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Welcome back to Hackwatch! Last time, I laid out the basic anatomy of the “technobabble defense,” Silicon Valley’s deflection of responsibility for following the law through the art of obscuring their business operations in dense computerese to obscure how they actually operate.
Top Biden advisor Bruce Reed recognized this trend, telling Politico’s Nancy Scola that “The industry got away with a lot of stuff because ‘It’s complicated to understand.’” The belief is, as Scola writes, that Silicon Valley “has long found success in Washington by cloaking its endeavors in technical jargon.”
For most of this series, we’ll be looking at specific applications of the technobabble defense in specific industries: how fintech firms are able to use jargon to justify creating massive shadow banking operations, how landlords argue that price fixing via algorithm doesn’t really count as price fixing, how cryptocurrencies are able to portray flagrant disobedience of securities law as “innovation.”
To kick us off, though, I want to talk about one of the most critical, common, and under-recognized examples of technobabble: the very concept of a “technology industry” itself.
When we hear about the tech industry or “Big Tech,” we have a general idea of what it is we mean, that web of computer-based business models centered around Silicon Valley. It’s a very convenient shorthand, one that virtually everyone, myself very much included, is guilty of using. And it is nice to be able to invoke phrases like “tech titans,” which succinctly communicate the centers of gravity for a powerful network that influences so much of our modern lives. But it also serves Silicon Valley’s interests; if their industry is “technology,” it grants credence to their techno-optimist trappings. It helps everyone keep a straight face when figures like Marc Andreessen present themselves as the latest step of our march of progress.
It bears asking: if there is a technology industry, what precisely is non-technological industry? Our general understanding of industry is deeply interwoven with technology; I would argue that all contemporary industry is a technology industry. Not to get too semantic, but I might even posit that the relationship to technology and technological progress is what distinguishes an industrial mode of commerce from other types of economic activity.
We also need to reckon with the implications that Silicon Valley represents a grouping of businesses that form a coherent “industry.” That assumption is dubious, to say the least. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Uber are companies that are as varied as Disney, Costco, Boeing, and Yellow Cab. Notice that both of those lists are sets of a communications platform, a retail giant, an advanced manufacturing company, and a driving service. And yet we reflexively read the first list as a reasonable clumping, while the second feels scattershot.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Uber all deliver dramatically different products in dramatically different markets, but still are all commonly understood as tech firms. Where the real commonalities lie is in the broad strokes of their business models. All were fueled by Silicon Valley venture capital to rapidly scale-up and absorb losses to undercut competitors via that “blitzscaling” approach, all of them collect massive amounts of data on their userbase, and all have attempted to stave off oversight through appeals to how complicated and technical their products are. They have all, in other words, invoked the technobabble defense.
The popular conception of a “technology industry” does not actually line up with the markets they operate in. There are two main sets of industry classification: the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) from the Securities and Exchange Commission for breaking out what markets publicly traded firms operate in and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), created by the Office of Management and Budget alongside Canadian and Mexican peer institutions, which supplanted SIC as the standard classification metric among federal agencies that collect economic data. If you look each of their industry classifications up, Meta is a web search or database retrieval portal, Amazon is miscellaneous retail, Apple is wireless communications equipment manufacturing, and Uber is a driving support service.
Both classifications are obviously imperfect, but it bears mentioning that neither matches the popular discourse about a defined “technology industry.” If you’re interested, here’s a quick and dirty table that gets the point across:
| Name | Primary NAICS Industry | Secondary NAICS Industry | Primary SIC Industry | Secondary SIC Industry |
| Meta Platforms Inc | Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services | N/A | On-line data base information retrieval | N/A |
| Amazoncom Inc | All Other Miscellaneous Retailers | Supermarkets and Other Grocery Retailers (except Convenience Retailers) | Electronic shopping | Grocery stores |
| Apple Inc | Radio and Television Broadcasting and Wireless Communications Equipment Manufacturing | Electronic Computer Manufacturing | Mobile communication equipment | Personal computers (microcomputers) |
| Uber Technologies Inc | All Other Support Services | All Other Transit and Ground Passenger Transportation | Drive-a-way automobile service | Local Passenger Transportation, not elsewhere classified |
None of this is to say that every use of the phrase “tech industry” or “big tech” is nefarious, only that it reinforces a public branding that is beneficial to invocations of the technobabble defense. For this reason, we won’t use either term in this series, we’ll instead discuss “Silicon Valley” or “Silicon Valley Venture Capital-backed,” which are clunkier but don’t fall for the industry’s own self-mythologizing. And yes, we are aware that not every firm broadly counted as being among the “tech firm” set is physically headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. All, however, have been backed by the area’s venture capital funds.
But the important takeaway here is that Silicon Valley does not, actually, have a monopoly on technology or innovation so much as they have an aggressive marketing strategy to drape themselves in rhetorical appeals to themselves as inheritors of the legacy of progress. When we get down to brass tacks, we don’t need to accept their favored conception.
Image credit: “Binary code” by Christiaan Colen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.