#bit tyrants

A single iPhone 6 requires seventy-five pounds of ores for the metals, along with one hundred liters of water and twenty grams of cyanide for separating the tiny amount of gold, creating giant amounts of poisonous by-product.

If Google can downrank into obscurity vertical-search websites in commercial categories where it wants “more exposure,” it can do that same thing to political news and views. Google now plays a central role in how people keep up with the world, providing major news outlets with large proportions of their total online traffic through referrals and clicks from search results; about 40 percent of clicks on the company’s trending topics are for news, and a recent study found Google makes almost $5 billion a year from their middleman role between consumers and news. This is almost as much as the entire news industry made from ads that year, meaning Google is absorbing about half the industry’s income without hiring a journalist.

Launched in 2000, a time when Gates was looking like a heartless, lying corporate tyrant, the Gates Foundation has since become the largest and most widely recognized global charity, managing an endowment of $44 billion that is used to support economic development. Indeed, the philanthropy of the world’s richest men and women serves as one of the main arguments of their defenders—sure, Gates and other billionaires make a lot of money, but then they use it to help us. So generous! But if we review the business press’s own observations, we can gain a fuller picture: “Twenty years ago, people associated the name Gates with ‘ruthless, predatory’ monopolistic conduct,” a wealth manager frankly stated to the New York Times.

Private institutions are under systemic and legal obligations to make money quickly to reward their capitalist investors; thus expensive, uncertain long-term research is inevitably harder and harder to justify as quarters tick by with few money-making breakthroughs to show for it. Small wonder, then, that the Internet, the web, the GUI, modern processors, Wi-Fi signaling, fundamental computer languages, and even Google itself arose from the academic or military research settings where steady funding is more or less assured and near-term stock prices don’t drive whether projects get axed. The history is long—Guglielmo Marconi developed radio for the Royal Navy, Berners-Lee the web protocols for CERN. The OSTP notes, “Past DOD research has resulted in revolutionary technological capabilities such as radar, digital computers, wireless mobile communications, lasers, fiber optics, composite materials, the Internet (and other ‘packet switched’ networks), and satellite navigation.”

The original disk operating system Microsoft developed for IBM has a similarly dubious history. IBM’s urgent need for an operating system meant there was insufficient time to develop a new OS, so Microsoft actually purchased one from a tiny company called Seattle Computer Products in 1981 for $75,000, renaming it MS-DOS. Wallace and Erickson’s popular book Hard Drive describes Microsoft’s reputation in the industry as “notorious” for “predatory pilfering,” mostly committed against far smaller companies, who can be picked on safely. The classic pattern is for Microsoft to approach a company and express guarded interest in its product, and to suggest a possible partnership. “After Microsoft is given a glimpse of how the software works, it suddenly loses interest in the deal—only to announce later that it has been working on surprisingly similar, but competing, software.”

In almost all firsthand accounts, Jobs was known for his abusive tirades against his official subordinates and for being a general heel. He mocked the idea of extending stock options to a former best friend working at the company who had been too naïve to ask for them early on, and he lied about having no control over the process. Macworld publisher David Bunnell recounts that Jobs parked his car in a handicap space at the Mac building, since his car would be keyed by disgruntled workers if he parked at the side of the building or behind it. Stanford business professor Robert Sutton wrote, “It sometimes seems as if his full name is, ‘Steve Jobs, that asshole.’” Truly, a classic capitalist.

The clear tendency is for publicly backed research entities, not private companies, to experience major technological leaps. Only states and publicly funded research institutions can support long-term basic scientific research, which by its nature is based on exploring the unknown and can never guarantee a genuine breakthrough will be the result, let alone a money-making one. Plus, the costs of scientific research and experimental engineering—including trained scientists and fancy prototyping equipment—are large.