Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies — and We Fall for Them

Remember when we spent our days “surfing” the “information superhighway?”

The 1990s dotcom bubble, when some tech companies spent as much as 90 per cent of their budgets on advertising, brought a flood of hype-driven technobabble designed to lure venture capitalists.

Twenty years later, some tech giants have revenues greater than the GDPs of small countries and have the power to influence election outcomes in major ones.

The need to cut through the hype churned out by the tech giants’ marketing departments has become even more acute.

Here are three techno-utopic terms we should ban in the 2020s.

1. There is no ‘cloud’

“The cloud,” we should have learned by now, simply means “someone else’s computer” (and not necessarily someone trustworthy).

The term is brilliant branding. Selling people on “cloud storage” is a lot easier than convincing them to hand over all their data to a corporation.

And the idea makes sense. With the advent of wide access to high-speed connectivity, it’s efficient — and cheaper — to shift storage and processing from individual devices to central sites.

But there is no safe, secure cloud. Security breaches have exposed millions of users’ accounts — on Dropbox, Amazon, Google and others. Companies have handed files over to authorities, sometimes without a fuss or a word. And Edward Snowden has revealed practically limitless government spying on data moving through the internet.

Where data ends up, how it gets there, and the laws and security processes that govern both are pretty darned important.

The clouds, where the gods live, have always been humanity’s favourite storage place for all that is out of reach of questioning and understanding.

The term seems designed to invoke a magical awe that prevents questions about where your precious files will be stored and handled, and who will be responsible. And any questions will be shielded by an atmospheric layer of “terms of service” agreements created by the best-funded legal teams in the corporate world.

Though the term gained popularity after a 2006 speech by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, cloud computing actually dates back to the original 1990s internet bubble excesses, MIT’s Technology Review reported in 2011. In 1997, personal computer giant Compaq launched its project to sell “cloud computing” services.

Schmidt’s speech gave the term new life. Coincidentally, it was also that year when a U.S. senator described the Internet as a “series of tubes” in a widely mocked speech.

As it turns out, the tubes analogy is a pretty good description of the internet.

And there are questions we should ask about these tubes — as we naturally do with physical things like pipelines — like where they end, where they travel, and what happens if, as we’ve seen with Facebook and others, they leak?

So, let’s stop talking about the cloud. Your files and programs are moving via waves and wires and stored on a computer, owned by a corporation seeking any way it can to skimp on cost or monetize the data.

2. ‘Don’t be evil.’ (At least for a while)

“Don’t be evil” became part of Google’s code of conduct in 2000 and stuck around until 2018.

It exemplifies the post-bubble tech model. Launch as an idealistic company offering free services, earn trust by claiming to be different from traditional profit-driven corporations, win market supremacy — and then sell the company to the highest bidders to exploit the market dominance.

“Think different,” said the cool underdog Apple during one of its most successful campaigns spanning the turn of the millennium, on its way to becoming the most valuable company in the world. (Its CEO was recently called out at the Golden Globes by comedian Ricky Gervais for running “sweatshops” in China.)

The nature of most of these businesses means that dominance is lasting. Despite increasing concern about the ways Facebook is exploiting users’ trust and data, revenues continue to grow. It’s tough to launch a new social media option when billions of people are committed to Mark Zuckerberg’s creature.

(Facebook, for its part, didn’t even promise not to be evil; it merely said it would “move fast and break things” and allowed the public to imagine it had ideals because it was free and followed in the traditional ethos of internet networks.)

No matter what clever slogans, clutter-free web presence or ties to big universities an internet startup touts, you can predict the course it will follow if revenues grow.

An idealistic tech upstart will bring in business expertise — particularly as it moves toward becoming publicly traded — and operate like corporations in other boring old industries, from whence the experts probably came, and concern itself with little other than the bottom line.

And what once was evil will become good business. Like Google’s effort to develop a special search engine for China that will block searches based on terms like human rights, democracy and protests.

3. There is no free, web-based anything

Type “if the ser— ” into Google search, and its artificial intelligence will suggest the rest of a sentence: “If the service is free, you are the product.”

But mostly we don’t care. We keep signing on with the free startups, even though we know they will eventually break our hearts by misusing our data. We refuse to pay a dime to companies who dare ask for money in return for services.

The most famous do-no-evil internet company showed the way.

With Google’s public offering looming late in 2004, it generated buzz by announcing the invitation-only launch of Gmail. It was faster, had more features and offered a gigabyte of free storage, while market leader Hotmail made people pay for anything above two megabytes.

But there was a catch, one that sparked concerns from internet privacy advocates. Google announced it would place ads beside the emails that were relevant to their contents — proving it had read them. (How innocent we were back then, to have been capable of outrage over this.) Politicians sprang into action, proposing bills to make the practice illegal.

Around the same time, an article in the New York Times dismissed the concerns.

Uber-successful tech columnist David Pogue’s article “Google Mail: Virtue Lies In the In-Box” ridiculed privacy concerns.

“Computers do the scanning — dumbly, robotically and with no understanding the words — just the way your current e-mail provider scans your messages for spam and viruses,” he wrote.

The larger storage capacity means the user is “no longer neurotic about checking your mail twice a day just to keep the in-box cleaned out. You can let years’ worth of e-mail pile up, complete with file attachments,” he said.

“In fact,” Pogue enthused, “Google argues that with so much storage, you should get out of the habit of deleting messages.”

“The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads,” he wrote. “Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it.”

Pogue perfectly captured the dismissive attitude toward privacy issues that let tech giants exploit every scrap of our personal information.

Sixteen years later, we should know better and embrace a new slogan — “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Web Service.”

Perhaps the next generation of web giants will yet be those companies that convince us that some things are worth paying for.