Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow

402 Pages·2019·24.215 MB·English

by  Ramesh Srinivasan

Acknowledgments
A book like this, which in its first draft was over seven hundred pages, can’t
just write itself! It took inspirational friends, family, and colleagues to make
Beyond the Valley happen. And to each of you I’m deeply grateful.
Thank you to my wonderful parents (the Srinivasans), my brother Mahesh
and his partner Amanda, and the central figure in my life: my deepest
confidante and love Syama. Thank you also to my university (UCLA) and
colleagues around the world for all their support throughout the process.
MIT Press has been a joy to work with. A special thank you to Gita
Manaktala, an always constructive, supportive, and fantastic editor. Gita,
your mindful and positive approach toward this book has been essential in
making it a real contribution.
I want to thank my reassuring, smart, and savvy agent Jeff Shreve (and
Peter Tallack) of the Science Factory for being such great partners with this
project. Jeff, thank you for believing in me and in this ambitious book from
the start, for lending your great eye to the proposal, and for your support
in giving it the global reach that it needs and deserves given the topics I
discuss. Thank you also to Doug Rushkoff for your mentorship and the pow-
erful preface. And thank you Cathy O’Neil for all your support in helping
this book reach a wide audience.
I worked with a wonderful team of supporters to conduct the research
and express the arguments that form the foundation of Beyond the Valley.
Chi Truong, thank you for being so easy and efficient to work with—h elping
draft and edit content with your fantastic mind and editorial eye. Rene Ber-
mudez, it’s been such a pleasure—y our attitude, creativity, consciousness,
and wonderful writing skills have been instrumental in making this book
happen. Philip Smart, thank you for your support in Africa, and afterward
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viii Acknowledgments
with the text. Shane Boris, Sarah Gavish, and Jill Giardino, thank you for
your generosity in reading and commenting on this book. Thank you to my
wonderful copyeditor Mary Bagg for all of your support and excellent edits.
And then there is the real glue that kept the project together on a day-t o-
day basis. To Leia Yen, a UCLA undergraduate way beyond your years, one of
the most remarkable students I have ever come across: thank you for help-
ing me research the arguments in this book, and for bringing them together
in polished form as this book reached its final stages. Jasmine Huang, thank
you so much for doing such impeccable work to help me glean insight
from the interviews, and for being available for this project despite living
thousands of miles away! Vanessa Wong, a hearty thanks for your support
with interviews and other essential book items. Michael Lumpkin and Roey
Reichert, thanks for your support in this book’s initial stages.
Thank you also to Aditi Mehta for joining me to co- author chapter 17,
“Keeping Network Power Local,” so I could add these inspiring efforts to
this book’s story. Adam Reese, thank you for you your meticulous, diligent,
always-o n approach toward chapter 23, “Blockchain: A Crazy Free-f or-A ll,
and Maybe More?” It is a true contribution—a n analytical, reflective, and
important assessment of this space. In terms of blockchain community
connections, thank you to Anthony Donofrio for introductions and to my
dear friend Vikash Singh for your support.
The people, places, and projects featured in Beyond the Valley speak to the
power of human creativity and the dreams we have of a more equal digital
world; one that recognizes our values and rights as sovereign human beings
and the communities to which we belong. I’m just sharing all of your sto-
ries; you are leading the way. Thank you to each and every one of you.
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Foreword
Digital technology is the subject of our time.
It’s more than just the topic of so many articles, panels, talks, and books.
Our technology serves as the very focus and direction of our society. But the
more we look to our devices, platforms, and networks for an understanding
of our collective situation, the further untethered we become from the real
world in which we live.
We tend to look at technology as the subject of our concerns, and human
society—h uman beings ourselves—a s the objects being acted upon. In part
this is because we no longer use our technologies so much as our technolo-
gies use us. With every swipe of our fingers, our smart phone gets smarter
about us, even as we get dumber about it.
Indeed, as long as we attempt to understand technology by the content
pouring through its many screens, we will remain clueless about its real
impacts on our cultural, economic, and planetary environment. We simply
become part of a feedback loop between people and a media landscape that
is programmed to keep us distracted, atomized, and powerless.
Ramesh Srinivasan breaks this cycle. He recognizes the true ethos of Sili-
con Valley tech development: earn enough money to insulate yourself from
all the harm created earning money in this way. It’s a page from the same
rulebook that has guided corporations since the era of the British East India
Company. The object of the game is to extract as much value as possible by
any means necessary, and then externalize the impact to people and places
somewhere else. Digital technology platforms, with their illusion of cleanli-
ness and hermetically sealed purity, hide their externalities even better than
traditional Industrial Age enterprises. But the human slavery, environmen-
tal destruction, social alienation, economic oppression, and civic collapse
they engender are just as real. Moreover, they now happen “at scale.”
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x Foreword
The inwardly turned campuses of our tech monopolies keep their work-
ers’ focus on the code, and off the impact. (How can a company live by the
credo “don’t be evil” if it is not even looking beyond its webpage metrics?)
Likewise, when our evaluation of power dynamics in a digital age relies on
analysis of the companies themselves, the affordances they are embedding
into their platforms, or even structural critique of their surveillance services
and business plans, we risk losing sight of the bigger and more relevant
picture. We end up trying to understand technology through the lens of the
very technologies we are trying to see. And in the process, we make them
even more central to the story, relegating ourselves—h umanity—t o the
background. Mere externalities.
That’s why it’s so important that a scholar of Srinivasan’s rigor and insight
actually traveled the world to witness, first-h and, the impact of algorithms
on electorates, ride-h ailing apps on African cities, smart phones on indig-
enous Mexicans, and blockchain on the environment. In venturing beyond
Silicon Valley and its user interfaces, he found rampant, underreported,
and actively camouflaged devastation. Digital technology companies are
involved in shattering lives and livelihoods, enslaving children, undermin-
ing democracy, ruining economies, and threatening the environment.
But he also found people fighting back, subverting the intended func-
tions of technologies to empower themselves and their communities. From
Oaxaca, Mexico, where activists built community-o wned digital networks
that promote the solidarity and autonomy of indigenous people, to Sub-
Saharan Africa, where people and small businesses leverage the power of
networks not to compete but to collaborate and exchange value. By sub-
verting the extractive intentions of the technology companies seeking to
colonize and coopt them, these people and places are staging a revolution
against the dominance of global corporate capitalism.
Those of us insulated by our technologies, our privilege, or our Western
bias, owe it to ourselves to learn from these efforts. If we model these same
approaches, we stand a chance of restoring our own collective agency, and
avoiding civilization-s cale catastrophe. 
By reporting from the ground up, Ramesh Srinivasan reminds us that in
a world of digital domination, we are all indigenous people.
It’s time we act that way.
Douglas Rushkoff
New York, February 2019
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Introduction
Sergio, a friend of mine from Argentina, recently completed a trip around
the world. I met him last year in southern Mexico, where I’ve been visit-
ing regularly since 2016 to learn from indigenous communities who have
been creating their own digital networks. My visits there were inspired
by my two-d ecade-l ong fascination with the internet and digital technol-
ogy’s rapid development: first as an engineer and, later, as an educator and
researcher exploring how digital technologies impact the lives of diverse
cultures and societies.
Sergio had not traveled extensively outside of his country before. When
we met at a food vendor’s table on a street in Oaxaca, he was buzzing with
the excitement of having visited five continents and holding various jobs
(as a carpenter and farmer, for instance, and in the service industry, at
hotels and restaurants) in just the past year. When I asked him about his
range of experiences in parts of the world so different from where he grew
up in working-c lass Buenos Aires, he made an offhand remark that stopped
me in my tracks: “Regardless of where you go, people get pushed into the
internet. That is what they want.”
After we parted ways, Sergio’s comment stayed with me. I was struck
by the contrasting but intertwined images it contained: the first being of
people thrust into some alternate universe that exists beyond our screens;
the second being of people who relate to the internet as the place where
we share common ground. Like many of us, Sergio had the perspective of a
user, simultaneously awed yet also perplexed by the characteristic “pushi-
ness” with which websites, mobile apps, virtual reality headsets, and myr-
iad other digital devices have appeared and made their way into our lives.
I wrote this book as a way to explore how we, the billions of internet
users, can respond to the sea change that transformed an open world of
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2 Introduction
online possibility into something else altogether: a digital landscape of
walled gardens and predetermined paths already programmed for us, for
which we have little visibility or control. If we are going to turn over our
lives to these devices and systems, shouldn’t we, at the minimum, have
power over how they are designed and profited from? Shouldn’t tech-
nology be people-c entered, not in use and addiction, but in creation and
application?
As access to the internet and cell phones expands around the world, so
too does the power and wealth of but a few technology companies located
on the West Coast of the United States (Silicon Valley and California) and in
China. These companies offer services that have, without question, created
value for their billions of users, providing efficient and economical ways for
us to find and disseminate information, telecommute to our jobs, social-
ize with one another, and buy and sell goods. Many of us love the cheap
prices on Amazon and how quickly the products we purchase arrive at our
doorstep. Others believe that things like surveillance cameras, GPS track-
ing of people using smartphones, and the use of shared data to apprehend
terrorists provide great value. But we may not also recognize that in the
process we give up our individual rights to privacy, put the most vulnerable
members of our society at risk, threaten the viability of small businesses,
and contribute to greater economic inequality and political division.
In domesticating the “wild west” of the internet, the big tech companies
have provided a vibrant market of beneficial tools and services for users and
amassed unimaginable wealth for their executives and stockholders. But in
the process they have also supplanted the open, democratic internet with a
vast network of privately owned architecture—i magine digital fences, high-
ways, roads, bridges, and walls—w hose sole purpose is to control people’s
movement through digital space in ways that benefit their companies’ bot-
tom lines.1 Clinging to this idea of an open internet obscures the reality: The
digital world is structured by static, hefty, and inflexible digital architectures.
And like invisible borders, they enforce specific paths.
We are increasingly aware, of course, that the phones and websites link-
ing us to a wider world keep track of us, even when we are not using them,
and that our personal data is vulnerable to covert collection and monetiza-
tion. We have also experienced the amplification and rapid spread of pro-
paganda, misinformation, and hate speech on the internet, too often with
tragic results, all of which distracts us from facts, contexts, and multiple
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Introduction 3
points of view. Meanwhile, journalists, activists, scholars, and more of the
public are raising concerns that Chinese, Western, and white male inter-
ests dominate the content and systems that power the internet rather than
those who reflect the full diversity of us online. Finally, against the back-
drop of profound economic inequality across the world, we have seen how
the expansion of the gig economy has made work, wages, and benefits less
secure than ever before, even as digital automation threatens to eliminate
much of the current job market.
I, like so many of us, derive incredible value from the services and prod-
ucts provided by Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. But I
also know that I have agreed to their terms of service without understand-
ing exactly what I have given up in exchange for what I am getting: I am
not being given the means to think through the downstream implications
of my actions even for myself, much less for others in my networks. As
an example, Amazon has made it so inexpensive and easy to buy almost
anything, that almost all of us use the site regularly. The Chinese Alibaba
is no different. But is it okay that both these companies have monopolis-
tically overtaken an open marketplace? What about Amazon’s facial rec-
ognition technology being sold to military contractors, the police, and to
support President Donald Trump’s actions with the Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement (ICE) agency? Are we okay with these sorts of transac-
tions, similar examples of which we can find involving every powerful tech
company?
How many of us know that the internet itself largely came to be thanks
to public, taxpayer-f unded research? So how come the spoils of our pub-
lic investments, the trillions of dollars associated with Silicon Valley, have
only lined the pockets of uber-r ich investors and executives? Somehow we
gave away all the money and power to the 1 percent, a secretive cadre of
middlemen.
Don’t get me wrong, the value provided by the most powerful and ubiq-
uitous technologies is unmistakable: Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft,
and Amazon have created efficient, helpful, and beautiful services and
objects most of us wouldn’t want to live without. And these Big 5 tech
companies are not the only major players. Although I don’t discuss Chinese
tech giants in detail in this book because I couldn’t gain sufficient access
to information via first-h and interviews, they are equally pervasive in their
presence and influence, particularly in Asia. In 2018, China took 9 of the
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4 Introduction
top-2 0 slots ranking internet leaders of the world, with their businesses and
products reflecting the kind of design and performance values championed
by Silicon Valley.2 In the e-c ommerce sector, Alibaba is the No. 1 retailer in
the world with profits and sales surpassing Amazon and eBay combined.3 It
too, has worked toward expanding and synthesizing its services, from cloud
computing to offering virtual reality shopping experiences for its users.4
On top of it all, China has just launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) news
anchor, according to state news agency Xinhua. The Guardian reported that
Chinese viewers in November 2018 were greeted with a digital version of
regular anchor Qiu Hao, who promised them, “Not only can I accompany
you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can be endlessly copied and present
at different scenes to bring you the news.”5
I wrote this book not to merely criticize or raise alarms, but to advocate
for and illustrate a future where the connectivity and the online services
we love don’t come with the costs of surveillance, income disparity, false
information, and extreme imbalances in how technologies are designed
and deployed. The possibilities are vast, and we can learn a great deal from
the whole range of strategies and efforts already underway. In order to put
the power of technology to work for the common global good, we must
identify what is dangerous about the current arrangement, and mobilize a
vision for positive change.
The challenge doesn’t just face the big tech companies but any who
presume that their so-c alled neutral systems always do good, even when
their troubling effects may look more like social engineering. For exam-
ple, consider the company Faception’s attempts to predict IQ, personality,
and violent behaviors through the application of “deep” machine-l earning
techniques to facial features and bone structure.6 We’ve made such horrible
mistakes before, for example treating black people’s faces and body types
as supposed evidence of their inferiority. Are we about to justify continued
racism thanks to “machine learning”?
In Beyond the Valley I show examples of technologies from around the
world that balance efficiency with values of equity, democracy, and diver-
sity. I tell stories of global innovators that point the way toward a humane
and balanced internet of tomorrow. I explain the perils that occur when a
narrow understanding of efficiency becomes our primary focus and ironi-
cally creates inefficiency. Efficiency on our consumer platforms can make
all of our lives inefficient by disturbing our sense of security and privacy,
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Introduction 5
interfering with our democracy, and furthering economic inequality. Effi-
cient industries can create the inefficiency (and massive threat) of climate
change. And similarly, the blind embrace of efficiency can result in tragic
hidden costs to vulnerable humans—l ike when the reliance on AI-p owered
safety-f eatures that could not be overridden in an emergency resulted in
fatal plane crashes in 2018 and 2019.
To address these challenges I tell stories of entrepreneurs creating tech-
nologies with a social mission, users pooling resources and ideas to support
grassroots politicians and ethical causes, and communities coming together
to own digital platforms. In all of these cases the idea is for people, not
private tech companies, to design their own networks and services based
on shared values and belief systems.7 These small-s cale, environmentally
conscious, user-g overned, and often decentralized efforts are examples of
what some call “appropriate” or “people-c entered” technology. I also share
examples that are less widely established, but which are on the cutting edge
of innovation, such as privacy-p rotecting systems, universal basic income,
portable benefits, union organizing, digital cooperatives, worker councils,
and more.
These are not all new ideas; they exist around us and it’s time to see what
we can gain by paying attention to them. But we can also do more, start-
ing with demanding that governments and big tech companies be more
accountable and communicative with their users. We can also work with
engineers who are not trained to analyze the social, political, or economic
effects of the systems they create to develop a more reflective and inclusive
design process. We have a range of positive directions in front of us, and
they can drive the change needed for a connected world that is more just,
more representative, and more diversely democratic.
Part of pursuing this future is pursuing the internet we were promised,
but haven’t yet received: an internet that acts as a “global village,” bringing
us all together; an internet that creates, or at least supports, equality; an
internet that lifts all boats. The coming pages will look at the past and the
future, around the world, and at our cultural, political, and economic lives
to point toward a digital future that supports diversity, democracy, and the
belief that our collective and individual welfares are interwoven.
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