Tech Doesn’t Create Innovation, It Destroys It

Tech is widely considered to be, fundamentally, and beyond all things, an engine of innovation. We see the way that technology has shaped modern life, and conclude that this, all we know, represents the cutting edge of what we are capable of doing as humanity.  

We take the industry’s word that what it is doing is innovative, but we have nothing to compare that to, no yardstick to definitively say that this is the future, happening today; perhaps we are, rather, very far behind. How do we know? I am prepared to argue that venture capital has very little to do with innovation; that “innovation” is a marketing ploy more than anything, and in fact, we are being deliberately kept FROM innovation, in ways that would make our lives better — as opposed to just creating universal misery with social media apps and universal misery with tech-engineered wage gaps. The idea of innovation covers up and excuses the significant harm done to us — “move fast break things”, we seem to believe that all this is just the price we pay to continuously achieve more and more “innovation”.

The technology ecosystem itself is a trap for innovation. THE monetization model that tech has, is to build mechanisms of control (centralization) around innovation. This is what they are doing with cryptocurrency, where the underlying tech is theoretically distributed and equally available, but the ecosystem around it consists almost totally of venture-capital built gatekeeping, and there is total unavailability of funding to create any infrastructure that would conflict with VC’s huge investments in the coins themselves and their centralized ecosystem of exchanges, security companies, vaguely “web3 platforms”, identity platforms, various financial instruments, services to purchase digital assets, etc. All the things they need to centralize and make money at all of those different points. We will discuss more in this piece how the VC model is more described as a capture of innovation (including data, Blockchain, open source, etc), and sells access to it, as mediated by them and according to their interests, and to intelligence agencies, advertisers, institutional investors, and less importantly, end users. 

The most popular critique of tech innovation is a representation-based one, essentially that the tech industry doesn’t fund or hire people from marginal groups, and therefore, we’re missing really huge swathes of innovation; this is important, but to some extent submerges facts like, tech companies in fact STEAL innovation, diabolically transform it into a tool of technofascist capitalism, and then make money off the very people that were stolen from. 

Classic case study is BuzzFeed, which, little know secret, was actually founded as a way to study activist movements online and figure out how to copy the virality, specifically for use by corporate advertisers. This is perhaps one of the more disgusting examples I’ve run into, the most blatant instance of innovation coming from people, then being captured by venture capitalists, then sold to advertisers, and then suddenly the fundamental strategies that were being used to organize activism, are being used for the corporate machine. And you’ll note that particularly social movements are of interest to technologists, that you can find social movements, disruption, activism, and oppressed peoples beneath many platforms. So the argument here is a bit more subtle than simply cutting people out of the innovative process, when much of what tech company “innovation” does, is in fact, using its ever-surveilling eye to detect and steal and figure out how to control innovation, build platforms and features off of it, and of course, what it inevitably does, is try to crush those people, turn them into new data sources, sell the innovation off to corporate clients, etc. Innovation of the people, is turned against them. 

Key, key stories around this theme, pertaining very specifically to sex workers and Black communities online; in the former, the most well-known pattern is of sex workers pioneering financial distribution at the bleeding edge, where sex workers were major early adopters of Bitcoin, uncredited as crucial early adopters, and were the clear inspirations and original audience for sites like Patreon… who then kicked them off, only AFTER the innovation is extracted in the form of products, features, an initial revenue flow to the business, monetization concepts, and data; when tech inevitably chases these communities away, this pushes them back into a state of marginalization in digital space, forced to move their entire infrastructure and business model once more, and in so doing, they create even MORE innovation for tech companies, and so on. In fact, there is a long legacy here that sex workers have been the drivers of massive leaps in innovation on the internet overall, significantly streaming and P2P payments, including its very first use cases, particularly around fintech. You could make a pretty strong argument that one of the main pillars of technology and innovation more broadly, is essentially using sex workers as early adopters and platform innovators, then pushing them further and further out, starting the cycle again. 

Briefly, in the last 10 years we’ve seen feminist activists and sex workers innovating the use of financial platforms; now, this is a #1 use case of companies like Square, which sex workers and activists are themselves regularly banned from; or in the case of Twitter experimenting with direct payments on the platform (something Twitter is indicating will happen through crypto). This is built on concepts that came out of Give Your Money to Women and other movements about paying women for unrecognized labor; as well as early crowdfunding efforts on Gittip in 2013ish, where women in tech were changing the ideas of what labor in tech is, what digital labor is, what economic justice looks like online, how to build an independent activism community, etc; these emerge again, as features on major sites, while the originating group’s ability to use these strategies declines as technology adopts it *from us*. 

Black communities online, again we have the clear example of innovative usage of Vine, which paved the way for TikTok, which is now worth 75 billion dollars — enough to give every Black person in America close to two thousand dollars; more broadly, the cultural development of Black Twitter in general provided all sorts of social media innovations ripe for co-optation by corporations, from meme production to organization and protest, and use of hashtags for social change, and what a distributed, digital movement can be on a sustained level and as a political force. There is a reason that Jack Dorsey flew to Ferguson immediately: it was generating a new kind of activity on the platform, when we had seen global uprisings like Arab Spring, just a few years before; as we can see how Twitter has continued to benefit from its many Black users while CONTINOUSLY allowing white supremicist hate groups on the site, causing extreme disruption to the majority Black women who are targeted by it.   

One last for the books: young girls are the primary target audience of social media apps. Young girls are the first adopters, they find unique and creative ways to use the platform, they drive the most amount of traffic and produce most of the content; they are considered by VCs in the consumer space to be the most important audience, by far, and openly say so. Companies use that data, coming from the girls, to monetize the platform in various ways, advertising being the primary one, which is used against these girls; consistently resulting in loneliness, suicide, depression, low-self esteem, and pedophile attacks; this then turns into more advertising money for the platform, the cycle begins again, and I think you do see teen girls moving from platform to platform (each of which gets purchased immediately by Facebook), and I have to wonder if some of the adoption of new technologies is because they are trying to break free for the artificial misery that is constantly generated by these platforms in an attempt to extract more from them. 

So, lots of examples, and then, there are also arguments to be made that tech stole very foundational pieces of its business models from Black communities; here’s a great piece from my former magazine about how startups stole the very entrepreneurial model they use, directly from Black communities, and this going back before the technology industry was even formulated; that on a very basic level, the entrepreneurialship of the industry is derived and appropriated. 

So we, as a human body, produce the innovation; they are stealing it and selling it and using it against us. We see this in the latest AI “innovation” spectacular - the GPT-3 chat bot, which, first of all, is being trained on giant sets of data *we* have generated, the entirety of human knowledge *we* have put on the internet, what we have contributed to this world. Now with AI, you can bet your ass they’ll be making big bucks selling it to other corporations; they’ve found yet another way to capture our work. More than that, but our use of things like this chat bot itself, our use of it, in interacting with it, in coming up with ways to interact with it, things we want out of it, what we can contribute to it, the things we can make and extend with it: all of this is going to be used by VCs to figure out what the developments, interfaces, etc. need to be for the next stage. I think one way that’s worth thinking about, when it comes to AI, is that AI is very much rigging a point of centralization onto a larger collection of our data than ever before; AI is not just using our data, but adds the VC choke-hold to it; like everything else, most of the AI tech will only be available to corporations, intelligence agencies and advertisers, other tech companies, etc. OpenAI will be used by the imperial and capitalist core, and used to generate experiences *at* us; much like Facebook, it will mostly likely cause wide scale misery with our own data, the record of our lives and our life’s work. OpenAI admits as much: “ChatGPT is optimized for dialogue. Our goal is to make AI systems more natural to interact with, and your feedback will help us improve our systems and make them safer.” The feedback comes in the form of your interactions with it. We are, once again, the innovation. 

WhatsApp, now owned by Meta, also a good example of how innovation is done by users and then used by companies who go on to sell it for close to 19 billion dollars, which is 19,000 million dollars: 

“Koum updated WhatsApp so that everyone in the user's network would be notified when a user's status changed. This new facility, to Koum's surprise, was used by users to ping "each other with jokey custom statuses like, "I woke up late" or "I'm on my way.” Suddenly a new kind of instant messaging facility had been born out of the chance capability that users found more useful than the app's intended purpose. Fishman said "At some point it sort of became instant messaging ... We started using it as 'Hey how are you?' And then someone would reply." Jan watched the changing statuses on a Mac Mini at his town house in Santa Clara, and realized he had unintentionally created a messaging service."

Did HE create it? Or did WE?

So where we usually say that innovation is stalled by a lack of representation in the Valley, we should also be looking at how innovation *is* occurring, by us, but is stolen, captured, bastardized, twisted, grifted, lifted, used as a weapon back at us, and monetized for corporations, given to the surveillance state, increasing the wealth gap, ensuring the financial benefits in particular do not accrue to the originating parties. Theft is obviously anti-innovation, yet is provided as evidence of momentum, which gives you an idea of what “innovation” means to VC, which is essentially, innovation is created through people’s responses to societal forces, often oppression, then stolen, turned around, now owning that innovation, restricting the originators from it, thus creating a way to make money off of them, oppressing them yet more, whereupon they produce innovation, and then the cycle begins again. This is one pattern; there are others as well, which I might explore in later depth in other articles; but I think its incredibly important to understand that oppression actually produces innovation for tech to steal; that once more, the poverty of the people is the bedrock of the tech empire.   

For now, I invite you to look at the technology ecosystem as a way of studying innovation, through surveillance tools, in order to best appropriate it and sell it to corporations and intelligence agencies; they have a map, via Facebook, Instagram, payments platforms, etc., to see when something new and interesting is starting; we will never know just the extent of the stealing when they are able to operate as an eye in the sky in this manner. They don’t even let us see the innovations we ourselves are making.

We have ended up with a fascistic and authoritarian, centralized model for tech and VC: huge amounts of information ON PEOPLE, is concentrated in the hands of a very companies, Facebook, Google, AWS (which houses HUGE amounts of data), and right behind those companies, are really just a very limited number of venture capitalists, who are in all of these cases, just adding a giant system of centralization onto data.  

Flowing from this, the fundamental business model of the technology industry is *not* to fund a rich innovative, competitive community; when they give a startup financial resources they are committing to fix the market so that only that company will survive in its category — VCs do not invest in things that compete with other funded projects. VCs are basically the only source for money for tech, and they are the ones who decide who, if anyone, outside the industry itself, can participate in it financially. There is no competition in the tech industry, the belief that it is competitive in any way, is a lie about the economic model of venture capitalists. VC is about picking something that they want built, and making sure it succeeds at all costs, forcing it into the market. 

The mechanism for CRUSHING innovation is actually much stronger than the one for generating it; the business model is to crush competitors and establish very simple monopolies.

 I always explain to people that there WERE competing views for what Silicon Valley could look like, what tech could look like, that had a lot to do with control and access to data, and how, in general, data was going to be handled, which we understand to be the primary source of tech industry wealth — data is their core advantage and aim with every startup, no matter what vertical it is in. Data, is a weapon, and riches, and control, and power, and land. Everything.  

Twitter is not necessarily a high-volume site in today’s measures, but it is important because it contains some of the most robust data on humans and their feelings and thoughts, responding to and creating news, political changes, social and cultural trends, etc; it is fundamentally a real-time data store of the mind and intellectual output, that is the focus of the platform and that is very unique in its own way; it has always been a disproportionate influence on world events because of this. And of that data, you have just a few consumers; and that is intelligence community, and other corporations, and advertisers. Outside of that, we are stuck with the data Twitter will allow us to see and the interface Twitter gives us.

It’s hard to believe now, that when Twitter was founded in 2006, that there was a very different vision for it. The tact Twitter took in its early days was a far more open, egalitarian, innovative, productive, meaningful, expansive way of dealing with data than we see today; specifically, they were trying to get as many developers building on top of the data as possible so they could innovate much faster, and because they could not possibly hope, even today, to address the giant surface area of applications of the data. Back then a common expression was “let a hundred flowers bloom,” referring to the hope of getting a widely varied and diverse ecosystem around the API (this is what we call the interface that developers work with to access data). In particular, this helped Twitter quickly have multiple user interfaces for the many platforms it wanted to be on. Back then there were a number of different Twitter clients, instead of this ugly broken shit. 

Anyhow, it was in the age of open APIs, web 2.0; the idea was that you open up the data stream to developers all over the world, and you let THEM build on top of it for the experiences of their users. I can’t remember how they monetized, but if memory served, there was a time where they weren’t even charging for access. Twitter was always slight authoritarian about it all, but for a few years, there was an absolute fanfare around it, and Twitter was supposed to be THE example of how a company could be a PLATFORM for innovation as opposed to the total and singular expression of its existence. And this model was suggested to the rest of companies in America; a huge number of tech startups went from company to company selling essentially a business model for the future: that these companies could collect and store the data being generated by that company’s customers, and then provide the means for that to be made as maximally useful and as maximally available as possible, or at least to create a rich ecosystem around it, that this was perhaps even a way to get away from a fully advertising-based revenue streams as you were now selling access to data and possibly even generating revenue from the large number of applications built off the center. 

Welp, you can guess how long that lasted. About enough time for Twitter to get to the size where it could create its own versions of the most popular independent apps, in house; very similar case of innovation coming from independent parties and again, from users in general who were driving use cases, and then that being cannibalized. 

Now, Twitter only allows its data to be used by “extensively vetted” partners. These are mainly corporate advertising, “enterprise” apps for large companies to manage their social media presence, a few scattered research cases. Twitter itself says that a huge number of entities apply to be Twitter Partners, and only a small few are elected; and further, that an extremely strict set of rules apply when selected. So this is obviously an extremely carefully managed process — maintaining the centralization point on all the data; there are strict limits on non-regulated API usage; this starts at 2 million tweets a month; there about 500 million tweets per day, so this is a very small subset; academic research is allowed 10 million tweets per month; and enterprises, of course, are able to buy more; so there is huge restriction and huge oversight by Twitter the corporation over Twitter data .

When the second bubble started, the shared marketing banner was “every company is a tech company”. But all we did was turn them into something like Facebook and Twitter: offering incredibly little exposure of data and value to the user, hoarding all the benefits of aggregation, and making as much money as possible off it, the user be damned. And a lot of the ecosystem now can be described as basically VC laboratories for features of subsets of major tech companies to acquire down the line, once they are ready for production, with no intention of those ever being able to grow into a real competitor.   

I’ll probably do some more posting on this topic in the coming months, as there is much more to discuss. But this should at least be an introduction to the idea that these people are completely fucking full of shit who have spent decades using us for money while crushing any ability for us to develop our own experiences and ways of using aggregated data to make our lives better. These aren’t the creators of innovation; these are its lords and smashers.