The students booing artificial intelligence at commencements across the country are not just worried about jobs. They have learned an urgent lesson from the not-so-distant past.
They know that the familiar promise of empowerment and creativity will continue to give way to the pathologies of the online surveillance economy: viral slop, commercial manipulation and addictive apps — this time on automated steroids.
The utopian promise of the tech industry is on life support. The hope that it would empower workers and revitalize democracy soured sometime between the massive data breach of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the rapid uptake of the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the online economy.
If Silicon Valley once received the enthusiastic reception reserved for “good guy capitalists,” those days are over, and deservedly so.
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The backlash is not limited to AI. The luster and hype surrounding the entire tech industry in the 1990s and 2000s, back when Gen Xers and millennials flocked to Silicon Valley, have fizzled, replaced by mass layoffs and a litany of social harms.
It’s not only that Gen Z has lost faith in Big Tech. In the face of galloping economic inequality and democratic backsliding, many now view tech titans as greed-fueled latter-day barons of capitalism.
Gen Z has learned that what determines the future of technological innovations is not their inherent capabilities but the choices of the private organizations that deploy them. Students worry that AI will enhance the data-driven manipulation of consumers and flood the media environment with synthetic clickbait.
These young people are already seeing what technology is doing to their lives and education and don’t like the results. At my own institution, students have formed a Luddite Club to resist the siren song of social media, and they’re not alone.
In our short-attention-span era, it isn’t easy to hark back to the heady days of the early web, when we were assured everyone would benefit from access to the accumulated knowledge of the world and become active participants in well-informed self-governance. The futurist George Gilder predicted in the 1990s, for example, that the personal computer would become “a powerful force for democracy, individuality, community and high culture.”
Today’s generation was not around for any of that, and now they are up against the reality the tech industry actually delivered — not the fantasy it sold. They are confronting the fact that what matters is not just the technology, but the social relations in which it is embedded.
Instead of cultural uplift and the creation of an informed citizenry, young people see billionaires profiting from pumping the most sensational and polarizing viral content into our news feeds.
Instead of prosperity, they see the real wages of working Americans in decline and a country in which the richest one percent control more wealth than ever before. They see Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sending his fiancée and a pop star into the stratosphere while Amazon workers pee in bottles and collect food stamps.
Instead of a vibrant information-enhanced multicultural democracy, they see a country sliding into authoritarianism and corruption at an unprecedented scale while platforms hire teams of psychologists to help addict young people to online brain rot.
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In the face of these developments, the tech oligopolists remain in something of a time warp. They look in the mirror and fail to see the caricature of extreme, unaccountable wealth they have become; they strain instead to recapture the image of themselves as hip young founders in hoodies parading through plush Silicon Valley campuses while promoting “don’t-be-evil” happy capitalism.
The ubiquitous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen encapsulates this midlife crisis. A one-time founder of the web browser Netscape, he recently bemoaned the demise of the “deal” whereby tech moguls were revered by the media, awarded honorary degrees “from all the universities” and invited to “all the great parties.”
If tech billionaires are too cocooned in their fabulous wealth to absorb the lessons of history, this year’s crop of college students is not. They see a bigger picture: a world with powerful AI tools in the hands of a few companies devoted to using our own data to control and manipulate us.
They see a present in which companies with unprecedented surveillance power are prostrating themselves before an increasingly authoritarian administration bent on targeting its perceived political foes.
During his commencement address at the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to the AI skepticism of graduating seniors by urging them to play a role in shaping the future of AI. He was seemingly attempting to revive the promise of an earlier digital age. Schmidt, 71, is old enough to remember when those claims held currency, while today’s students are not.
They have quickly learned what earlier generations have been slow to admit: When billionaires pledge to empower the world, they usually only mean themselves.
Mark Andrejevic is a professor of media studies at Pomona College.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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