Author: Dr Tim Coles

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 6 (Dec 2020)

Internet communication has gone from emails, messaging boards, and chatrooms, to sophisticated, all-pervasive networking. Social media companies build addictiveness into their products. The longer you spend on their sites and apps, the more data they generate. The more data, the more accurately they anticipate what you’ll do next and for how long. The better their predictions, the more money they make by selling your attention to advertisers. 

Depressed and insecure about their value as human beings, the younger generations grow up knowing only digital imprisonment. Older users are trapped in polarised bubbles of political hate. As usual, the rich and powerful are the beneficiaries. 

Masters of Manipulation

Humans are social animals. But big business wants us isolated, distracted, and susceptible to marketing. Using techniques based on classical conditioning, social media programmers bridge the gap between corporate profits and our need to communicate by keeping us simultaneously isolated and networked.

The Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), pioneered research into conditioned reflexes, arguing that behaviour is rooted in the environment. His work was followed by the Americans John B. Watson (1878–1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904–90). Their often cruel conditioning experiments, conducted on animals and infants, laid the basis for gambling and advertising design. As early as the 1900s, slot machines were designed to make noises, like bell sounds, to elicit conditioned responses to keep the gambler fixed on the machine: just as Pavlov used a bell to condition his dogs to salivate. By the 1980s, slot machines had incorporated electronics to advantage particular symbols whilst giving the gambler the impression that they are near victory. “Stop buttons” gave the gambler the illusion of control. Sandy Parakilas, former Platform Operations Manager at Facebook, says: “Social media is very similar to a slot machine.”

Psychologist Watson’s experiments “set into motion industry-wide change” in TV, radio, billboard, and print advertising “that continued to develop until the present,” says historian Abby Bartholomew. Topics included emotional arousal in audiences (e.g., sexy actress → buy the product), brand loyalty (e.g., Disney is your family), and motivational studies (e.g., buy the product → look as good as this guy). 

Many of these techniques involve stimulating so-called “feel good” chemicals like dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin. These are released when eating, exercising, having sex, and engaging in positive social interactions. Software designers learned that their release can be triggered by simple and unexpected things, like getting an email, being “friended,” seeing a retweet, and getting a like. The billionaire co-founder of Facebook and Napster, Sean Parker, said that the aim is to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post.” But Parker also said of his company: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” 

Facebook’s former Vice President of User Growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, doesn’t allow his children to use Facebook and says “we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric.” Tim Cook, the CEO of the world’s first trillion-dollar company Apple, on whose iPhones the addictions mainly occur, bluntly said of his young relatives: “I don’t want them on a social network.”

With the understanding that “the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been in the business of selling their users” (technology investor, Roger McNamee), social media designers built upon the history of behaviourism and game addiction to keep users hooked. For example: In the good ol’ days, sites including the BBC and YouTube had page numbers (“pagination”), which gave users a sense of where they were in their search for an article or video. If the search results were poor, the user knew to skip to the last page and work backwards. But pages were phased out and replaced with “infinite scroll,” a feature designed in 2006 by Aza Raskin of Jawbone and Mozilla. Pagination, for instance, gives the user a stopping cue. Designers have systematically removed stopping cues. Likening infinite scroll to “behavioural cocaine,” Raskin said: “If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling.” 

How They Do It & How It Hurts

Users think that they have control over their social media habits and the information being fed to them, including news and suggested webpages, are coming to them organically. But, unbeknownst to them, the framework is calculated. The US Deep State, for instance, helped to develop social networks. Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their web crawling software, which they later turned into Google, with money from the US Defense Research Projects Agency. Referring to the Massive Digital Data Systems, the CIA-funded Dr Bhavani Thuraisingham confirmed that “[t]he intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding.”

Consider how the technologies were commercialised. “Growth” means advertising money accrued from sites visited, content browsed, links clicked, pages shared, etc. “Growth hackers” are described by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris as “engineers whose job is to hack people’s psychology so they can get more growth.” Designers build applications into software that manipulate users’ unconscious behavioural cues to lead them in certain directions. 

To give an example: The feel-good chemical oxytocin is released during positive social interactions. It is likely stimulated when social media companies send an email alert that family have shared a new photo. Other human foibles include novelty-seeking (for potential rewards) and temptation (fear of missing out or FOMO). These are linked to the feel-good chemical dopamine. Rather than including the new family photo in the email, the email is designed with a URL feature to tempt the user to click the link which directs them to the social media site in order to see the new photo. The chemical-reward response chain is as follows: family (oxytocin) → novelty/new photo (dopamine), temptation to click/FOMO → reward from positive social interaction after clicking and seeing the new photo (oxytocin-dopamine stimulation). 

This convoluted chain of events is designed to sell the user’s attention to advertisers. The more time spent doing these things, the more adverts can be directed at the user and the more money for the social media company. Harris says “you are being programmed at a deeper level.” 

In addition, tailored psychological profiles of users are secretly built, bought from, and sold to data brokers, like Experian. User behavioural patterns feed deep learning programmes which aim to predict the user’s next online move according to their personal tastes and previous browsing patterns. The more accurate the prediction, the more likely their attention is drawn to an advert and the more money social media firms accrue. Says former Mozilla’s Raskin: “They’re competing for your attention.” He asks: “How much of your life can we get you to give to us?”

Instagram was developed in 2010 by Facebook as a photo and video sharing service. It is used by a billion people globally and, unlike the teen-loving Snapchat, is used mainly by 18-44-year-olds. Instagram falls into the so-called “painkiller app” category. One designer explains that such apps “typically generate a stimulus, which usually revolves around negative emotions such as loneliness or boredom.”

Snapchat is a messaging app designed in 2011 that stores pictures (“Snaps”) for a short period of time. The app is used by 240 million people per day. Unlike YouTube, most of whose users are male, the majority of Snapchat users are female. Only 17 per cent of users are over 35. Its model is Snapstreak: a tracker that counts the days since the user replied to the Snap. Designers built FOMO (noted above) into Snapchat. The longer the user’s non-reply, the greater their credit score decline. This can lead to addiction because, unlike Facebook, Snapchat tags are “strong ties” (e.g., close friends, family), so the pressure to reply is greater.

In addition to the harmful content of social media – sexualised children, impossible and ever-changing beauty standards, cyberbullying, gaming addiction, loss of sleep, etc. – the very design of social media hurts young users. We all need to love ourselves and to feel loved by a small circle of others: friends, family, and partners. Young people are particularly susceptible to self-loathing and questioning whether someone loves them. 

The introduction of social media has been devastating. A third of all teens who spend at least two hours a day on social media, i.e., the majority, have at least one suicide risk factor. The percentage increases to nearly half for those who spend five hours or more. A study of 14-year-olds found that those with fewer social media likes than their peers experienced depressive symptoms. Teens who are already victimised at school or within their peer-group were the worst-affected.

Divided & Conquered

Another feature built into social media is the polarisation of users along political lines; a phenomenon that mainly concerns people of voting age. One of the many human foibles exploited by social media designers is homophily: our love of things and people similar and familiar to us. Homophily makes us feel safe, understood, validated, and positively reinforced. It stimulates feel-good chemicals and, in social media contexts, is exploited to keep us inside an echo-chamber so that our biases are constantly reinforced, and we stay online for longer. But is this healthy?

Referring to Usenet group discussions, the lawyer Mike Godwin formulated the Rule of Hitler Analogies (or Godwin’s Law), which correctly posits that the longer an online discussion, the higher the probability that a user will compare others to Hitler. The formula was a reflection of users’ lack of tolerance toward the views of others. 

A projection published in 2008 asked if people will be more tolerant due to the internet. Nearly six in 10 participants disagreed, compared to just three in 10 who agreed. In many ways, the industry specialists were fatalistic. Internet architect, Fred Baker of Cisco Systems, said: “Human nature will not have changed. There will be wider understanding of viewpoints, but tolerance of fundamental disagreement will not have improved.” Philip Lu of Wells Fargo Bank Internet Services said: “Just as social networking has allowed people to become more interconnected, this will also allow those with extreme views… to connect to their ‘kindred’ spirits.” Dan Larson of the PKD Foundation said: “The more open and free people are to pass on their inner feelings about things/people, especially under the anonymity of the Internet – will only foster more and more vitriol and bigotry.”

Users can artificially inflate their importance and the strength of their arguments by creating multiple accounts with different names (“sock puppets”). Some websites sell “followers” to boost users’ profiles. It is estimated that half of the Twitter followers of celebrities and politicians are bots. Gibberish-spewing algorithms have been programmed to write fake reviews on Amazon to hurt competitors’ sales. In at least one case, a pro-Israeli troll was unmasked posing as an anti-Semite in order to give the impression that anti-Semitism is rampant online and thus users should have more sympathy with Israel. Content creators increasingly find themselves de-platformed because of their political views while others’ social media accounts are suppressed by design (“shadow-banning”). 

In the age of COVID, disinformation on both sides is spread: the severity of the disease, efficacy of vaccines, necessity of lockdowns, etc. As with US politics, Brexit, climate change, etc. neither side wants to talk rationally and open-mindedly with the other. The very designs of social media make this very difficult. 

It should be emphasised that some social media are designed to create echo-chambers, and others are not. Cinelli et al. studied conversations about emotive subjects – abortion and vaccines – and found that while Facebook and Twitter show clear evidence of the echo-chamber effect, Reddit and Gab do not. Sasahara et al. demonstrate that due to users’ need for validation, when likes and friendships are withdrawn the network tends to descend into an echo-chamber. 

Conclusion: What Can We Do?

Noted above is Google’s seed-funding from the Deep State. More recently, the ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others were passing user data onto his former employer. Government and big tech became “the left hand and the right hand of the same body.” In the UK, the NSA worked with Government Communications Headquarters on the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Leaks revealed an unprecedented, real-time surveillance and disruption operation that included hacking users’ social media accounts, posting content in their name, deleting their accounts, luring them into honey-traps, planting incriminating evidence on them, and more. 

To beat the antisocial social network, we need to remember who we are and what real communication is. We need to protect the young from the all-pervasive clutches of “social media” and to realise that we are being sold. 

Ask yourself: Do you use social media solely to organise protests, alert friends to alternative healing products, and spread anti-war messages? Or do you use it to send irrelevant information about your day-to-day habits in anticipation that an emoji or “like” will appear? 

Taking a step back can allow us to see outside and indeed prick the bubble of digital hatred in which the Deep State and corporate sectors have imprisoned us. 

Dr Tim Coles’s new book The War on You can be obtained from online booksellers & www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B08HB68N97

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Footnotes

1. Roger Collier (2008) Canadian Medical Association Journal, 179(1): 23-24

2. Quoted in Hilary Andersson, BBC Panorama, 3 July 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44640959

3. Abby Bartholomew (2013) University of Nebraska, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=journalismdiss

4. Quoted in Mike Allen, Axios, 9 November 2017, www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792-f855e7b4-4e99-4d60-8d51-2775559c2671.html

5. Quoted in James Vincent, The Verge, 11 December 2017, www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

6. Quoted in Samuel Gibbs, Guardian, 19 January 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/tim-cook-i-dont-want-my-nephew-on-a-social-network

7. Interviewed in The Social Dilemma (2020), Netflix. 

8. Adam Alter (2017) Irresistible, London: Penguin

9. Quoted in Sean Keane, CNet, 4 July 2018, www.cnet.com/news/facebook-twitter-are-designed-to-be-like-behavioural-cocaine-for-users-insiders/

10. Quoted in Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence, 22 January 2015, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

11. Interviewed in The Social Dilemma (2020), Netflix

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid. 

14. J. Clement, Statista, 29 October 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/325587/instagram-global-age-group/

15. Quoted in Hannah Schwär & Qayyah Moynihan, Business Insider, 5 April 2020, www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-been-deliberately-designed-to-mimic-addictive-painkillers-2018-12

16. J. Clement, Statista, 21 October 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

17. J. Clement, Statista, 29 October 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/933948/snapchat-global-user-age-distribution/

18. Sara Fischer, Axios, 17 October 2017, www.axios.com/teens-are-addicted-to-snapchat-1513306234-2b836b56-97c9-4b50-af8e-391fe68681ff.html

19. Leah Shafer, Usable Knowledge (Harvard), 15 December 2017, www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/12/social-media-and-teen-anxiety

20. Hae Yeon Lee et al. (2020) Child Development: DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13422

21. Rebecca Moore (2018) Nova Religio, 22(2): 145-54

22. All quoted in Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie, The Future of the Internet III, Pew Internet and American Life Project, 14 December 2008, pp. 38-46, www.pewresearch.org/internet/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/media/Files/Reports/2008/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf

23. Caroline Forsey, HubSpot, 18 October 2020, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buy-instagram-followers

24. Rand Fishkin, SparkToro, 9 October 2018, https://sparktoro.com/blog/we-analyzed-every-twitter-account-following-donald-trump-61-are-bots-spam-inactive-or-propaganda/

25. See my CounterPunch article, 4 October 2019, www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/04/robot-trolls-on-amazon-how-fake-reviews-could-undermine-progressive-politics/

26. Lance Tapley, Common Dreams, 20 August 2014, https://www.commondreams.org/hambaconeggs

27. Caroline Forsey, HubSpot, 27 August 2019, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/instagram-shadowban

28. Matteo Cinelli (2020) “Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis,” arXiv:2004.09603

29. Kazutoshi Sasahara et al. (2020) Journal of Computational Social Science: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s42001-020-00084-7.pdf

30. Quoted in Katie Collins, CNet, 4 November 2019, www.cnet.com/news/edward-snowden-says-facebook-amazon-and-google-engage-in-abuse/

21. JTRIG (2014) The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1021430/the-art-of-deception-training-for-a-new.pdf

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 3 (June 2019)

There is a new, mega-rich global elite consisting of a small number of billionaires and multibillionaires. Many of them made their money in the technology sector. Others play financial markets or inherit fortunes. They are wealthier and more powerful than some entire nation-states. 

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) says: “Whilst there have always been differences between the wealthier, better educated and the less privileged, these differences appear likely to widen in the coming decades.” 

The mega-rich deliberately order the world in ways that guarantee their wealth by institutionalising inequality. Occasionally, this is admitted. In 1997, a book published by the Royal Institute for International Affairs in the UK acknowledged: “The present international order may not be the best of all possible worlds, but for one of the ‘fat cats of the West’ enjoying a privileged position in an international society that is structured and organised in ways which perpetuate those privileges, there are good reasons for not pursuing radical change.” 

This is also true of internal policymaking. The third richest man in the world, Warren Buffett (worth over $80bn), confirmed this: “There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won.” This echoes his statement in 2006, just prior to the global financial crisis: “There’s class warfare all right… but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Around the same time, the liquidity firm Citigroup circulated an investor memo, stating: “Society and governments need to be amenable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain that fatter profit share.” More recently, the UK MoD admitted: “In the coming decades, the very highest earners will almost certainly remain rich, entrenching the power of a small elite. Vested interests could reduce the prospect of economic reforms that would benefit the poorest.”

Consider the enormous concentration of wealth and power that results from this imbalance. 

Ever-Increasing Power

Global and national inequality is staggering and getting worse. By 2011, a mere 147 – mainly US and European – corporations owned and controlled 40% of world trade and investment. Just four corporations influence the profitability and power of these 147: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s ratings agency; Northwestern Mutual, owner of the indexer Russell Investments; the CME Group, which owns 90% of the Dow Jones market index; and Barclay’s bond fund index. Evaluative decisions by analysts at these firms affect the wealth and performance of each of the 147 giants.

That’s corporate wealth concentration. But what about wealth concentration among individuals?

There are 7.7 billion people in the world. Of those, just 2,153 are billionaires. According to Forbes, their combined wealth totals $8.7 trillion. The list of billionaires reflects where power is most concentrated: in the US. While China and Europe’s number of billionaires declined in the previous 12 months, the US and Brazil gained billionaires. The US is home to 607 billionaires or 0.000001% of the population. It is worth noting that President Donald Trump was a billionaire before he came to power. Trump has cut taxes for his fellow billionaires. As an indication of continued wealth concentration, consider the wealth disparity among the billionaire class itself. He Xiangjian, founder of the Midea Group, is the joint-50th richest person, worth over $19.8bn. Jeff Bezos, by comparison, the founder of Amazon, is the richest man in the world, worth over $131bn – more than six times He Xiangjian.

Part of the problem has been the US-led imposition of an economic dogma called “neoliberalism” (which is neither new nor liberal) on much of the rest of the world. 

Neoliberalism can be roughly defined as: 

1) Financialisation, i.e., allowing investors to make money from money as opposed to tangible things; 

2) Deregulating financial services; 

3) Taking out government insurance policies so that working people bail out financial institutions; 

4) Cutting taxes for the wealthy; 

5) Privatising public services to reduce social mobility; 

6) Imposing austerity to make markets more attractive to investors. 

Neoliberalism has cut taxes for the super-rich, enabling them to hold onto their wealth at the expense of others. According to Oxfam, the average rate of personal income tax for the wealthy was 62% in 1970. In 2013, it was 38%. In the UK, the poorest 10% pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the richest 10%. Global GDP, i.e., how much money there is in the world, is $80 trillion. But, of this, $7.6 trillion is untaxed. In the decade since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires doubled. This reveals that the system rewards greed. In 2017, 43 people owned as much wealth as half the world’s poorest. In 2018, the number was 26.

To put all this into perspective, Jeff Bezos owns as much wealth as the poorest fifty countries. When it comes to more ‘developed’ nations, Bezos’s wealth equals the entire GDP of Hungary. Consider how Bezos makes his money. Amazon is a corporation that primarily advertises and delivers products. The innovation, design, and investment in and of those products is the work of others. Amazon treats “workers like robots” by spying on them, discouraging unions, offering insecure contracts, and encouraging long hours. Amazon is also notorious for paying little or no corporation tax. Amazon is an online retailer. The Internet was developed by the US Defense Department in the 1960s as ARPANET, with public money. The satellites that enable online transactions are first and foremost military hardware. Not only did Amazon take advantage of state-funded innovation, but it also rewards government investors by selling the CIA cloud technology and the Pentagon artificial intelligence.

Bezos is far from being the only one. Bill Gates’s Microsoft and the late Steve Jobs’s Apple, which became the first trillion-dollar company, also enjoy low taxes, technologies developed with government grants, and procurement contracts. 

Consider also the immoral activities of other hi-tech nouvelle méga riche. Without making it clear to users, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (worth $66bn) has made his money by selling personal data to insurers and advertisers. Scientists have used Facebook in social media experiments without the knowledge or consent of users in an effort to see how memes affect mood. 

Other mega-rich, including the hedge fund manager Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies, used Facebook to market political candidates. Other tech billionaires include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google technology was funded by the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Also relying on technologies developed by the Pentagon with workers’ tax dollars, the company cooperates with the National Security Agency to spy on citizens and it has even enabled US assassination programmes. 

Consequences

How do the billionaires get away with it, and what are the social and political consequences? The examples below are from the US, but it should be noted that the US exports its mega-wealth model. 

A study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page on plutocracy (government by the rich) notes that the rich buy political parties. Politicians draft and/or vote for laws that help the rich. The authors analysed 1,779 policy issues in the US and conclude that “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Unlike the public, “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy.” Other research into wealth inequality in the US finds that “[c]ertain policies, such as the decreased support for unions and tax cuts favouring the relatively well-off and corporations, have benefitted a small minority of the population at the expense of the majority and have thus contributed to widening income inequality.” 

At the turn of the last century, 9% of American families owned 71% of the nation’s wealth. The elite of the day included familiar names: John D. Rockefeller (oil), J.P. Morgan (banking), W. Averell Harriman (industry), and so on. Things balanced out after the Second World War, with the majority of Americans becoming middle class. Gradually, state controls over the economy were removed, and the situation reverted to the inequality of bygone centuries. 

Since the 1970s, the US middle class has been shrinking. Until recently, the middle classes of Asia grew, precisely because strong Asian economies (notably China, South Korea, and Singapore) either retained some state controls or refused to adopt the US neoliberal model. 

Alan B. Krueger, a labour economist and key Obama advisor, explains that, “since the 1970s income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution than in the middle, and it has shrunk for those at the bottom.” Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% ((multi)millionaires and (multi)billionaires) enjoyed a 278% increase in their after-tax incomes. But 60% of Americans saw their incomes rise by just 40%, which when adjusted for rising living costs means stagnation. Krueger notes that during that period, $1.1 trillion of annual income was moved to the top 1%. “Put another way, the increase in the share of income going to the top 1% over this period exceeds the total amount of income that the entire bottom 40 percent of households receives.”

The exportation of this model means that Australia, Britain, and Canada became what the billionaire-dollar liquidity firm Citigroup calls “plutonomies,” economies in which the rich drive luxury goods markets such as jewellery, fashion, cruises, and sports cars: hence the recent entry of celebrity Kylie Jenner into the billionaire class. The Citigroup document also notes that in plutonomies the top 1% owns 40% as much wealth as the bottom 95%. No matter where you live, you can’t escape the institutional structures that create inequality. 

The US military exists, in part, to maintain the unjust status quo. Yet, it acknowledges the dangers of dominance: “A global populace that is increasingly attuned and sensitive to disparities in economic resources and the diffusion of social influence,” thanks in part to the very technologies that enrich the rich, “will lead to further challenges to the status quo and lead to system rattling events,” like Brexit or the Yellow Vest protestors in France. 

The mega-rich and international think tanks and forums they sponsor are beginning to reluctantly accept that their status quo political puppets might get voted out of office and give way to so-called far-left or far-right parties unless they address wealth inequality. 

New Paradigms of Control

The question, then, is how to deal with the restless and disaffected majority while not radically altering the system and taking away the privileges of the elite. In 1961, US President John F Kennedy said: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” In the 1980s, World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab said: “Economic globalisation has entered a critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects… is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries… This can easily turn into revolt.” More recently, he said: “Today, we face a backlash against that system and the elites who are considered to be its unilateral beneficiaries.” Likewise, the billionaire Johann Rupert of Cartier jewellery (one of the many luxury services driving plutonomies) said: “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us.” Similarly, the British MoD discusses
“[m]anagement of societal inequalities,” as opposed to the elimination of social inequality.

Many of the new elites make people redundant by automating the workplace. While Amazon still relies on human shelf-stackers and delivery drivers, it uses an increasing number of physical robots to stack shelves and algorithmic robots to assist online customers. Likewise, Facebook and Google’s content filters rely on heavy automation. This is creating precarious employment conditions. According to the Washington Post (which is owned by Bezos): “…the modern emerging workforce of tech, urbanised professionals, and ‘gig economy’ labourers all represent an entirely new political demographic.” Politicians then “focus more on education, research and entrepreneurship, and less on regulations and the priorities of labour unions.” 

But there are many problems. For one thing, the financial services economy, which markets everything, has made “education” a form of unsustainable debt. The quality of US education is notoriously low by world standards, and many young people are “overqualified” for menial jobs, like delivering for Uber or stacking shelves in Amazon warehouses. The UK MoD acknowledges that, “Freelance work is… often low-paid, lacking the benefits and security of formal employment and, therefore, the growth of the gig economy could increase inequality.”

The crisis of what to do with a young, indebted, restless population automated out of steady work by – and competing with – algorithms and physical robots has been considered for at least 50 years. 

Traditionally, ‘education’ meant brainwashing children to work in menial jobs for life in adulthood. But as the economy changes and employment becomes less stable, new methods of ‘education’ for re-skilling adults are required. In the late 1960s, future political advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski authored a book in which he advocated for lifelong learning as a way of re-skilling an aging population that finds its employment opportunities diminished, as small-to-medium-sized businesses get overtaken by tech giants. Around the same time, the British Labour Party (when it was a real labour party) introduced the Open University with the aim of providing lifelong learning. Likewise, in the 1980s, futurist Alvin Toffler envisaged an “electronic village” in which flexible working hours and lifelong learning would be required in a hi-tech economy.

To keep the poor from rioting while trapping them in a system that works for those who design it, today’s multibillionaire elites help to privatise public services and education by offering scholarships and infrastructure investments. In doing so, they train poor people to work for their system by developing others’ technology skills while hiding their own taxable wealth in charity foundations. 

Howard G. Buffett is the son of Warren. While enjoying largely tax-free wealth that further impoverishes the global poor, the Buffetts, via Howard’s foundation, invest in dams and irrigation in the poorest nations of Africa. Bezos’s foundation awards scholarships for STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Zuckerberg’s foundation seeks “to find new ways to leverage technology, community-driven solutions, and collaboration to accelerate progress in Science, Education, and within our Justice & Opportunity work.” 

Conclusion

By using free online services, we have allowed ourselves to be the products that tech giants sell to advertisers. By not organising to raise taxes on the mega-wealthy, we have underfunded our public services. By not keeping an eye on who’s funding what, we’ve allowed our political parties to hoover up donations from elites. By failing to understand the economy, we’ve allowed a new normal of instability and political uncertainty to flourish to the advantage of asset managers and hedge fund investors. As the US pursues global domination, this model will continue to be exported. It’s time to wake up. 

The footnotes for this article are published in the print and PDF versions of this magazine.

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