshir Contractor: You’re right that the number of users may have reached a plateau but the growth has come by the acquisition of other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: I mean, Zuckerberg knows what he’s doing when he buys platforms like that, and we have to add Oculus to that as well, right, the virtual reality platform. It’s also pretty clear to me that the next five years, we will see Instagram and WhatsApp and probably to some degree Oculus, folded into the Facebook experience in what they call in the company Blue – the standard Facebook interface that we use on our phones and on the web. And I think that’s really what Zuckerberg would like. He doesn’t like having this trifurcated experience. He would like there to be a meta company that he now calls Meta.
Noshir Contractor: Well, speaking of which, in Slate in November of 2021, right after Facebook renamed itself, you had a column titled: “You don’t change your name to ‘Meta’ if you think anyone can stop you. Facebook’s rebranding isn’t a PR move. It’s a vision.” Tell us more about that.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: So in my observations of how Mark Zuckerberg works in the world, I think he is a supremely confident person. He has never let a scandal or an uproar or a problem significantly change his outlook, his agenda, or his company. All the changes he has made have been cosmetic. You know, the big picture is where he’s focused, and the big picture has been consistent probably since the day that Facebook went public, maybe sooner. It has a lot to do with the vision that Google has for its future, that Microsoft has, that Amazon has, that Apple has, to some degree. They are all in a race to become what I had called in my book “the operating system of our lives.” To be the company that most significantly manages, monitors, and monetizes the data that flow through our houses, our cars, our bodies, our refrigerators, our minds, our eyeglasses. Because, and to a lesser degree Apple, they already won the battle to be the operating system of our mobile devices: our phones. Microsoft, for the most part, won the battle globally to be the operating system of our computers that’s in our desks. And Facebook has won the race to manage our social lives. Google has won the race to manage knowledge and navigation. So all of these companies, you could envision them saying, we’ve carved out our lane. nobody’s coming close to us. Instead, they all have a much bolder vision. So Zuckerberg, he’s got this idea of the metaverse where our consciousness is embedded in flows of data, and flows of data are embedded in our consciousness and our bodies and our world, and there is no clear distinction among reality with a capital R, virtual reality, and augmented reality. What I see coming down is potentially much more dangerous than even Facebook, because if any of these companies become dominant in this world, that is a tremendous amount of power. That kind of concentration of power should make us all worried deeply. How that power is exercised I can’t predict. The pattern has been that it’s exercised largely benevolently in intent but clumsily in execution, which allows for easy hijacking by nefarious forces. But one thing we know is that giving so much power to that industry has not made life richer, better, more peaceful, more satisfying, more humane. We’re living faster, we’re living more conveniently. I don’t have to leave this chair. What kind of life do we want to live? We can live a glorious life as human beings who are so easily connected, who have such access to information, but we can’t think of connectivity and information as ends in themselves. They are resources to be harnessed and used carefully toward a good life.
Noshir Contractor: A lot of people who are trying to make sense of the Metaverse, some of them are critical and are talking about coining the phrase “not averse” as a way of looking against the Metaverse. These new developments, this is qualitatively different from what we’ve seen so far with Facebook or Google and represents the next intellectual challenge for web science, but civil society challenge for all of us.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: Our scholarly community is engaged with these issues fully and has been for decades. Katie Pierce at the University of Washington has been writing about the ways that authoritarian dictators exploit social media outside of the gaze of Western powers for 10 or 15 years, and had some reporter for the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN taken Katie’s work seriously, in 2011, 2013, 2015, then what we saw in 2015, 2016, 2021, would not be a surprise. I am in awe of Katie Pierce, of Meredith Clark, who’s doing amazing work on Black Twitter, among other questions of how Twitter affects daily life and the future of journalism. These are the sorts of questions that we ask in our worlds, in our conference rooms. The conversations are exciting. I think we are getting to the point where more scholars are able to get their work out to a larger public. Our community is not prescient, but we’re careful, and we’re engaged. We are still looking at all of this with fresh eyes, with the tool sets of multiple disciplines.
Noshir Contractor: I thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today and look forward to your next venture, whether it’s going after the next company, whether it’s going after Metaverse or something else that you choose to do. It’s always going to be exciting, and your ability of being able to tell stories and make compelling arguments is exactly why I would again recommend folks listen to your podcast that you co-host titled Democracy in Danger.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: Oh Nosh, it’s been such a pleasure to catch up with you. I hope I can see you in person very soon, let’s do that.
Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes using, with caution, your Google, Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft devices. Thanks for listening.