Investigating the Claims of Big Tech

And so you need to be the Idea Generation. The generation who’s always thinking on the cutting edge, who’s wondering how to create and keep the next wave of American jobs and American innovations, who’s figuring out how to out-compete the Idea Generations of Indias and Chinas of the world.

His remarks from that day would frame the grand strategy of an American future that he would guide as US president three years later. The merit, purpose and yardstick for American success had been established: innovation.

But what is ‘innovation’? Classic definitions characterize it as that which ‘makes new’ but newness is not the only quality advocated by the innovation movement that we’ve become accustomed to. This newness must bring dominance, a sense of refreshment and—most importantly—redemption. This heroic depiction of innovation was evangelized by American leaders as a solution to the global recession. Innovation had become the promise for an abundant future that could redeem us from the unbearable treachery of mundanity and mediocrity. Remember Edison, Ford, Gates and Jobs? You could be like them. You should be like them—from rags to riches, hacker to stacker, entrepreneur to emperor.

Yesterday’s dogma of innovation became today’s Big Tech. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are bastions of a technocentric, techno-deterministic new normal promising to uproot the failures of our past and correct the miscalculations of our sentiments. Tech innovation won’t just save us, it will save us from ourselves. Right?