The threat that big tech poses to our democracy, health and environment goes far further than just children. Banning children from social media will do nothing to solve the real problems at hand. The Federal Government must address the root of these problems to protect our national sovereignty and begin to build technology that serves the public good.
Banning children from social media is bad policy. Not because social media isn’t harmful for children, it clearly is. But because it was a rushed announcement designed to sound good during an appearance on Sunrise rather than being serious about protecting people from the many harms being propagated by big tech.
While the movement to take on big tech in Australia isn’t as big as it needs to be, there is a diverse ecosystem of people who have been taking on big tech for years and there is a wealth of policy, technology and campaigning experience. But the Albanese government has sidelined experts and activists, instead choosing to run with the naive hope that a tabloid policy will mitigate right wing attacks. Labor has once again turned potential allies into critics and left themselves isolated and vulnerable.
Big tech poses a serious risk to our national sovereignty, democracy and environment. Big tech have unchecked private power to shape our access to news, entertainment and information. While attempts to regulate how they use that power are important in the short term, regulation alone will always be insufficient.
We are in the midst of an economic restructuring, and the fight over the future of technology is at the heart of that project. We need to be serious and think long term about the technological future that we want for our society. We can’t let unaccountable tech-billionaires make these decisions for us. The Australian public needs a genuine stake in the future of technology in Australia, so that we can develop technology that serves that public good, not just for profit.
Big Tech's hostile vision
Big tech’s vision for our technology is increasingly anti-social and hostile. Big tech wants us spending more time glued to our screens where our interests and activities can be tracked and our attention sold to advertisers. Yes, these technologies are addictive. Of course they are. There is no incentive for these companies to design them any other way.
But the worst is yet to come. Generative AI hype has enveloped the tech world, causing a rush to build new hyper scale data-centres. While language such as “the cloud” is designed to obscure this fact, the internet is a very physical thing. It requires vast amounts of land, water, energy and mineral resources to operate. AI is especially resource intensive.
But resource usage isn’t the only harm. In his recent podcast mini-series, Data Vampires, Paris Marx digs further into the social and political risks of generative AI:
There are many harms we can talk about with generative AI and some of the more common forms of it too. We could talk about how companies are stealing all this data and using it to harm the prospects of workers in different industries, like in visual media, writing, journalism, and more. Or we could talk about the waves of AI-generated bullshit flooding onto the web — some with malicious intent like non-consensual deepfake and AI nudes, but much more of it being made just to try to make a buck through social media engagement or tricking people into scams.
But even more importantly, AI takes decisions away from people and concentrates even more decision making power over our lives into an even smaller group. The barriers to entry for AI are extremely high, with only the largest of tech companies having access to the computing resources required. As Paris Marx explains, “AI … erodes the power of much of the public over their own lives, taking away their autonomy by shifting decisions to unaccountable technologies and the people who control them.” From a political point of view, generative AI is simply a way for big to to further cement their position of control over our lives.
We do not need generative AI. The only people who are served by this technology are the people who own it. They have plagiarised our art and our ideas to build a machine that is hostile to our humanity, devalues our creativity and will be increasingly used to manage humans and demand that we work more like machines.
Generative AI will be used to abstract and justify cruelty at every level. It is already helping resources flow from the working class to the owners of this technology. It is already causing serious environmental harm. It is already flooding our information ecosystem with garbage, devaluing human expression, art and ideas.
We know that the future that big tech wants to create for us is awful because the present that they have created for us is already awful.
Taking on big tech in Australia
Last year I helped write a report with Digital Rights Watch called ‘Democratising Digital Economies’. It is a broad but comprehensive summary of the ways that that big tech exerts control over our society and lives.
But more importantly, it was meant to be a call to arms to civil society in Australia to wake up to the size of the threat that big tech poses. It contained a number of proposals for how we could begin to build momentum for a democratic digital future.
A core recommendation of the report was the establishment of an Australian Digital Corporation. In the report we argued:
Australia has a long and proud history of building and supporting public institutions that work towards the benefit of all Australians. When private enterprise failed to deliver adequate broadcasting services we supported the development of the ABC to ensure that all Australians could benefit from the technology.
In the digital age, when privately controlled digital technology is failing the Australian people, our culture and our democracy, we need a new public institution that can drive digital services in the public interest.
One of the less visible, and less discussed parts of big tech’s power is their ownership of the physical infrastructure that runs the internet. Especially in the age of cloud computing and AI, government, business and individuals are increasingly reliant on infrastructure owned by big tech. Worryingly, governments in Australia are giving over more power to big tech as they move digital services off their own servers and into cloud computing services that are owned by big tech.
An Australia Digital Corporation would give the Australian public a real stake in the digital economy. We could create thousands of good public service jobs in everything from construction (building and maintaining data centres are very much blue collar jobs) to software engineering.
We don’t need to begin by building a publicly owned Facebook or Google, but we could begin by building a publicly owned cloud computing provider that sells services to all levels of government. But it doesn’t have to stop there. An Australia Digital Corporation could help us reimagine an internet for the people. It could provide support to schools, libraries and other community groups to provide human scale technologies that support learning, connection and culture. It could develop payment technologies so that local businesses aren’t reliant on PayPal, Square and Stripe.
Covid, the election of Donald Trump and a more volatile and isolationist world should show us what the risks are if we leave the power over technology in other people’s hands. We need to begin to not just imagine, but to build, a future where technology is in the hands of the people. An Australia Digital Corporation would be just the beginning, but it’s a far better place to start than an ill-conceived social media ban for children.