Ruthless Overlords of Silicon Valley Globalization According

Ruthless Overlords of Silicon Valley

Globalization

According to the article "The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley," the corporate founders of the new digital age have tried to present themselves as benign leaders, more devoted to intellectual excellence and social good, rather than the ruthless pursuit of profits. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said this directly: "simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services" (The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley, 2012, Newsweek). However, the authors of this Newsweek editorial state that this rhetoric is a facade for the actual agenda of organizations such as Google, Apple, Zynga and Facebook. The authors term these new Internet companies as just as unregulated and powerful in their influence over our lives as the robber barons of old. As an example of their profit-focused initiatives, Apple is taken to task for "systematically outsourcing the assembly of iPhones and other gadgets to contract manufacturers like China's Foxconn, [so] Apple has shaved its overall cost of production and plumped profit margins for shareholders" (The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley, 2012, Newsweek). The authors also critique the muscle that Google and other companies used in stopping SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which could have shut down websites if the sites were accused of having pirated content. However, given the sweeping and vague nature of the bill, faulting Silicon Valley for opposing the bill hardly seems fair. According to SOPA, "if an intellectual property rightsholder thinks a site is 'promoting' infringement, that party can go to court to seek an order forcing payment processors and ad services to choke off financial support to the site" even before a trial (McSherry 2012).

Throughout the article, the authors fault the companies for trying to make a profit. "Tellingly, big profit-driven sites like Google expressed sympathy but didn't go dark [protesting SOPA] -- while the notably nonprofit Wikipedia, which had no revenues to lose, did switch off in protest" (The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley, 2012, Newsweek). If Google and Facebook did not make a profit, users could not enjoy their services. Is trying to merge the social good of spreading information across the globe and making the world smaller while still sustaining the profits of shareholders to be faulted? A more legitimate critique is the potential impingement of privacy of some users. However, the most egregious violation cited in the article is one made by the major tech companies, but a small start-up called Path.com which was "uploading users' entire contact databases to its servers without permission" (The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley, 2012, Newsweek).

The Newsweek authors also fault Silicon Valley companies for retaining a high degree of control over their ventures, or segregating "investors into the stock-market equivalent of first- and second-class citizens" which, in the case of Facebook means that Zuckerberg's share carry "10 times the voting power of the stock being sold to the public" (The ruthless overlords of Silicon Valley, 2012, Newsweek). But this is not necessarily a bad thing, given that more control may mean that the company is better able to remain true to its original ideals. Being profitable and socially responsible is not necessarily incompatible, which the authors seem to assume.