Is the Tech Backlash Non-Existent - Or Accelerating?

The evidence suggests that there is a backlash. While tech industry avatars point to growing use of tech devices as 'proof' there is no resistance, the more convincing argument appears to be that the backlash is derived precisely from that very saturation: as consumers become more familiar with and adept at using technology, their sophistication about its pluses and minuses has grown, leading to demand for restrictions on what big tech is permitted to do.

In democracies, governments tend to bend to popular demand, not lead it. That so many are now challenging tech is further evidence of growing insistence on change. JL


Rob Walker comments in the New York Times and Casey Newton comments in The Verge:

95% of consumers in the United States say they have or use a cellphone, and 89% have or use the internet. “New connected devices continue to emerge” and we continue to embrace them. Voice assistants, smart TVs and wearable devices are growing in popularity.  (But) four years ago, technology companies were seen as having a positive impact on the United States. The share of Americans who hold this view has tumbled 21% points since then, from 71% to 50%. Negative views of technology companies have nearly doubled from 17% to 33%. (As) for investigations into big tech, there (are) 2 Congressional, 6 state and local, and 8 federal investigations now underway.

New York Times It’s fun, and increasingly fashionable, to complain about technology. Our own devices distract us, others’ devices spy on us, social media companies poison public discourse, new wired objects violate our privacy, and all of this contributes to a general sense of runaway change careening beyond our control. No wonder there’s a tech backlash.

But, really, is there? There certainly has been talk of a backlash, for a couple of years now. Politicians have discussed regulating big tech companies more tightly. Fines have been issued, breakups called for. A tech press once dedicated almost exclusively to gadget lust and organizing conferences that trot out tech lords for the rest of us to worship has taken on a more critical tone; a drumbeat of exposés reveal ethically and legally dubious corporate behavior. Novels and movies paint a skeptical or even dystopian picture of where tech is taking us. We all know people who have theatrically quit this or that social media service, or announced digital sabbaticals. And, of course, everybody kvetches, all the time.

However, there is the matter of our actual behavior in the real-world marketplace. The evidence there suggests that, in fact, we love our devices as much as ever. There is no tech backlash.

Consider Facebook: It’s hard to imagine a more backlashable company. Facebook is widely associated with data breaches, the spread of dubious information and a basic deterioration of interpersonal communication. It was recently fined nearly $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling its customers’ data. And, given its ubiquity, it’s also a handy stand-in for the corporatization of online life in general. If you’re going to make a show of quitting a tech service, Facebook may be your best choice.

But according to its most recent quarterly report, the number of Facebook accounts used daily (1.59 billion) and monthly (2.4 billion) each increased by 8 percent over the prior quarter. Despite all the anecdotes you’ve heard about people deleting their accounts, the company’s flagship app added about a million new daily users in the United States alone. Revenue was up 28 percent. Even factoring in the F.T.C. fine, Facebook recorded a profit of $2.6 billion.

Facebook is not the only demonized tech platform; social media companies in general are routinely criticized as toxic swamps full of trolls, liars and bots. But again, there’s no evidence of any exodus. In the same quarter, Twitter added five million new daily users, and Snap reported that the daily user base of its flagship Snapchat app grew 7 percent, its best-ever performance as a public company. According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans use some form of social media, a percentage that has risen steadily for years and shows no sign of flagging. (The people I know who quit Facebook all use Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, or both.)

Habits die hard. But even more remarkable than our apparent reluctance to ditch the technologies we love to dis is a fervent embrace of newer new things that seem, at the very least, worth approaching with caution.

Take smart speakers — the kind that respond to vocal prompts and questions — as an example. It’s exactly the sort of technology that gives people pause. Is this thing listening to me all the time? What about these weird stories of smart speakers laughing or cursing, or

randomly recording a conversation and sending it to the owners’ contacts? The tech press has gotten better and better at chronicling the latest troubling answers — for instance, people may in fact listen to your voice activations as part of the process of refining the device’s functionality — and detailing what, if anything, you can do about it.

Nevertheless: As of last year, a little more than a quarter of American households owned a smart speaker, according to one estimate. The category leader is the Amazon Echo, equipped with the Alexa voice-recognition software; Amazon says it has sold more than 100 million Alexa devices.

Certain tech-use indicators have in fact leveled off in recent years, but that’s mostly because they correspond with categories that are already thoroughly established and widespread: Around 95 percent of consumers in the United States say they have or use a cellphone, and 89 percent have or use the internet, according to Pew. But dig a little deeper into that data, and it turns out that “new connected devices continue to emerge” and we continue to embrace them. In addition to voice assistants, smart TVs and wearable devices are growing in popularity.

Perhaps most remarkable, if you think we’re in the midst of tech backlash, is the traction of the aggressively hyped “smart home” trend, encouraging you to link your locks and lights and other household infrastructure to the internet. Amazon (which intuitively ought to be suffering in a tech-backlashed environment) recently announced that the record sales on its most recent Prime Day promotion included “millions of smart home devices.”

A particularly striking example touted by the company: gangbuster sales of Amazon’s own Ring video doorbell system and related home surveillance and security products. Ring has formed partnerships with hundreds of police departments, encouraging users to share video directly with law enforcement. And the device and its associated neighborhood-communiqué app have been criticized for essentially encouraging racial profiling and general paranoia. Amazon has denied that Ring currently uses the company’s spookily named Rekognition facial-recognition software (which is used by law enforcement agencies and businesses). But as reports by BuzzFeed and others have pointed out, the device’s terms of service allow the company to use Ring-collected recordings to help develop new products and services. It’s not hard to imagine this pointing to a future when the camera will “recognize” who your neighbors are.

That sounds like the sort of potentially invasive and controlling technology that would spark a public outcry — if not actual marching in the streets, then at least intense pressure on public officials to keep the tech giants in check, and on the tech giants themselves. But as with other unnerving-sounding innovations — self-driving cars, beacon devices that let retailers track customers’ in-store behavior, delivery drones, cashier-less stores — we mostly just shrug. Or, as in the case of the Ring, actively participate in the aggressive spread of a technology whose potential implications are unclear.

So if there is no tech backlash, why is that? Probably a combination of factors. For starters, technology can be complicated, and most of us don’t bother to read terms-of-service agreements, let alone try to understand how something like Alexa, or even Facebook, really works. By and large, tech companies prefer it this way, and they either actively obscure the way their algorithms make decisions or passively encourage you to focus on the post-user-manual idea that technology “just works,” and you don’t need to worry about whys or (especially) hows.

Also, we really, really like much of what technology has to offer. There are good reasons to feel that way: Technology has improved the world, and our lives, in plenty of ways. But it often seems we are willing to overlook significant potential downsides in exchange for rather trivial payoffs. Apparently, for example, the main uses of voice technology are ordering a speaker to play music or asking for a weather report. (Another example, in the interest of full disclosure: My deep concerns about a citizen-enabled surveillance state have not yet inspired me to ditch my own Ring doorbell.)

Maybe being a more determined backlasher just feels hopeless. Quitting Facebook or boycotting Amazon seems similar to removing a drop of water from the ocean. Even an unfamiliar start-up backed with piles of venture capital has the resources to get around whatever entity is supposed to regulate it. The Luddites lost. Why not just learn to stop worrying and love the gizmos?

I wonder if the main reason more of us aren’t active participants in a tangible tech backlash is that we assume lots of other people are. After all, the same tech lords people pay to worship at pricey conferences are now occasionally hauled before Congress, and there’s some sense that cracking down on them might be a political winner.

Sure, the actual plans for doing so tend to be vague (and those tech lords don’t seem to be suffering). But everybody’s complaining about technology all the time — there’s nothing more on-trend than lamenting our ephemeral hashtag culture. So it’s easy to believe that there really is a roiling tech backlash that will somehow head off any dystopian outcomes, while we lean back and ask Alexa whether it’s raining. In other words, it’s a virtual backlash: so convincing we can really see it, if we just wear the proper goggles. 

The Verge Is there a backlash toward the technology industry in the culture? I tend to think so, having written about its various twists and turns most weekdays for the past couple years now. But sometimes an obsession with a beat can lead to myopia, and so it can be useful to check in with your assumptions from time to time to see whether they still hold up.

Such an occasion presented itself over the weekend, when the New York Times published an op-ed by Rob Walker with the provocative title “There is no tech backlash.” Walker argues that whatever jaded media types and politicians might be saying about the big tech platforms, consumers remain enamored of them, and the companies’ financial performance has been superb. He writes:

According to its most recent quarterly report, the number of Facebook accounts used daily (1.59 billion) and monthly (2.4 billion) each increased by 8 percent over the prior quarter. Despite all the anecdotes you’ve heard about people deleting their accounts, the company’s flagship app added about a million new daily users in the United States alone. Revenue was up 28 percent. Even factoring in the F.T.C. fine, Facebook recorded a profit of $2.6 billion.

Facebook is not the only demonized tech platform; social media companies in general are routinely criticized as toxic swamps full of trolls, liars and bots. But again, there’s no evidence of any exodus. In the same quarter, Twitter added five million new daily users, and Snap reported that the daily user base of its flagship Snapchat app grew 7 percent, its best-ever performance as a public company. According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans use some form of social media, a percentage that has risen steadily for years and shows no sign of flagging. (The people I know who quit Facebook all use Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, or both.)

Moreover, Walker writes, consumers continue to buy potentially privacy-destroying gadgets like voice-controlled speakers and surveillance-camera doorbells. And so while it might seem like there’s a backlash, the argument goes, in reality technological progress is proceeding apace — and the rest is just noise.

Elements of Walker’s argument are true on their face. Technology companies indeed remain big, successful, and admired. And regulatory action, which so far has taken the form of relatively small fines, has spurred little change. But if you’re trying to evaluate whether cultural attitudes toward the technology industry have changed — whether there is a tech backlash — this strikes me as the wrong place to put the goalposts.

What would be a fairer way?

First, we could look at direct consumer actions against tech companies. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we have repeatedly seen consumers protest the big tech platforms. In 2017, Tristan Harris began leading a consumer movement accusing Google, Facebook et al of creating a “digital attention crisis” by “hijacking our minds.” Within a few months of Harris’ work gaining attention, Google, Facebook, and Apple had all introduced robust screen time controls into their services.

In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal went supernova. It caught Facebook by surprise, in large part because the basic facts of the case had been public for years. What turned it into crisis was global consumer outrage — outrage that has contributed to dramatic changes in Facebook’s product roadmap, most notably this year’s pivot to privacy.

You simply can’t understand Cambridge Analytica as anything other than a groundswell of people suddenly awakened to the ways, both real and imagined, that social media can manipulate their behavior — and perhaps that’s why Walker leaves the most famous tech backlash of the past two years out of his tech-backlash essay entirely.

Second, we could examine how consumer attitudes about tech have changed. As it so happens, Pew Research released some new findings on the subject just over a month ago. Authors Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley write:

Four years ago, technology companies were widely seen as having a positive impact on the United States. But the share of Americans who hold this view has tumbled 21 percentage points since then, from 71% to 50%.

Negative views of technology companies’ impact on the country have nearly doubled during this period, from 17% to 33%, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

That all feels like a meaningful backlash to me. And it offers some statistical weight to all the conversations you likely had with friends and family last year as they explained why they deleted their social media accounts, or dramatically scaled back their usage.

Third, we could look at all the government action that has resulted from changing consumer attitudes. This month, the New York Times posted a handy tool for tracking ongoing investigations into the big tech platforms. It found there to be two Congressional, six state and local, and eight federal investigations now underway. (Some of them made progress over the weekend, as you will read below.)

When I made this observation on Twitter yesterday, some folks responded that government action did not count as a backlash, it had not come from “consumers.” This strikes me as a strange argument to make about a representative democracy, in which consumers (or citizens, as they were previously known!) elect people to protect their interests. Politicians responding to changing consumer attitudes to crack down on the excesses of large companies has a long history in the United States, and strikes me as rather powerful evidence of a backlash.

If all that’s true, though, why are tech companies still so successful? Well, that’s one of the many nice things about monopolistic businesses: it’s very hard to avoid being a customer. Kashmir Hill demonstrated that fact earlier this year in a brilliant series of stories in which she attempted to cut out the big five tech platforms from her life. Doing so required the use of special hardware, custom software, and an effort that could only be called Herculean. It’s little wonder that customers haven’t been fleeing the platforms en masse — it’s unclear how they even can, assuming they wish to continue using the modern internet.

Now, it’s certainly still possible that the platforms will emerge from this regulatory moment relatively unscathed. It’s a concern I raised here myself this summer, when Facebook shrugged off an FTC fine. But to make that argument at this moment — when US antitrust forces have roused themselves to attention for the first time in a generation — strikes me as very strange. The tech backlash is here, it’s real, and it’s accelerating.