Daily Archives: April 27, 2021

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has failed to resolve 98 per cent of cases important enough to be of concern across the EU and needs to be urgently reformed, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) is to tell an Oireachtas committee on Tuesday.

In an opening statement due to be made to TDs and Senators, Dr Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the ICCL, will state the commission is the bottleneck of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) investigations of tech giants across the EU.

In the three years since the GDPR was applied, the DPC asserted its lead role in 196 cases, but delivered decisions in only four, he will say.

Systematic infringement of fundamental rights go unchecked by the DPC, Dr Ryan will add.

In his opening statement Dr Ryan will reiterate his argument that the commissions failure to uphold the rights of European citizens creates economic and reputational risks for Ireland.

Dr Ryan is among a number of speakers due to appear before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice. Also appearing is Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems, who will discuss, among other things, the GDPR. The legislation, which came into effect in May 2018, gives data regulators powers to fine companies up to 4 per cent of their global turnover of the previous year or 20 million, whichever is greater, for violating the law.

Mr Schrems will also be discussing his ongoing complaint against Facebooks user data policies. He recently described Irelands approach to protecting European Union citizens data as a Kafkaesque waste of Irish taxpayers money.

With most of the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook having located their European headquarters in Dublin, the DPC has become a de facto regulator for their pan-European data activities. However, there have been widespread complaints about delays by the commission in reaching decisions in investigations.

The ICCL in its opening statement will urge the Government to intervene to ensure the State meets its GDPR obligations. It has called for the appointment of two additional data protection commissioners and to designate a chair. It also wants to see an independent review established on how to reform the commission.

An investigation carried out by the organisation earlier this year concluded that a five-year delay in implementing an internal ICT project has cost the taxpayer at least 1 million.

Representatives from the commission are also expected to appear at the committee on Tuesday, as will solicitor Fred Logue.

Read more:

Irelands data regulator failing to rein in tech giants, committee to hear - The Irish Times

Image: Getty Images

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) in December kicked off an inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia, considering, among other things, the role of social media, encrypted communications platforms, and the dark web in allowing such activity.

The New South Wales Police Force told the committee that online propaganda continues to instruct, recruit, inspire, cause fear, and encourage attacks. It said this remains a significant driver for global terrorism and the targeting of crowded places in Western countries.

"Extremist groups, across all ideologies have consistently demonstrated a willingness to harness new technologies to amplify their messages, reach new audiences, and coordinate activities," NSW Police said [PDF].

"Digital platforms, including social media, encrypted messaging applications, live-streaming platforms, and the dark web are able to be used effectively by extremist groups. These innovations have allowed new types of communities to emerge, where ideological affinity overcomes a lack of physical proximity.

"Internet-enabled technologies have provided an accessible, low-cost means to establish, engage and empower like-minded groups across divides."

It said that where platforms associated with extremist groups and implicated in terror attacks have been taken down by their hosts, rather than resulting in the demise of these platforms it has simply displaced them, emerging in altered forms and with new hosts.

"Pushing extremists to the fringes of the internet, away from mainstream users, could be a positive but it presents a different set of challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies," NSW Police added.

Also providing a submission [PDF] to the inquiry, Facebook said the existence of terrorist or extremist groups within society inevitably leads to terrorist or extremist activity online. The social media giant detailed its work in removing terrorist or extremist activity, but told the PJCIS it must consider not just how to prevent the violent manifestations of extremism, but also how to combat hate, labelling it the root cause for extremism.

On encrypted communications, Facebook said end-to-end encryption is the best security tool available to protect Australians from cybercriminals and hackers, but it also poses a legitimate policy question: "How to ensure the safety of Australians if no one can see the content of messages except the sender and the receiver?"

"The solution is for law enforcement and security agencies to collaborate with industry on developing even more safety mitigations and integrity tools for end-to-end encrypted services, especially when combined with the existing longstanding detection methods available to law enforcement," it wrote.

"We already take action against a significant number of accounts on WhatsApp (a fully end-to-end encrypted messaging service) for terrorism reasons, and we believe this number could increase with greater collaboration from law enforcement and security agencies."

See also: Home Affairs concerned with Facebook's plans to create world's 'biggest dark web'

It said it's committed to working with law enforcement, policymakers, experts, and civil society organisations to develop ways of detecting bad actors without needing access to the content of encrypted messages.

It added the creation of backdoors is not the way forward.

Similarly detailing its approach to removing terrorist or extremist activity across its platforms to the PJCIS, Google said [PDF] it also engages in ongoing dialogue with law enforcement agencies to understand the threat landscape, and respond to threats that affect the safety of our users and the broader public.

Google receives approximately 4,000 requests each year for user data from Australian law enforcement agencies.

The search giant also said encryption is a "critically important tool in protecting users from a broad range of threats".

"Strong encryption doesn't create a law free zone -- companies can still deploy several anti-abuse protections using metadata, behavioural data, and new detection technologies -- without seeing the content of messages encrypted in transit (thereby respecting user privacy)," it wrote.

"While we are unable to provide to law enforcement the unencrypted content of messages encrypted in transit, we are still able to provide a wealth of data and signals that in some instances have proven richer than content data. Metadata such as call location, associated phone numbers, frequency and length of call/text are logged on our servers and can be shared with law enforcement/intelligence when provided with a valid court order."

Offering similar summaries of the work it does in countering terrorist or extremist activity on its platform, Twitter told the PJCIS its goal is to protect the health of the public conversation, and to take immediate action on those who seek to spread messages of terror and violent extremism.

"However, no solution is perfect, and no technology is capable of detecting every potential threat or protecting societies and communities from extremism and violent threats on their own," Twitter said [PDF]. "We know that the challenges we face are not static, nor are bad actors homogenous from one country to the next in how they evolve, behave, or the tactics they deploy to evade detection."

The Office of the Australian eSafety Commissioner told the committee that its research on young people and social cohesion showed 33% of young people have seen videos or images promoting terrorism online, and over 50% of young people had seen real violence that disturbed them, racist comments, and hateful comments about cultural or religious groups.

It told the PJCIS it believes the best tactic to prevent terrorist or extremist activity is education.

"Especially in the context of this inquiry, it is important to consider the structural, systemic, and social factors that may lead someone to be attracted to, and engage in, negative or dangerous activity online," its submission [PDF] said. "A whole of community approach and systems approach is therefore needed to understand and address the underlying drivers of this behaviour, as well as provide diversion and alternative pathways to support and assistance.

"Giving individuals the skills and strategies to prevent and respond to harmful experiences online and engage online in ways likely to promote safe and positive online experiences."

Read more:

Tech giants and cops at least agree thwarting terrorist or extremist activity is a joint effort - ZDNet

Apples message seems simpler.

Thats true. Apples view is that its simply giving people a choice of whether to be tracked across apps or not. Facebooks argument to the public is more complex that they have to be tracked for the internet to work, and that people dont know whats good for them.

Wait, lets go back to the hypocrisy part.

Facebook is worried about its own profits being hurt by Apples new feature. It has mostly focused, though, on making the smaller businesses that advertise on Facebook the face of its opposition to Apples app-tracking feature. Yes, smaller companies could be hurt, but its fair to ask whether my local pizzeria needs to know what Im doing on a fitness app to effectively advertise to me.

And Apple wont admit that what its doing is great for the company, not just iPhone owners. Its good marketing to be able to say that iPhones are the place for privacy. Apple also says that targeted digital advertising is dangerous, but it gets billions of dollars each year from Google, the biggest targeted ad company.

Is it possible that this iPhone app-tracking feature wont be a big deal?

To be honest, yes. Its not easy to predict the impact of this iPhone change or whether companies will counter it with different information-gathering methods. Theres a chance that lots of people say no to app tracking when iPhones offer the choice, but the advertising industry keeps chugging along.

Tip of the Week

Brian X. Chen, the consumer technology columnist for The New York Times, is here to guide us through new capabilities for Siri that are also part of the updated iPhone software:

In my latest column, I dived into some of the most notable new features in Apples iOS 14.5, the software update for iPhones and iPads that Apple plans to release on Monday. (Look for the update in the Settings app and the Software Update menu.)

But theres lots of other new goodies in the updated software focused on Siri, Apples voice assistant.

See more here:

Whats Behind the Apple-Facebook Feud? - The New York Times

More than a third of the S&P 500 are expected to report their quarterly results in the coming week, including Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc., as companies detail how the reopening world is affecting their businesses.

Tech giants will dominate the coming earnings calendar. In addition to Apple and Tesla, other big names providing quarterly updates include Microsoft Corp. , Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Amazon . com Inc.

In total, 181 companies in the S&P 500 will report results this coming week, according to FactSet, following the 25% that have already logged results through Friday.

Tesla jump-starts the week with its report Monday. The Silicon Valley car company has enjoyed record sales, delivering nearly 185,000 vehicles in the first quarter. However, the company also is facing questions about the safety of its battery-powered vehicles following a recent crash in Texas and a protest in China.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Alphabet report their results after the market closes. Microsoft has benefited from strong demand for its cloud-computing services and videogame business during the pandemic. The company posted record quarterly revenue in the holiday quarter, and analysts are projecting sales to grow 17% to more than $41 billion in the opening months of 2021, according to FactSet.

See the original post here:

Tesla, Apple and Amazon Headline a Heavy Earnings Week - The Wall Street Journal

As President Xi Jinping targets Chinas massive tech giants, the big question now is how hell get them to share key data as part of a sweeping plan to transform the worlds second-biggest economy.

Until recently, Chinas megafirms like Jack Mas Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. have operated in a similar way to U.S. counterparts Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., harnessing user data to refine an expanding array of digital services. Since more data leads to better products, the tech platforms often become natural monopolies -- giving them enormous wealth and power that also opens the door for abuses.

More U.S. lawmakers have started calling for legislation to break up the American firms, but so far those efforts have failed to gain much traction. Europe has focused mainly on giving users more control over data and levying hefty antitrust fines against companies like Google.

China, by contrast, is going further than any other country to rein its tech behemoths. Xi last month declared his intention to go after platform companies that amass data to create monopolies and gobble up smaller competitors. Chinas regulators followed up by slapping a record $2.8 billion fine on Alibaba for abuse of market dominance, and gave dozens of other top internet companies a month to rectify anti-competitive practices.

While part of the motivation is political, a potentially more important aspect is Chinas attempt to create a market for data that unleashes its value and propels growth. Beijing is pouring money into digital infrastructure, drafting new laws on data usage and building new data centers around the country with the goal of positioning China as a leader in transforming the world economy over the next few decades.

This is not a short-term initiative -- it is a complete national refocusing on data as an economic driver, said Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at Trivium China, a consultancy in Beijing. With such significant upsides, you are also potentially looking at a scenario where companies are more willing to adapt to Chinese net controls to gain access to the market.

Chinas digital economy grew much faster than national gross domestic product in 2019, underscoring its significance to future growth, according to the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Market research firm IDC projected that China would hold around a third of the worlds data by 2025, or roughly 48.6 zettabytes -- about 60% more than the U.S., or equivalent to more than 10 trillion DVDs.

China will hold almost one third of all data generated globally by 2025

Source: IDC reports (2019)

One big challenge will be how to get some of the countrys biggest holders of data on board. The bluntest way would be to seize their data outright, which some hardliners have suggested.

Zhao Yanqing, a Xiamen University professor, made the case for nationalizing the data of big tech giants at a Chinese economic forum. Since China blocked foreign firms like Google and Facebook, he said, companies like Alibaba and Tencent received a benefit that should now be shared with society.

Only by establishing public ownership for platforms can we tame capital, Zhao said, according to a transcript published by the nationalistic news site Guancha.

Still, most analysts view that as unlikely. While Xi has a long history of knocking back billionaires who could pose a threat to the Communist Party, he also wants to find a way to ensure growth is more evenly distributed among Chinas 1.4 billion people. Although China is a one-party state, the party has staked its legitimacy in part on hitting targets for improved living standards -- and a booming digital economy is key to success.

Nationalizing data could quickly backfire, stifling innovation at a time Xi needs technological breakthroughs as the U.S. works with allies to prevent China from obtaining advanced computer chips.

You need companies that are very competitive, said Lizhi Liu, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who has written about data politics in China. Nationalization of data would hurt the tech companies. If you take away the data, the companies will lose their incentive and their ability to innovate.

So Chinese officials are focused on crafting legislation on data ownership that addresses concerns from a range of competing interests. Local officials in tech hub Shenzhen might differ with antitrust bureaucrats on how much proprietary data companies must share, while security departments could clash with economic ministries on issues like data security.

Much of the other work involves setting standards for datasets that are not uniform between different entities and provinces. This would allow them to be more easily used on new data exchanges such as the one recently launched in Beijing that aims to allow companies to trade anonymous proprietary data -- effectively a pilot for a national data trading system.

So far similar projects set up in past years in cities like Shanghai and Guiyang in southern Guizhou province have only received tepid reception, partly because they are disconnected from each other and only hold small pools of data. While its crucial for big tech platforms and other private companies to buy in to the exchanges, the still-evolving regulatory framework is putting many players off.

Data in China is very fragmented and lacks common standards, which makes it difficult and expensive to exploit, said Camille Boullenois, a consultant with Europe-based Sinolytics. Drafting standards and encouraging cross-provincial databases will help incentivize data trade.

Firefighters monitor firefighting and rescue related data screens at the command center of Guiyang Fire Brigade in Guiyang, Guizhou province, on April 11.

Photographer: Colum Murphy/Bloomberg

Until recently, Chinese lawmakers focused mostly on security. A 2017 law gave authorities the right to access almost all private data when necessary and demanded foreign firms store data from Chinese customers locally, forcing Apple Inc. to open a data center with local officials.

Chinas leaders are now focused on using big data to help governments provide better services. Firefighters can use it to respond to calls quicker, while data from hospitals can help track citizens and stem the spread of Covid-19. It would form the foundation of everything from smart cities to financial regulation to surveillance operations against political dissidents.

Chinas government is developing a digital yuan that will compete with Ant Group Co.s Alipay and Tencents WeChat Pay, which together account for nearly all of the mobile-payments market, allowing the Peoples Bank of China to gather enormous amounts of data on transactions. Authorities have also made significant advances with a system for measuring the social credit of companies on everything from tax payments to environmental protection to product quality.

For now, Chinese authorities have stressed they wont force companies to hand over data. On a trip this month to the Guiyang data center, a local Communist Party official told Bloomberg News that companies are mostly concerned they will lose their competitive edge if they part ways with an essential resource.

With regard to the use, development and trade of data, were still exploring the mechanisms, said Hu Jianhua, deputy director-general of Guizhou Provincial Big Data Development Administration. For enterprises, they have the ownership of the data. We encourage them to make their data open but not force them to do so.

The lobby of the Guizhou Big Data Exhibition Center in Guiyang.

Photographer: Colum Murphy/Bloomberg

One possible solution is for the government to become co-investors with the companies. Bloomberg reported last month that China proposed establishing a joint venture led by the Peoples Bank of China with local technology giants that would oversee the data they collect from hundreds of millions of consumers. The Financial Times reported Friday that Ant Group Co. is resisting such a proposal, which risks facing the same obstacles as when Tencent and Alibaba reportedly refused to share data with Chinas central bank several years ago after it set up credit scoring company Baihang.

Data privacy is the biggest obstacle the government faces in dealing with the tech giants, said Angela Zhang, author of Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism and director of the Centre for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. There is an inherent tension between protecting consumer privacy and promoting competition among different platforms.

Executives at Chinas biggest companies have sought to blunt the damage from Xis crackdown.

After the Alibaba probe wrapped up, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang told investors last week that the company will continue to work with regulators on data privacy. Earlier this month, companies including JD.com Inc. and Meituan pledged to play fair in data usage after Guangzhou antitrust regulators summoned them into a meeting. Robin Li, the head of top search company Baidu Inc., in March proposed to top Chinese lawmakers a pilot program to break up barriers in data flows among internet companies.

The company reactions show they are spooked after years of limited measures to align with government policies, according to Dev Lewis, a research fellow at Digital Asia Hub in Shanghai.

Now that mirage has been lifted, he said. The onus is now firmly on the platform if they want to reinstate that. They need to take the initiative on the data front.

With assistance by Colum Murphy, Coco Liu, Peter Elstrom, Zheping Huang, Lucille Liu, Jing Li, Yuan Gao, and Lulu Yilun Chen

(Updates with report on central bank in 23rd paragraph)

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Originally posted here:

Xi's Next Target in Tech Crackdown Is China's Vast Reams of Data - Bloomberg

Tech giant Apple has announced plans to build a new campus and engineering hub in North Carolina, bringing in new jobs in the greater Raleigh-Durham area and across the state.

Apple said that it will spend over $1 billion on the campus, which will add at least 3,000 jobs in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. The move is part of Apples pledge to invest approximately $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs across the US by 2026.

At this moment of recovery and rebuilding, Apple is doubling down on our commitment to US innovation and manufacturing with a generational investment reaching communities across all 50 states, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. Were creating jobs in cutting-edge fields from 5G to silicon engineering to artificial intelligence investing in the next generation of innovative new businesses, and in all our work, building toward a greener and more equitable future.

In addition to the campus development, the firm will commit over $110 million in infrastructure spending to the 80 counties in North Carolina. Apple claims that the investments which will go toward broadband, roads and bridges, and public schools will generate over $1.5 billion in economic benefits annually for the state.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company is also expanding in other states, including California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Washington. Its $1 billion Austin campus is expected to open next year, according to the press release.

Read more: How tech giants are dominating US commercial real estate

As a North Carolina native, Im thrilled Apple is expanding and creating new long-term job opportunities in the community I grew up in, said Apple COO Jeff Williams. Were proud that this new investment will also be supporting education and critical infrastructure projects across the state. Apple has been a part of North Carolina for nearly two decades, and were looking forward to continuing to grow and a bright future ahead.

Read the original post:

Apple to build $1 billion campus in North Carolina - Mortgage Professional America

An employee at Tandem Computers in Silicon Valley, 1981. (Franois Lochon / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

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Lets say youre trying to decide where to order lunch. Once upon a time, you might have had a Zagat guide on the shelfor depending on your lifestyle, a Michelin. Today, youre more likely to go online. On a website like Yelp, you can find the same collection of opinions, the same star rating system, and the same index of logistical facts like addresses and phone numbers. But while that information was once collected by a staff of experts, its now provided by someone else: you. Whatever else Yelp is, it is an enormous repository of labor.

Over the years, Silicon Valley has scrambled the way we think about work and how it generates value. Companies of all kinds have strained to make their offices resemble those of tech giantseveryone is incubating and disrupting. Companies like WeWork, the latest cautionary tale, hope for a windfall of venture capital by standing close to, and speaking the language of, the tech industry. The standards established in that industry have come to influence jobs that seem to have little to do with the now-deserted campuses along Californias US-101. Instead, they have made us, the users, party to those standardsoften just by using their products. Among the most influential standards, though not always in obvious ways, are its conceptions of gender.

The collective labor that goes into something like Yelp is of two kinds: A platform has to have both structure and content, and both have to be produced by labor. But whos doing the work here? And whos getting paid? What makes the platform attractive to a general user is above all an unparalleled mass of reviewsuseful, funny, cool, or not. Reviews that represent probably billions of labor hoursnone of which were remunerated. In fact, the whole thing becomes profitable only if we can explain to ourselves why a certain kind of labor doesnt deserve or require pay. You might argue that reviewers arent employeesand platforms often dobut its quite another thing to say that what they do isnt even work.

A platform like Yelp is unprecedented in many ways, but the way labor is rendered invisible in order for it to function is decidedly not. There are a lot of ways to get something from consumers while avoiding giving out a paycheck. The tech industry has come to call many such tactics gamificationcollecting data or content by tricking the user into thinking theyre having fun. The way this happens is best described with language drawn from the field of care work, a field in which laborparticularly womens laborhas historically been made invisible. Its no accident that Silicon Valley relies on the same gendered rhetoric.

This was something that was tacitly acknowledged within the company, as one early employee told me, speaking under condition of anonymity. He got the sense that the initial marketing strategy was deliberately meant to recruit women as users, by means of gifts and gamified rewards that seemed to cater to stereotypical gender roles. Most of the elite events, meant to reward high-volume reviewers at Yelp, were spa events, involved skincare products, or took place at hair salons. The reason Yelp targeted women, the engineer speculated, was a suspicion that they would have a larger number of online social connections to invite to the site and a better writing pool.

Small decisions like this along the path to start-up success add up, and they reactivate older tropes and project them into the future. Even the word this early Yelp employee chosewriting poolbrings to mind the secretarial pool of the mid-20th century workplace. Women were there for the social stuff, for doing the important but ultimately secondary work of providing content for the structures set up by anas this same employee makes clearoverwhelmingly male central organization. Yelp may have epitomized an unprecedented kind of virtual environment, with hitherto unglimpsed forms of labor, but when early employees began imagining and describing this space, you could hear the faint echoes of the clatter of typewriters and the workplace mores of Sterling Cooper. Although more than a half-century old by now, gendered categories like this still influence who gets hired in Silicon Valley, and how their work is understood once they are.

It has hardly escaped notice that the tech industry isnt exactly exemplary when it comes to gender representation. What has received less attention is the implicit gendering of labor and work product that perpetuates that problem. The Womens Leadership Lab at Stanford is a research institute trying to untangle what goes wrong around gender and race in Silicon Valley, whether its about recruitment, promotion, or retention. What the researchers are finding is that, for all their meritocratic myths and their famously flat organizational structures, Silicon Valley firms are rife with inequalities that ultimately sort employees into those whose work counts more and those whose work counts less.Current Issue

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Tech has developed all kinds of interlocking hierarchies to differentiate labor and hierarchize how it is rewarded: management vs. technical ladder, fuzziness vs. logic, front end vs. back end, engineering vs. design. And then there is the byzantine nomenclature of badges at most large tech companiesbadges that distinguish the full-timer from the contractual worker, the worker who deals with the product and the one who runs some kind of support network. The system makes public how an individual worker is salaried by what company, and also what perks one has access tono shuttle for the blue badge, no all-hands meeting unless you have a white one.

There is an entire value system being telegraphed to workers at these companies, and the platforms they set up often enough pass on that value system to the users. There is work that is the core of the mission; it is arduous, difficult, all-consuming, and isolating. And it is almost invariably figured as masculine. As Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA, has pointed out, this ideology is why the problem of women in technology is thornier than shoehorning women into all-male panels. Its not just the gender of the employee; its the way gender is embedded in the job.

As Sharla Alegria from the University of Toronto has found, gender in tech has often been governed by a set of interlocking, and surprisingly fine-grained, sorting systems. She found that women were less likely to be promoted than men, and when white women were promoted, it was frequently into jobs that seemed to separate them further from the core business of the company, and toward soft and people skills. This was even more pronounced for nonwhite women, who ended up in fields even more removed from their training. She interviewed women of color who underwent training after training in programming, but ended up in support or help desk positions.

Within this system, people can make choices, but they are, as Shannon Gilmartin of the VMware Womens Leadership Innovation Lab told me, loaded choices. If the corporate culture recognizes certain jobs as male (having to do with the platform, the product, the genius vision) and female ones (care, content, and communication), then it wont take long for those who try to buck the pattern to be treated as interlopers.

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Of course, some of these distinctions between masculinized and feminized jobs reproduce gendered valuations that one finds across American society, from the elementary school classrooms to the New York Stock Exchange. As Posner points out, one way of telling the story of the rise of the tech industry is of a field that had been heavily feminized, dominated by clerical busywork, and accordingly had seen low wages, establishing itself as a domain of male geniuses that command exorbitant salaries. In that way, tech is just part of the jagged intersection of gender and the American workplace more broadly.

But other distinctions between male and female work in tech are granular enough that they can surprise outsiders when they come across them. Then again, more and more they might not. Because while the obsession with hard logic, purity, and difficulty that underlies them may be somewhat unique to the tech industry, this obsession has long shaped what outsiders picture when we hear words like tech worker or programmer.

In accounts like Posners, or Mar Hickss study of the British tech industry, it becomes clear that this development was far from inevitable. As the tech sector took shape, people had to choose to interpret labor and value. Where did this interpretation come from, and how has it proved so resilient? One place to look is the intellectual climate in which the companiesnot necessarily the technologiesof Silicon Valley first took shape. The ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller (18951983), Marshall McLuhan (19111980), and Ayn Rand (19051982) came to Silicon Valley via the midcentury counterculture, and have always retained its trappings.

Think of the way the concept of genius has shaped the image of the tech industry. Genius is an old word, but one that means fairly specific things in the tech context. The tech industry likes to diffuse the conceptthink of the genius bar at the Apple Store, of the idea of the collective genius of crowd intelligence. But when it comes to creating the companies and platforms, the word seems to refer more toas the subtitle of Adam Fishers recent Uncensored History of Silicon Valley puts itThe Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom. The genius is a hacker, a founder, a freak. Pure and aloof, the genius is disruptive to the old order and ultimately a little cold. The genius isnt a team player, often an outsider, does not play well with others. To ask him to play with others means diminishing his brilliance. And the genius is usually a he.

The genius aesthetic, which holds that the meaning of an object is best understood by understanding the mind of its exceptional creator, comes from the turn of the 19th century. But it is everywhere in contemporary Silicon Valley, which often treats multibillion-dollar companies with thousands of employees as though they were one brilliant individuals work of art. Elon Musk unites a strange bundle of companies just by the magnetic force of his outsize personalities. Steve Jobss personal quirks are embedded in the gadgets that have made him an icon. This way of reducing collective labor to the ideas of one person is likely owed to the influence of Ayn Rand, a favorite of many tech moguls, as is the idea that the job of the broader collective is to accommodate itself to the brilliance of the few.

Marshall McLuhan has had a more counterintuitive impact on the lay theories of Silicon Valley. Sometime in the 1940s, McLuhan, then teaching English at Saint Louis University, began filling grocery boxes with various advertisements from newspapers. His first book, The Mechanical Bride, began its life as essentially one of these boxes sent to Vanguard Press in New York, along with McLuhans commentary. The medium (the box of pop cultural flotsam) was itself the message.

What made McLuhans work pathbreaking was this ability to stand over a dizzying cacophony of content and establish formal relations between the disparate elements. Focusing on the content of media messages was ultimately a fools errand. The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. McLuhan framed content as seductive: Obvious, diverting, and uncomplicated, it thrust itself upon the analyst and kept him from the serious work of understanding what was really going on.

McLuhans legacies to the counterculture and later to the tech industry are various. But one of the legacies was simply about the kind of persona he modeled. The curious, aloof, slightly ironic man who takes seriously the detritus of our expanding communication networks and figures out how to bring it into some sort of order. There is one type of labor, in other words, that fills magazines with ads, comics, advice columns; theres another type of labor that clips those out, collates them, and orders them in ways their creators only dimly intuit. And the first type of labor was more real, more important, more valuable.

Whatever else they contributed to Silicon Valleys emerging ecosystem, figures like McLuhan, along with R. Buckminster Fuller or Stewart Brand, shaped a particular style of Silicon Valley masculinity: techno-libertarian, opposed to traditional structures, and defined by a freewheeling and highly individuated creativity. And that valued free, abstract tinkering, removed as much as possible from the messy political and interpersonal concerns of modern society. That sort of gee-whiz purity always has an implicit oppositethe thing to keep tinkering pure from. That which lies outside the monastery walls.

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When it comes to who gets promoted how in Silicon Valley today, Gilmartin told me, theres still an assumption that anybody can be a manager, but not everybody can be an engineer. Dealing with the interpersonal stuff, with care work, with the content, according to this ideology, requires little specialization. As a general rule, the further you are removed from the front end, your colleagues, the customer and the content, the more prestige accrues to your position. This applies to female tech workers who get frequently shunted onto management tracks, into UX design or even into HR, even though they have the same degrees and training as their male engineer colleagues. It gets worse once you get beyond them.

In the far reaches of the ecosystem of a tech companybeyond the limits of those the companies even recognize as their employees.the imbalance applies even more forcefully. This is techs shadow workforce, as the journalist Ellen Sheng puts it: contractors who supplement the efforts of direct employees of the tech giants. As Wendy Liu has written, the contract worker becomes an atomized unit, forced to display enough perseverance and merit to convince their supervisor of their economic value, in hopes of being made permanent. Conversations with contract workers suggest that the same implicit biases around labor that are rampant in these companies govern who gets hired for these positions, how much they make when they get there, what benefits and privileges their non-employer feels necessary to grant them, and whether they are ever made permanent employees.

Whether you are recognized as an employee or not, based on the mere technicality that you work for a certain company, whether you are recognized as being core to the mission or just have a supporting role, whether and how much of your labor is being recognized as labor at all: all of that turns out to be governed by the same logic.

This emphasis on imposing form has transmitted itself to modern Silicon Valley as a prioritization of the platform over the content. But it has shifted from a methodological concern (how best to analyze) to one of value generation. It has remade these workplaces, both shaping and making invisible the immense inequality that makes them tick. What has remained are the gender politics behind that idea. And however far Silicon Valley has traveled from the heady days of McLuhan, Fuller, and Brand, these ideas have come to govern how Silicon Valley organizes its companiesfrom the largest corporations to the scrappiest startup. As any startup founder would insist, in turn those ideas have remade our world.

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How Sexism Is Coded Into the Tech Industry - The Nation

Last month, the worlds eyes were on America as the CEOs of its most successful businesses came before Congress to testify about their companies content moderation practices. But while America debates if and how to regulate digital markets, the EU has been moving forward with similar proposalsproposals that would needlessly burden technology companies for decades to come.

Far from levelling the playing field, the new regulations would edge out small digital start-ups and give the tech giants, who have the resources to grapple with the rules, an even firmer foothold.

Executive Vice President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, has made it her mission to wrap international digital markets in red tape. Previously, this took the form of antitrust charges and fines against American tech businesses like Google, Facebook and Apple. Vestagers latest proposals the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act would create a new regulatory framework for tech companies in an attempt to reel back control over the internet.

These two Acts are allegedly intended to work together to foster innovation, competition and safety. But both pieces of legislation would regulate internet businesses into listening to Brussels will without regard to the potential negative impact on consumers and small businesses.

Read more: Google steps up fight against fake news with $29m contribution to new EU fund

At the heart of these legislative proposals is the desire to punish online intermediary services, an all-encompassing term for internet access providers, domain name registrars, cloud and web hosting services and online platformsfor their content moderation practices and role as gatekeepers. In reality, the proposals would make it harder for smaller companies to grow, and enable more competition in the tech sphere.

By placing crushing regulations on European digital markets, these acts will change tech practices on a global scale. The EU accounts for almost 16 per cent of the worlds imports and exports; its a market tech companies cant simply ignore. So when Brussels finalises its demands for an overhaul of current industry-standards, tech companies will have little choice but to comply.

And that could lead to very different search experiences and social media timelines than were used to.

Companies will have to navigate an entirely new realm of government oversight, regulation and compliance costs to even operate in the European market. Government bureaucracy and mandated complaint systems will bog down companies moderation efforts, increasing the price of their services and lowering the quality of the user experience. Its likely only the largest of tech companies would be able to survive thisentrenching the market position of businesses that Europes bureaucrats aim to break up.

Meanwhile, smaller companies would struggle to grow and innovators trying to get their foot in the door would be met with heavy costs. The next Spotify will face more regulatory barriers to entry and fewer investor prospects than ever before. To comply with data regulations, trusted flaggers and more, start-ups will find it harder to do business in Europe without significant sums of capital upfront. Unfortunately, those same start-ups will have fewer options for venture capital investment thanks to these proposed regulations negative impact on investment and innovation.

Read more: Draper Esprits tech bets pay off as portfolio value jumps 35 per cent

These legislative proposals fall under the EU and Vestagers protectionist approach to digital markets and competitions. Europe has long preferred that entrepreneurs ask permission to innovate, rather than simply giving them the freedom to do so. These proposals are in the same vein. Theyll arm unelected bureaucrats with more power to control internet services and how they change over time.

When we look at the tech of today, Europes heavy-handed approach to regulation has ensured it protects established European competitors and not European consumers. So, European consumers will see higher prices, fewer tech businesses and slower rates of digital innovation. The direct result is a dearth of tech businesses, leaving Spotify as the only European company in the top 30 internet tech companies by market cap.

Legislative proposals like the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act enable Brussels bureaucrats to push this protectionist approach on an international populace that spans past EU borders. In Vestagers hands, these proposals to strong-arm Europes digital markets risk further hurting Europeans online, and because of spillover effects, internet users everywhere.

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European tech regulation will hold back free competition and hand power to digital giants - City A.M.