LOSING THE PLOT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 340/ 10 Nov 2022 09:53

I live in Camden Town, close to The Regent’s Canal down which I can walk in 10 minutes to King’s Cross. The area around this great railway station used to be squalid and dilapidated but a couple of decades ago renovations began that would turn it into what was briefly dubbed “The Knowledge District”. The British Museum in Bloomsbury was already close, so they decided to move their famous library to a new building at King’s Cross (one that King Charles III so famously disliked). Soon followed King’s Place, an avant garde glass pile containing concert halls, art galleries and the Guardian newspaper, then The Francis Crick Institute, a giant spiky armadillo of a building housing Europe’s premier biochemistry labs (and one of the runners in the Covid vaccine race). 

Then digital tech arrived. Google – sorry Alphabet – started its new European HQ which is almost finished as I write, a vast edifice the size of a city block (on a par with Fiat’s Turin HQ) with a whole park on its roof. Facebook – sorry Meta – pitched in with its own block-sized building, only just open, in that area between the canal and York Way which seems to sprout a new mini-skyscraper every time I walk though its Manhattan-lite main street. Deep Mind has a smart office there, as has a Tasmanian craft brewery that dispenses £6 pints from shining steel vats behind its football-pitch-sized bar. 

Ten years ago I might have imagined this as a preview of a hi-tech future but 2022 has rapidly clouded any such vision. In the last few weeks (November 2022) Facebook’s – sorry Meta’s – share price has crashed and the firm is laying off 11,000 employees; Elon Musk follows up his deranged take-over of Twitter by laying off another 4,000; most of the crypto currencies have been progressively crashing in value. A recent UK survey investigated public perceptions of various digital product categories like live streaming (94% approve and use), instant messaging (63%), text-to-speech and voice recognition (52%), but such approval drops off sharply for emerging technologies like Web3 (11%) and Internet of Things at 16%. Most had never heard of, or are bored by, Web3 (89%) and the Metaverse (84%), the virtual technologies Zuckerberg has bet his company on. 

Behind all the iPhone, Oculus and Alexa there remains a real-world, material economy which makes real things (like iPhones, Oculi and Alexas) using real people who once have real jobs, wages and pensions. The vast wealth that builds these opulent offices comes at a cost to that real world. The smartest minds are deployed to avoid paying the taxes that contribute to its upkeep: Amazon displaces high street shops; Google and Twitter displace local newspapers; Uber displaces taxi drivers; AirBnB hotels and so on and on. Newness and convenience have so far protected them from public wrath, but the metaverse suddenly becomes a revealing metaphor for the way the owners of these tech giants have detached themselves from the real economy. They can live in a retarded-adolescent sci-fi and gaming world where colonising Mars, or the pursuit of physical immortality can seem like good ways to spend money. Unfortunately for those fantasies the real world is where silicon chips are made.Along comes the Covid pandemic, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine reviving the Cold War and a 

semi-collapse of global supply chains. The USA once had a symbiotic relationship with China where cheap Chinese labour made cheaper products for the USA, while modernising the Chinese economy and reducing Chinese poverty. That relationship is turning sour, which unfortunately leaves most of the world’s semiconductor fabrication plants within China’s geographical sphere of influence. President Biden hastily tries to shut the stable door by decreeing the building of more fabs in the continental USA, but that will take a lot of time and money. And a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a third whammy, leaving US tech industry in real trouble. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the enormous achievements of the digital giants. The internet, the search engine, the smartphone, the video stream, even cryptocurrencies have changed the world already, and although in many cases basic technologies were paid for by state agencies – universities and military research –  no state could ever have achieved the astonishing global infrastructures that sprang out of Silicon Valley. I’m not suggesting that merely taxing them more heavily would magically solve our looming economic problems. A massive change of mindset is required to induce cooperation between states and digital giants to deploy this semi-miraculous infrastructure for solving problems on this planet, rather than on Mars or the metaverse. If that doesn’t happen soon, those shiny new office blocks in King’s Cross might end up being renamed The Museum Of Globalisation…

[Dick Pountain is as fond of a pint as the next man, but six quid!?]