Sean Parker is just the latest in a growing litany of high-tech billionaires with sudden second thoughts about their own digital Frankenstein monsters. Seems you can’t throw a brick these days and not hit an obscenely rich digital media titan looking to unload a guilty conscience.
Mr. Parker readily admits his own complicity, as do other extremely successful and wealthy Silicon Alley tech insiders like Tristan Harris, Justin Rosenstein, Loren Brichter and investor Roger McNamee. Unfortunately, the digital horses they designed (with eyes wide open) left the digital barn long ago. Meanwhile, Messrs. Parker, Harris, Rosenstein, Brichter, McNamee — and others of the same ilk just now emerging from the digital swamp — continue to profit hand over fist from the all-powerful digital narcotic cartel they imagined and built, even while they now profess regret and remorse.
Of course, most striking about Mr. Parker’s mea culpa is his admission that the mechanisms of addiction were and remain conscious and deliberate design components of Facebook and other marginal digital drug dealers like Google and Apple. Go figure.
A year or two ago I participated in an email exchange on a media ecology listserv with a well-known and deservedly well-reputed media theorist, author and open source advocate. We were discussing the accelerated consolidation of media, wealth and power in the digital era, and at one point he broke down and lamented the failure of the Internet to deliver on its early promise to (among other things) democratize the media. “It didn’t turn out as planned,” he said.
“You’ve been drinking too much digital Kool-Aid,” I told him, then reminded him that all of the promises—like personal empowerment, the democratization of media and digital accountability — were made by the same immense corporate and government interests that invested the requisite trillion dollars to build and blow out the Internet and high-speed digital pipeline in the first place. In other words, the Internet turned out pretty much exactly as they — the guys and gals who built and regulate the digital lives we now rent each month for exorbitant sums — planned.
In other other words, too big to fail — like digital addiction — isn’t some unintended consequence of a lousy plan or a failure to plan. For the biggest digital media and digital device builders, investors and regulators, for the masters of the Brave New Digital World, too big to fail — like digital addiction — is the plan.