I did not have to take my eyes from the screens draping the walls of the Javits Center in Manhattan that election night of November 8 to feel the reactions of shock among my friends and colleagues standing around me. The disbelief in the air was palpable as Secretary Clinton succumbed in one swing state after another.
I stayed to the bitter end that night, in shock. John Podesta, the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, took the podium to share a few words shortly after two thirty in the morning; the handful of loyal supporters who had stuck it out through the night represented a sorry sight. I left shortly thereafter: I had meetings in the Washington office of Facebook, my employer at the time, starting at nine in the morning, and I would have to begin the solemn drive south right away to arrive on time.
The drive was long, and that night I was discouraged and disillusioned. But it gave me ample time to ponder what the world had just witnessed. I could not read any expert opinions or conduct my own analysis on the election results before the drive, but as I concentrated on the road the conclusion I came to was this: an insidious but coldly logical commercial regime underlies the internet that propelled Trump to victory—and without the silent internet economy that had enabled the coordinated spread of outright lies against his opponent, the nation would not have been wrenched from its tracks with such force.
Nonetheless, the Russian disinformation problem was only the canary in the coalmine signaling deep-rooted problems at the heart of the internet. The commercial regime behind consumer internet platforms—and the journey to comprehend it in its entirety—is the focus of this book. I aim to cut through the internet’s weeds and depict its inner economic logic, as well as the economic factors motivating the decisions made behind the veil of Silicon Valley. And I do so in hopes that we can finally correct the course of a modern media ecosystem that has wholly failed the American people—and the global citizenry—time and again.
We have seen enough. It is time to repair the mass economic exploitation of American consumers that has taken hold at the behest of the technology industry.
The Internet as the Engine of Globalization
If you were to visit Calcutta today, you would be struck by the city’s great divide. On one side are the rich colors of an established cultural identity. Wide, hopeful avenues like Chowringhee, Prince Anwar Shah, Rashbehari, and Central evoke a certain nostalgia for decades past. Sun-filled streets go sleepy by day but come alive by night, with the constant activity of tea stallers, coconut merchants, and shoe shiners on every corner. Romantic alleyways unite and diverge again in hapless disorder, lined with wall-to-wall flats covered with weathered paint of every stripe of the rainbow. The Victoria Memorial, the High Court, the Great Eastern Hotel, and the Eden Gardens cricket ground, remnants of a colonial India during which the city enjoyed an economic importance and accompanying panache that it has failed to regain over many long years, grace the city’s center with elegance but serve as a constant reminder of decades of subjugation at the hands of the British Empire. And a people that has yielded the likes of the first Indian Nobel Prize winner and the first Indian Oscar-winning director today looks mostly to India’s past accolades, excessively proud of the country’s intellectual heritage and paying little heed to its place in the world’s future.
In the other half of the city—literally so, from a geographic perspective—looms an imposing new sector that has cast away Calcutta’s past and embraced the connected global economy in all its glorious commercialism. The new dedicated technology district sprawls over the northeastern edges of the city, flowing outward and upward as the tide of commerce grows. It only expands, graced by companies such as IBM, Infosys, Wipro, and Tata, all of which are engaged as technology consultants to the most important American and other foreign corporations.1 The sector—known as Rajarhat—boasts towering campuses that take advantage of the enormous local pool of high-skilled young talent at a cost of technical labor that clients in the rest of the world find relatively low. It is especially well connected, with newly renovated highways connecting it to the downtown area and the nearby airport, and set for a major modernization itself. It is this industry more than any other that hundreds of millions of young people in India strive to be a part of because of its pay and prestige.
Calcutta—like many overflowing metropolises in the developing world—finds itself stretching its cultural fabric between two realities. The former is the soporific postcolonial world that places outsize importance on the city’s high cultural heritage and intellectual contribution to the classical world. It is founded on the inherent brainpower of the local intellectual collective, a stronghold for the creation and study of literature, religion, science, and economics. Images of its greatest son, the writer and musician Rabindranath Tagore, grace the walls of the wealthy and the downtrodden. Pictured next to him is Subhas Chandra Bose, the nation’s greatest martial leader during the era of independence, whose contributions have been palpable to every generation since the colonists departed. These two individuals represent a revolution of ideas and action that fueled the freedom movement for the subcontinental race a century ago.
But Calcutta’s new world pulls the heartstrings of the local population in the opposite direction. Since national independence, the city has witnessed decade after decade of regional economic failure owing in large part to the failures of local governance advanced by a succession of communist leaders in the state, which have reduced Calcutta from what was perhaps the country’s most prominent city to a relative trash heap when compared with India’s booming metropolises situated to the far west and south of Bengal. This was no coincidence; there was a fair amount of political trickery behind the city’s turn to communism. An influx of immigrants from present Bangladesh, an ethnically Bengali part of India before the partition, left the city overpopulated and its people disoriented. Leader after leader, armed with communist rhetoric, fought off would-be industrialists, citing the interests of the displaced poor for their decision to hold Calcutta back from engaging the global economy while the rest of the country accelerated forward—fast.
And so, in a world that became increasingly cutthroat and capitalist, and increasingly desperate, there was no place for the intellectual Bengali. Year after year, regional ministers fought off industrial activities, settling on hackneyed counterarguments: if the multinationals build near the tracks, where would the thousands living in the slums go? These arguments, fair enough, were not met with new policies that could uplift the poor. As time wore on, the question of industrial investment and entry became so rigidly politicized along party lines that nothing happened, and seemingly nothing could happen.
But then came the World Wide Web.
It was this—the advent of the internet—that finally managed to defeat the city’s resistance to commerce. The industry did not have to work through municipal bureaucracy. There was so much money to be made that it could work around the local government completely if need be. As the modern world digitized commerce with the spread of the internet and increased use of the web, the market began to recognize that India could serve as the ideal technical support hub: millions of young, talented computer scientists, low marginal labor costs, and an English education system meant that this was a place teeming with economic opportunity for the Western barons of global digitization. India—powered by theretofore economically stagnant population hubs like Calcutta—could grease the commercialization of the internet along with all the background support the barons could want. And indeed, the barons have made their hay while the sun has shined. Thus was born Rajarhat, representing Calcutta’s principal wave of industrialization since the debilitating world war and national breakup.
The city has profited immensely in the process, at least in the short term. If the technology hub did not exist, what would its young people do besides serve the local consumer market in more mundane ways or leave the city? The internet has revolutionized the way Calcutta thinks about industry. What was once an overpopulated consumer market has turned into a haven for business—even if less so than other major Indian cities, including Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai—and this will