The word ‘techlash’ might appear to be a useful term to describe politicians’ and society’s changing attitude to the technology industry, but it’s worth unpicking exactly where the term has come from and how its meaning has evolved. Even if it manages to capture a vague sense of growing cynicism about technology in general and ‘big tech’ in particular, we shouldn’t ignore the way in which the concept has always been somewhat fractured and indeterminate.
This matters because there have been claims made throughout 2020 that the techlash is over. Proponents of this argument claim that this is a consequence of the Coronavirus pandemic. As big tech has ostensibly come to our rescue for everything from entertainment and infrastructure, the thinking goes, the world has come to have a greater appreciation of its value.
In reality, however, criticism is as strong as ever. While the techlash the press likes to pay attention to might be less visible today than it was in 2018, that doesn’t mean cynicism and anger have disappeared. In fact, they are gaining expression in new and growing ways.
The only way this can be appreciated is to acknowledge that understandings of the techlash are a reflection of two things: how you interpret technology’s impact on the present, and how you believe the future should be managed. Once you do that, it becomes much easier to see that the tech industry’s impact on society and society’s response to it is complex and multifaceted.
Four different ways of understanding the techlash
There are many unique perspectives on the techlash, but I think it’s possible to characterize four fundamental accounts. Each one comes from a different worldview and has a different agenda:
- For one group – the tech industry and their cheerleaders – the techlash is the response of backward looking individuals and institutions (like government) who hate the idea of change and progress. In their view the techlash is just a movement of haters.
- For another group – and this is what you could call the ‘liberal’ view – the techlash is shorthand for a story about a hubristic industry which is “the predictable result of an industry incapable of governing itself.” (These are people who believe managing the future effectively is really about balancing different forces effectively through rules.)
- For another, meanwhile – this is the right wing perspective – it is a response to a globalized and ostensibly ‘liberal’ hegemony that is undermining our sense of traditional values. (These are people that believe the future needs to be built on traditional values like family and patriotism.)
- And, finally, for a further group, it is a response to the aggression of late capitalism, which seeks to extract profit through increased exploitation and growing precarity. (These are people who think the future needs to be built on giving people agency and control over their lives.)
It’s also worth noting that the concept of the techlash takes in a variety of different issues and challenges in relation to technology and the tech industry. These include competition and monopolization, misinformation and political manipulation, privacy and data protection, and mental health and well being.
These are all important, but the way in which these issues are prioritized and framed all contribute to your overall understanding about what the techlash actually is. The best accounts of the techlash will reflect the way these issues interact with one another – the worst, however, will focus on just one and treat others as trivial or immaterial. Indeed, this is a useful guide for properly understanding any discourse about technology.
With that in mind, it’s probably worth going back to where the word first appeared. That will provide an illustration of how it was initially framed.
The Economist’s definition of the techlash
The first use of the word techlash can be found in an editorial by The Economist, published in August 2017. The premise of the piece, laid out in the opening paragraph, is this: “rude financial health conceals a more troubling long-term trend: governments, long willing to let internet firms act as they wish, are increasingly trying to tie them down.”
It’s not hard to see, from the very start of the article, that the concept is being framed as an issue of government vs. big tech. And although this face off isn’t presented as a simple one, purely about financial power – “the internet has penetrated every aspect of life offline” – the piece nevertheless does its best to frame things in these terms. Everything really boils down to legal definitions and government regulation: “For more than two decades internet platforms have largely been treated as intermediaries… Now, governments in America and Europe are starting to hold them responsible for what their users do and say.”
So, even though the tech industry’s impact IRL is substantial, with “incumbents from publishers to carmakers… coming to see the tech titans as a threat to their survival,” The Economist refuses to properly engage with these feelings of fear and frustration. Instead, it dismisses them in a rather glib manner: “tech firms are easy targets for anyone worried about change.”
Presenting tech giants as the protagonists of the techlash
If the narrative being constructed wasn’t clear enough, the way in which the piece offers up actions that supposedly mitigate the situation indicates that this version of the techlash is limited indeed. Mentioning Google’s ‘Growth Engine for Europe’, and Facebook’s ‘Journalism Project’, it takes no issue with the idea that tech companies would want to act like democratic institutions. The Economist is perhaps trying to do more than just frame the story through a lens of regulatory action – it’s trying to make big tech the protagonists of this whole story.
Perhaps it’s this sentence that really sums things up: “Amazon, which faced criticism a few years ago for its working conditions, has started offering public tours of its fulfilment centres in Europe.” Not only does The Economist fail to countenance that a company offering public tours of its warehouse is a bit weird, the fact that it underplays criticism of working conditions also demonstrates what it thinks really ‘counts’ as legitimate and notable.
Herein lies the problem with the formulation of the techlash put forward by The Economist. By ignoring many elements that were already in place in August 2017, it’s also ill-equipped to properly tell a story about how and why people are resisting the hegemony of big tech.
A diverse range of responses to big tech
The limitations in how The Economist presents the techlash functions to marginalise existing and future criticisms of the tech industry. A clue to this can be found in the way the article presents the key events in its narrative as “far beyond the latest row over sexism and tolerance of diverse political viewpoints in Silicon Valley.”
Although arguments about issues such as sexism and harassment and James Damore’s Google memo might have appeared incidental in the context of a new era of regulation, in reality this was far from the truth. It’s more accurate to say that these ‘rows’ – and the fact that they were happening in public – were an important moment in demonstrating that Silicon Valley has a politics. It underlined something that should have been obvious but had passed without notice: like every other organization on the planet, these companies are made up of people with perspectives and ideas about what the world should be like and how it can be improved.
To begin with, this gained the most traction as a right wing critique. Thanks to Damore and others happy to push his cause, it became easy to peddle the argument that Google – and, by extension, other large tech companies – were full of right-on, politically correct liberals. This meant that the culture of these organizations, which were playing a huge part in everyday life, were politically skewed. Far from being impartial and apolitical, they were marked by a degenerate liberalism.
It doesn’t really matter whether this is true or not. Although Damore was clearly motivated by a pernicious strand of misogyny and entitlement, there’s probably also some truth to the notion that there are lots of vaguely liberal or left leaning people inside of these huge tech companies. That’s not really that surprising given the demographics we’re talking about.
The internal politics and social impact of big tech become more visible
But what does matter – or rather did matter at the time – is the fact that technology started to appear political in a way that ot previously had not. Accusations of sexism and harassment, for example, made exploitative power relations inside these organizations much more visible than they had been before. This put paid to the notion that these were more ‘meritocratic’ and ‘open’ companies than what the world had come to expect from capitalism.
Meanwhile, the furore around Damore’s memo led to a new wave of attention being paid to how the politics of big tech could impact wider society. Sure, some of that attention might have been motivated by pernicious and toxic right wing beliefs, but this had a ripple effect on other areas of public discourse.
All of these issues came together to expose fault lines within the industry and its relationship with wider society. It also underlined that discussion about technology had to be about more than financial power and competition.
The evolution of the techlash
Criticism of the tech industry, of course, didn’t begin in 2017. Antitrust wrangling was a big story throughout the nineties, with Bill Gates looking much more like the billionaire bogeyman he is than the kindly and well-meaning philanthropist he is presented as today.
But having said that, it’s probably fair to say that it was only towards the end of the last decade that criticism, demonstrations, protests proliferated. They didn’t necessarily have the same purpose or aims as each other, but they were undoubtedly markedly outside of the ‘government v. big tech’ narrative of the techlash.
Worker organizing and unionization
Just a few months after The Economist’s techlash article, an episode of Comedy Central’s Nathan For You was broadcast: Andy vs. Uber. Without going into detail, the premise of the episode is this: Nathan tries to set up a sleeper cell of Uber drivers who will provide a deliberately poor service as a way of retaliating against the company for ‘stealing’ his cab driver friend Andy’s ‘business idea’ (to gift women who give birth in his cab babygrows). As daft as the episode is, it was a neat and relatively early depiction of the way in which Uber was exploiting a casualised and contract workforce in the mainstream media.
Workers in the gig economy (which, by their very nature, were tied to big tech platforms) had been organizing against working conditions for some time before 2017. As we saw above in the article from The Economist, Amazon workers were already calling out the company; but other gig economy apps also saw worker action, including Uber and Deliveroo. But it’s interesting to note how Recode covered an Uber strike that took place in October 2015. In short, it was pretty ineffectual, with the publication saying it ‘fizzled’ out. In a follow up piece, the publication discussed the challenges such workers face: “In this new era of labor, the companies hold all the power.”
That might still be true today, but since October 2015 we’ve seen much greater action and organization from ‘blue collar tech workers’ (I think this description is important as these people are as integral to big tech business models as infrastructure engineers or UX designers). Just look at the Black Friday protests against Amazon in 2019, involving a mix of Amazon employees and union members across Europe. This demonstrated that not only is there a real and active awareness of the problems unleashed by big tech, but also that there is solidarity across industries and across nations.
Furthermore, although the victory of Proposition 22 in California was a huge disappointment for those taking on exploitative tech platforms, it’s also important to note that it probably would have never come about had it not been for worker organizing. The law was, after all, a response to specific antagonisms that were initiated by labour. Its defeat indicates that there is much more to be done in terms of awareness and communication, but it’s evidence that the political environment is changing.
Internal dissent
Another important element of the techlash is critique and action from the white collar workforce inside big tech. We’ve already touched on this, but the issues at Google were only the very start of a series of events that took place over the last few years.
Furthermore, it’s also possible to categorise this trend in two ways. On the one hand you have criticism of working conditions – issues of misogyny, management harassment, and meritocracy; on the other you have technical, political and strategic criticisms of specific projects and partnerships.
Action against misconduct
Responses to misconduct and institutionalised discrimination have – perhaps by their nature – found it more difficult to cohere into a clear movement. Not only are these matters more likely to be handled in private, when they do enter the public domain it’s often in piecemeal ways, such as individual blog posts. But it would be wrong to see such issues as somehow separate from the techlash. The Google Walkout of 2018, for example, underlines how it’s possible to move from incidents of individual discrimination to collective solidarity and even to globally coordinated action. Like the Amazon Black Friday strikes, it’s also important to note that the walkout took place all around the world.
Criticism of products and partnerships
The last few years have also seen engineers and others criticise their employers for their practices or products. These include:
- Protests by Google employees against the company’s involvement with Project Maven (the Pentagon’s AI initiative) and Project Dragonfly (the company’s bespoke search engine for Google).
- Amazon employees protesting against the sale of Rekognition (the company’s facial recognition product) to police in 2018, and its partnership with ICE (the US border enforcement agency) in 2019.
- Microsoft employees speaking out against company contracts to develop tools for the military (such as its AR headset, HoloLens).
- Facebook employees protesting the social media platform’s policy regarding Donald Trump.
These incidentsmare as a reminder that the tech industry isn’t a single homogenous ideological bloc. Yes, the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel might have the most power in the sense that they set and manage the terms on which tech interacts with the wider world. But there are still plenty of people within the industry that genuinely believe that technology is an important component in building a better world, not just a vehicle for consolidating power and capital accumulation.
The role of Google in incubating dissent
Interestingly, a number of writers focus on Google as the locus for protest of this kind. Casey Newton, writing in The Verge, for example, cites a conversation with Jessica Powell, a former communications chief at the company. “At Google activism had been part of the culture from the beginning.” he recalls her telling him. “What changed over the past few years, she said, is that what had once been an internal discussion about company policies and procedures had lately spilled into public view.” This view emphasises my earlier point around James Damore’s memo, but it provides an insight into the culture of the company – one in which ‘dissent’ and debate was encouraged.
Newton links to a very detailed piece on Wired by Nitasha Tiku, “Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech,” which presents a brilliant picture of the way in which the company’s culture unraveled, finding its way to the public.
“[Google founders] Larry Page and Sergey Brin… had designed their company’s famously open culture to facilitate free thinking. Employees were “obligated to dissent” if they saw something they disagreed with, and they were encouraged to “bring their whole selves” to work rather than check their politics and personal lives at the door.”
Tiku never mentions the word ‘techlash’ and focuses purely on the internal mechanics of Google. However, it’s possible to see this as a useful origin story for this specific strand of the techlash. Newton argues, correctly I think, that issues inside Google were a catalyst for action elsewhere in the industry, concluding that “it turns out that you don’t need a strong culture of dissent to generate employee protests. A dawning cultural awareness of employees’ collective power, and employers’ fear of losing them, can be just as effective.”
Cambridge Analytica and the public mood
Although employee dissent across the tech industry may have had a domino effect, its impact wasn’t confined to its own milieu. The fact that tensions and fractures were emerging inside the world’s most visible – and, in some cases, most loved – necessarily impacted public perception.
However, alongside these events, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was particularly instrumental in consolidating cynicism towards big tech.
You might object: in October 2020, the UK data watchdog concluded that Cambridge Analytica had not misused data to interfere in the 2016 EU referendum. So really, the scandal was a bit of a storm in the teacup, right?
Not quite: the reality of what Cambridge Analytica actually did isn’t really that important. It’s significance is more symbolic than literal. This isn’t the same as inconsequential, because in symbolic terms it did have material effects on how people viewed social media platforms, and what they demanded from it. It made Facebook spend millions on its “Here Together” advertising campaign, a strange appeal for a second chance from users.
Tying together misinformation and privacy
More broadly, the Cambridge Analytica scandal helped to join together two concepts that had been quietly brewing in different domains. On the one hand you had misinformation and on the other privacy. The former is widely viewed as a social and political issue. The latter is generally seen as a commercial and technical one.
Of course, the two things have always been bound up with one another. But the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a watershed moment insofar as it made the relationship more visible to the wider public. With coverage and commentary in the mainstream press, the complex and previously clandestine marketplace of user data became part of everyday conversation.
If the populist turn earlier in the decade suggested that technocracy was on its last legs, this was the final knockout blow. In turn, the scandal helped to articulate people’s unease about technology and what it does to us both as consumers, citizens, and humans.
The mental health and wellbeing angle of the techlash
Finally, there’s another important element of the techlash that’s worth noting. This is all about mental health and wellbeing. It is largely concerned with issues such as self-image and screen addiction, and in some instances it has a particular concern for children and young people.
To a certain extent, this has some parallels with the satanic panic of the nineties. In this instance, however, it’s not MTV and heavy metal that’s the object of concern, but technology.
This isn’t to say that concerns are unfounded or exaggerated. Discussions about the relationship between mental health and technology draw on data that shows growing rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. There is undoubtedly a crisis across the population which is impacting children and adults.
However, we shouldn’t solely place the blame on technology. A study published in 2019, for example, claimed that social media only has a “trivial” impact on children’s mental health.
If this research is correct, it doesn’t mean we can excuse big tech for the way it is shaping our psychic lives. However, it’s important to be mindful of a crude critique that simply asserts that ‘screen time’ is in and of itself a bad thing. If technology is indeed having a negative impact on our mental health, this needs to be viewed and understood in the wider context of the digital economy, whereby our data – our lives – are treated as commodities that can be extracted at scale.
Coronavirus, the techlash and big tech’s redemption arc
Throughout 2020 there has been a wave of articles suggesting that the techlash is ‘over’ thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. “The deus ex machina of an overwhelming public health crisis has changed things,” one writer argues in Wired.
“While Big Tech’s misdeeds are still apparent, their actual deeds now matter more to us. We’re using Facebook to comfort ourselves while physically bunkered and social distancing. Google is being conscripted as the potential hub of one of our greatest needs—Covid-19 testing. Our personal supply chain—literally the only way many of us are getting food and vital supplies—is Amazon.”
There might well be an element of truth in this. Because technology provides the infrastructure and entertainment for us to live as normally as possible at a time when the threat of infection is everywhere, it makes sense that cynicism could begin to dissipate.
What this argument gets wrong
But this argument overstates its point. Fear of death and poverty might be greater than cynicism about huge companies, but they don’t replace those feelings. If the ‘techlash’ seems quieter to the press, that’s because political leaders and ordinary people have a new front to fight in the war that is late capitalism.
What these arguments also miss is that while the narrative thrust of 2018’s techlash might today seem less energetic, it’s this fragmentation of the term and the concept that means it is now diffused and widely distributed. From action against the gig economy from workers and lawmakers, to continuing scrutiny over misinformation, there are many ways in which the techlash is evolving into more specific activities and conversations. And sure, it might have been an immensely stupid conspiracy theory, but what was the destruction of 5G masts if not another way of expressing fear or anger towards technology?
Casey Newton, responding to the Wired article quoted above, makes an important point about how the Coronavirus pandemic could lead to further backlash against big tech:
“So much of the frustration with tech companies in recent years has originated from the fact that they are inescapable. Dependence breeds resentment, and the fewer alternatives consumers have to tech giants, the more resentful they are likely to become in time.”
This is already happening. The challenge is to make that resentment coherent. It needs to be illuminated it with a broader narrative about how technology is impacting and limiting our lives.
This doesn’t mean we should try and get back to where we were; that only plays into the hands of big tech, who, it seems, are all too keen to stifle criticism by slapping anyone that dares challenge them with the hater tag. Instead, we need to start thinking about how issues of misinformation, privacy, monopolisation all link together and impact other issues, from addiction and mental health issues to precarious employment.
So, what is the techlash?
The techlash is a word that describes different stories about the emergence of a new awareness about how technology structures our lives. It might have started out as a somewhat reductive idea about ‘haters’, but today there are many acts of resistance and many attempts to challenge big tech’s status quo.
Not all of these are the right approaches. However, it’s nevertheless important that we understand where different attitudes come from and what is driving them. Once we’ve done that we can make the techlash exactly what we want and need it to be. Once we do that, we might be able to find a better way of building and managing the future.