some old notes on the techlash
In the fall of 2019, I had a confusing exchange with an editor over my contribution to an art magazine's end of decade issue. My piece was killed and I wasn't quite sure why. At the time, I was swamped with my day job, prepping for the book release, and a few other freelance assignments. I figured it just wasn't my best work and stuffed the text in my folder of other * not my best works * which includes killed pieces, half-finished things, sentence or two written things, and so forth.
But I just happened to glance at it again, and wait—hold on—it's...not bad?
There's not a lot of tech criticism in general in proportion to the size of this beast (as I complain about often.) This has led to problems like chronology of events and controversy being misrepresented by the tech industry (which I point out in this piece). Anyway, this is a super deep cut and really not my best work (what "2010s in..." summary could be?) but I do think it's important to keep these observations public-facing rather than buried (as many other pieces in that folder of mine deserve to remain). — Joanne
The 2010s in Tech Criticism written in fall of 2019 for X magazine
As this decade nears to a close a number of pieces, such as this one, looking back on major changes in technology over the past ten years, speak of a “techlash,” and a shift in public opinion from adoration in 2010 to an all-pervading indignation nowadays. This is something Mark Zuckerberg himself has noted and commented on. “You know, for the first ten years of the company or so, we got more glowing press than I think any company deserves. And it wasn’t just Facebook; it was the whole tech industry. And then I think a lot changed in the last few years, and especially since the 2016 elections,” he told his staff in company meeting in the fall of 2019; the audio of which was leaked to The Verge.
When were these tech industry glory days? Certainly there was “glowing press” tech years ago in publications like Tech Crunch and Fast Company, but criticism was widely available elsewhere too. Books like “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom” by Rebecca MacKinnon, published in 2012, described the sinister ways that platforms like Facebook and Google assumed state-like functions. That year, the artist duo Metahaven wrote a series of essays for e-Flux Journal entitled “Captives of the Cloud,” warning how the “political, legal and jurisdictional consequences of the cloud are slowly becoming apparent—right at the time when we are unlikely to withdraw from it.” Their piece cites MacKinnon’s research, as well as other notable tech critics like Tim Wu and Evgeny Morozov. The term “techlash” even originates with an article in The Economist predicting that “tech elite will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology,” which was published all the way back in 2013. Such examples might have been rare, but one has to remember how unusual it was to cover technology in the media at all until recently. As the writer Sara Watson commented in her 2016 survey of technology criticism for Columbia Journalism Review, the occasion of Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013 brought about increased scrutiny of the industry, as well as greater resources devoted to those who report on it. Newspapers and magazines began to see how technology merited “investigative attention and journalistic resources,” Watson wrote, resulting in reportage that has “exposed labor practices at Amazon, detailed Google’s extensive lobbying efforts, uncovered Uber’s means for dealing with harassment, and surfaced discriminatory decisions and predatory practices of algorithms.”
Ten years ago, David Fincher made a whole movie about how awful Mark Zuckerberg and his company are (albeit, one largely unconcerned with Facebook’s most objectionable practices, including its algorithmic sorting, data mining, and scale of operations.) But it is true, there wasn’t much artwork that was critical of Facebook at the time. Almost all of the emerging artists I knew were Facebook users early on and I sometimes wondered why so few of them actively rebelled against or critiqued the social network. Then again, could they risk getting kicked off it—or were the consequences to their careers too great? Ten years ago, Facebook was a game-changer for a young artist: it was a tool that could connect them to curators and arts writers, as well as publicize and market their work. The social network’s immediate utility made it difficult to boycott from the beginning, but use of a product is not the same thing as adoration or respect for a product. Rather, it is the case that artists have viewed Facebook as a necessary evil for at least the past ten years.
Art institutions around the globe that welcomed Google to help digitize collections and document the insides of museum wings using Street View photography must have known that there were strings attached. Or maybe it was the absence of strings that was the real problem—Google’s documentation process wasn’t in any way reliable archival work. Google’s own homepage for its Google Cultural Institute Art Project contains numerous dead links including long gone YouTube videos. Several years ago, it recorded a series of “art talks” with “curators, museum directors, historians and educators from some of the world’s most renowned cultural institutions.” None of the talks held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, and the Getty Museum, among other institutions, are available to view today, because the recordings involved Google+, which Google shutdown in April 2019 and is in the process of full deletion.
One of the first protests of Google’s encroachment on art institutions was in response to a 2014 partnership between Google and the Barbican Centre. As part of its sponsorship of the exhibition “Digital Revolution,” a look back at forty years of digital art and art engaging with technology, the search engine giant debuted a new competition and platform called “DevArt.” Artists were particularly annoyed that Google presented this work as a “new type of art;” co-opting existing creative coding practices, while expecting this work on spec for the competition. A project called “Hack The Artworld” was developed in response. This collective created a “geofence” around the Barbican. Anyone accessing their website from the Barbican grounds could view their competing virtual exhibition and an “An open letter to Larry & Sergey” composed by the artists.
Hack The Artworld doesn’t neatly fit into the post-2016 election “techlash” narrative. Nor do the widely-distributed images of San Francisco activists smashing a Google Bus piñata at an “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” from 2013 suggest that the “whole tech industry” was adored until 2016. This narrative conflates the the tech press, Silicon Valley insiders, and the users of these products; and even the people—the very few among us—who have no Google or Facebook footprint. Those who abstained might have the most difficulty raising their objections to either company. Perhaps that’s what the next ten years looks like: even more anti-Google memos written with Google Docs, even more anti-Facebook posts on Facebook.