Farhad Manjoo

At the time, Theranos was a promising medical startup and Uber looked like a slightly rough-around-the-edges solution to urban traffic. Bill Gates was the world’s greatest philanthropist, and you’d have been laughed out of town for suggesting — as presidential candidates and billionaires themselves now routinely do — that people as rich as him should not even be allowed to exist. This month both The New Yorker and the Atlantic published lengthy investigations into Jeff Bezos’ designs on owning basically everything. In 2014, the Amazon founder was hardly so existentially menacing; he seemed happily married, most decidedly not jacked, and he wasn’t even close to being the richest man in the world. LOL, he was poorer than Mark Zuckerberg.

The stakes were smaller then, is what I’m saying. Over five seasons, “Silicon Valley” has been viciously precise in lambasting techies’ anti-social foibles, but as to the industry’s fundamental contribution to the world, the series has mostly aped the zeitgeist, handling tech with loving, kid gloves.

The gang of awkward bros who are trying to make it big with Pied Piper, the show’s heroic central startup, have always been mostly good dudes, at least compared to their real-life startup bro analogues. They weren’t abetting Nazis. They weren’t breaking democracies, or taking money from murderous petromonarchs. Compared to pop cultural portrayals of the nation’s other power centers — to Wall Street, Hollywood or D.C. — “Silicon Valley” long found in Silicon Valley some capacity for inspiration, wonder and awe.

But in much the same way that later seasons of “Veep” had to amp up an atmosphere of dystopian peril to match the real-life descent of U.S. politics, HBO’s tech satire has also had to adjust. Society is now drowning in tech, and as we’ve all curdled in the glare of our phones, “Silicon Valley” got more sour, too. This works well as a story arc for a show set in the tech industry: Though Pied Piper has always been an idealistic company (fake idealism is the whole joke about this place), each season brought new avenues to abandon its ideals — the time they signed up thousands of fake users, or when their software caused phone explosions that injured their customers’ genitals.

But now the show is going even darker. In its final season, “Silicon Valley,” which returns Sunday, seems to be catching up with the bleak mood in and about the technology industry.

Even filtered through a zany lens — El Pollo Loco’s logo has a prominent role — the show is asking big questions, maybe the biggest questions: Can good coexist with greed? Is it OK to act unethically in the service of ethical ends? Does money necessarily ruin everything — and how much does that matter, if we’re talking billions?

It’s a delicious, somberly hilarious turn. The new season begins with Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s gangly chief (played by Thomas Middleditch), testifying before Congress about his company’s noble efforts to undermine Facebook, Google and Amazon — corporate “kings” who “monitor every moment in our lives” and “exploit our data for profit.”

But taking the high road isn’t easy in Silicon Valley. Unbeknown to Richard, Pied Piper has indeed been spying on its users, and in his maneuverings to save the company, Richard must decide whether to take $1 billion from a Chilean investor with ties to the Pinochet regime. The second episode ends with a mordant scene illustrating the dilemma. As Richard weighs taking money from the threatening would-be savior, a parade of birds fatally crashes into the investor’s glass windows in a steady drumbeat, each one landing in a beautiful outdoor water display, where a gardener is waiting to fish out the carcasses with a pool net.

It’s an awfully telling metaphor. In tech, you build a gleaming edifice for the whole world to enjoy — and if it results in some unexpected deaths, hey, you can always hire someone to clean it up. “What are you going to do?” the investor says with a shrug.

You might worry that the show risks losing laughs by languishing in the gloom. Much of the early episodes are concerned with ethics, after all, a subject that has long taken a back seat in real-life Silicon Valley. At one point, there is an extended meditation that feels ripped from tortured tech-company boardroom discussions about how to behave under newfound scrutiny. Richard and his long-suffering sweater-clad biz-dev exec, Jared Dunn (Zach Woods), ask themselves: How much wrong can we do and still live with ourselves?

But the laughs come in their pretzel-twisting justifications.

“Even if this is wrong, I suppose you could argue that it’s wrong in the service of rightness,” Jared suggests.

Richard chimes in with rising approval: “It’s unethical in the defense of ethics. Unjust in the quest for justice.”

Jared: “It’s like stealing from your pimp to pay for your friend’s appendectomy.”

So, yes, “Silicon Valley” is still a comedy. And in mining tech primarily for humor rather than dread, I suspect it will be the last show of its kind at least for some time. Newer takes on the industry — in “Black Mirror” most notably, but also upcoming adaptations of the scandals at Theranos and at Uber — depict the perils of technology and the business of tech more squarely, seriously and scarily.

It’s true that “Silicon Valley” has often ridiculed techies’ insistence that their primary goal is improving the world. The series’ best-ever quip, from Season 2, is the Hooli chief Gavin Belson’s insistence that “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

Yet even now, the show still holds out hope for tech’s redemption, and still seems to buy into its characters’ idea that they are mainly in this for the betterment of humanity. Mike Judge, the series’ co-creator, has often argued that there is a stark difference between Wall Street and tech: Wall Street only cares about money, but in tech, people do want something bigger, realer, better.

In the years since “Silicon Valley” hit the small screen, I’ve grown less and less sure that Judge is right. And despite the show’s darker turn, I worry that a neatly redemptive end — in which Pied Piper finally makes it big, crushing the competition without losing its soul — might be in the offing. The show’s best feature is its well-researched verisimilitude. Just about every gag and personality trait in the script seems copied from real life; many tech insiders, including Dick Costolo, the former chief executive of Twitter, consulted heavily with writers to ensure its realness.

But a redemptive end would mar that truth. What we’ve seen in real-life Silicon Valley in recent years is that it might be impossible to be successful and good. Success in tech almost necessarily involves exploitation — of users, of investors, of employees — and when it comes, it arrives at such disruptive scale that it invariably hurts someone, somewhere, in ways that nobody could see coming.

I’m curious how “Silicon Valley” will navigate these treacherous threads. If it were up to me, I’d rather Richard and the gang fail honorably, letting Pied Piper die, than succeed by selling out. But that, too, would be unreal.

This article originally appeared in

'Silicon Valley,' Darker Than Ever, Captures the Bleak Mood of Tech

When “Silicon Valley” premiered on HBO in 2014, Silicon Valley hadn’t yet ruined the world. Those were the salad days for the titans of tech: Digital billionaires were superheroes feted on magazine covers and in the White House, not supervillains hauled before Congress for fixing elections, sowing genocide, undermining truth and monopolizing all the globe’s commerce.

I know what you’re thinking: What’s the catch?! Seems like a reasonable, candid, levelheaded gent, and so rich and good-looking, too! Are there any hidden red flags? Is he divorced or something?

Yes, several times, but enough about his accomplishments. Here’s the real problem: Word on the street is, there is … a report. It’s long. It’s legalistic. Very few people have read it, and technically it doesn’t come down either way on much of anything. Still, if you manage to get through it, you’ll find a very troubling suggestion that our otherwise perfect Tinder hunk may recently have — oh, it is too terrible even to contemplate — he might have … obstructed justice. And it gets even worse, because the guy who wrote the report just went on TV and said something truly devastating. He said our man was “not exculpated.”

I’m sorry! Take a breath! I should have warned you that we were dealing with someone truly beyond the pale here. Swipe left!

It has often been noted that the chief political mechanism of the Trump era is gaslighting. There is a racist in the White House — a man who ran on a platform of dividing the country by race and has since governed at every turn on a platform of dividing the country by race — who is nevertheless lauded by tens of millions of supporters and nearly every elected member of his party for his equanimity and fair-mindedness. Three years of daily dissembling and distraction from the unrelenting cause at the core of his presidency — the marshaling of state power against minorities and the elevation of white people above all others — would have been difficult enough to deal with.

But what is less obvious, and what truly breaks my brain, is the degree to which even President Donald Trump’s political opponents have joined in the gaslighting. It is their obsession with Robert Mueller and his tedious investigation — an investigation all but irrelevant to the racist agenda that animates Trump’s political project — that is the primary vehicle through which we’ve all been duped. Or, I should say, through which we’ve duped ourselves.

Some pundits are getting flak on Twitter for saying this week’s Mueller show was a political bust for Democrats because the “optics” of the hearings were bad — that Mueller’s case is complex and kind of boring, lacking sizzle. But the disappointed pundits are actually understating the case: The hearings were a political disaster for Democrats not just because the optics were bad but because the substance was, too.

Implicit in the hearings was the suggestion, perpetuated by the mainstream media and much of the Democratic establishment for the entirety of the Trump presidency, that the really damning gotchas are still to come. That despite what we know of Trump already — despite the fact that he has assembled a political coalition under the banner of racism and has whipped up that coalition not with a dog whistle but an air horn — we have not yet seen anything fatal to Trump’s presidency.

For that, we were told, first, to wait for Mueller’s report. When that fizzled, it was these hearings that would do him in. And when that fails, I guess we could try a Netflix special, a Broadway show with musical numbers or maybe a traveling trapeze act. If we just get the medium right, the theory goes, Mueller will produce the goods, and then the American people will finally realize that Trump is bad news, and all will be healed.

This is madness. We should stop trying to make Mueller happen, not because the special prosecutor’s findings are unimportant but because they are so very beside the point. The president just told four American members of Congress to go back to where they came from and then presided over a rage-soaked white-power rally that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Why, after that, are we still looking for reasons to impeach this man? And why are we holding televised hearings into something completely different?

Sure, I get it: Obstruction of justice is A Very Big Deal. In an ordinary political climate it could be the undoing of a president, especially obstruction in the service of derailing an investigation into foreign election meddling. Russia ran a bunch of divisive Facebook ads and hacked Democrats’ emails. Someone should probably do something.

Fine, but shouldn’t we first make sure racism has no place in the White House? How about we begin impeachment proceedings on that urgent question: Is it OK to have a racist president? And, indeed, how about we start not today but two years ago, when Trump praised the Nazis who marched on Charlottesville? Or when his administration lied to everyone about the racist impetus for adding a citizenship question to the census? Or when he started separating immigrant families at the border? Or during his first month in office, when he put into place an executive order codifying his Muslim ban?

You might argue, as some constitutional scholars did last week, that racism is not an impeachable offense. The theory seems to be that Trump has a First Amendment right to racism, and presidents are entitled to their preferred policy, even if they’re bigoted. In this view, Mueller’s findings are a better way to do Trump in — like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, they’re a means, if not an end.

But that’s a failure of imagination. Constitutional scholars also note that impeachment is a political act, and that the Constitution’s language about “high crimes and misdemeanors” has in the past been interpreted to cover a wide range of acts that politicians of the day deemed unacceptable. Indeed, one of the articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson went directly to his language. In a series of election rallies, Johnson had engaged in racist and demeaning rhetoric against blacks in general and several members of Congress. He’d suggested hanging abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men,” he declared.

Johnson was impeached by the House, but, by a single vote, was saved from removal from office by the Senate. It is time, now, to relitigate that history. We should have a political debate about whether or not racist federal governance should endure in America. It is not as if we don’t have enough evidence to make the case that Trump’s politics are racist. And if Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t a racist or that racism isn’t disqualifying, let them make the case. Make them go on record, again and again, over months of hearings, defending all the tweets they claim not to have read. Talk about bad optics.

Last week, Rep. Al Green of Texas attempted to make just this case in a resolution calling for Trump’s impeachment on the grounds of racism. “The Mueller testimony has nothing to do with his bigotry. Nothing. Zero. Nada,” Green told reporters. “We cannot wait.”

Nearly 100 lawmakers signed on to Green’s resolution, but Nancy Pelosi led the vote to table it. Her argument? Let’s wait for Mueller.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/mueller-trump-impeach-racism.html" id="3502acd6-3cef-33c2-a3b7-55ea778f8b64">The New York Times</a>.

One day, browsing Tinder, imagine that you come upon the profile of an obese, orange-haired real estate magnate and proud, raging racist. The first line of his bio: “Mexicans are rapists.” Formative business experience: Not renting to blacks. One of his profile pictures is a hand drawing of the continent of Africa across which he has scrawled the word “shithole.” Muslims: Don’t let them in. Jews, he tolerates, because sometimes you need a lawyer or an accountant, but he will also give a fair ...

Stop Trying to Make Mueller Happen

In Silicon Valley, you don’t get very far without accidentally creating a permanent digital underclass, and so it probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn that DoorDash has long maintained a compensation policy for its workers that looks pretty much like the outright theft of their tips.

The policy, which has been in effect since 2017 and has frequently inspired small uproars on social media, went viral again this weekend after Andy Newman, a New York Times reporter, detailed in a brilliantly dystopian article his nightmarish stint as a New York City food app deliveryman. Only then, finally, did DoorDash kill it.

Newman explained that on his first order, DoorDash offered him a guaranteed minimum payment of $6.85. His customer tipped $3, but Newman still got only $6.85, not $9.85, because DoorDash uses customers’ tips to pad its guaranteed payout. If the customer had tipped nothing, “DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85,” Newman wrote. “Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me.”

To anyone with sense and reason, this is tip theft. Yet DoorDash has been gaslighting workers and the media with the argument that its unfair policy was actually the most equitable and economically optimal model. I got the impression that the company was implying its workers preferred this injustice — they were single moms and college students who valued the flexibility and character-building precariousness of their gig worker status more than such trifling elite concerns as getting the full amount of money customers intended them to have.

After long defending the policy, Tony Xu, the chief executive of DoorDash, finally threw in the towel on Tuesday evening. He promised in a series of tweets to put in place a new pay model soon to ensure that workers get the full amount that customers tip them.

“We made the decision today that we’ve got to strike a better balance,” Xu told me on the phone.

The company’s reversal is welcome. And yet the fact that the tipping policy persisted at DoorDash for so long — and that the company so vehemently defended it in the face of waves of online outrage, and depended for its defense on the fact that most consumers and many workers didn’t quite understand the policy — only lays bare how shaky and capricious the entire digital economy is for workers.

There were other noteworthy facts about this debate on worker pay. These are times of agitation and hashtag-trending protest, so you might have expected someone in national politics to rush in and slay the clear injustice of DoorDash’s pay plan. For instance, members of the supposedly socialist-overrun Democratic Party. Didn’t the Democratic House majority just pass a minimum wage bill that includes reforms to the compensation of tipped workers? Wouldn’t such a bill protect DoorDash’s “dashers”?

Hah, no: The Democrats’ bill says nothing about DoorDash dashers or any other gig workers, because technically they are independent contractors and not actually employees — a bookkeeping loophole of enormous consequence that lawmakers are doing little to address.

Not that it would have made much immediate difference to dashers if they were covered by the bill, because the Democrats’ plan only gets to its headline $15-per-hour minimum wage in the year 2025. I suppose the idea is to give America’s workers something sunny to look forward to in the first year of Ivanka Trump’s presidency.

Of course, I’m kidding. The minimum wage is likely to be unchanged by Ivanka’s inauguration, because despite the enormous popularity of raising it, the Democrats’ bill has no chance of passing Mitch McConnell’s Senate, and Fox News is already full of resentment about the notion that coddled minimum-wage workers have anything to complain about.

Yes, you read that correctly: Democrats offered a six-year phase-in as a concession to moderates in a bill destined never to become law. Such is the state of workers’ rights — and workers’ political power — today. Even the symbolic victories are milquetoast.

We are told that we are living in the best economy ever in the history of economies. We are told we have a president who loves and is loved by the working class. And we are warned that there is a rebellious contingent among the left that loves working people and other politically powerless minorities too insistently.

Some pundits are even now beginning to worry that Democrats are moving too swiftly toward revolution — that offering free health care, free college and promises of living wages will turn off the vast middle of the country that just wants to return to the pre-Trump status quo of 2015, when everything was wonderful for everyone.

What worries me is that almost no one is pushing for revolution quickly enough to keep up with the enormous upheaval that software will wreak upon labor. What worries me is that DoorDash’s pay injustice was only a small, emblematic horror, and that technology is creating a vast digital underclass here in the United States and across the planet who will toil permanently without decent protections.

What worries me is that these laborers are invisible “ghost workers” hidden behind screens and apps and algorithms and digital tip jars, working for unpredictable, AI-dictated, sub-minimum wage, beckoned into furious action when you press this or that button on your $1,000 aluminum-and-glass happy machine. They are delivering your food, driving you to the airport, sprinting frantically to pick up and wrap your toothpaste and toilet paper so it can be delivered in a day, all while keeping your social feeds free of terrorism and stray nipples (though only female nipples!).

But what worries me the most is that this is just the beginning. The software-driven policies of exploitation and servility will metastasize across the economic value chain. Taking DoorDash workers tips today will pave the way for taking advantage of everyone else tomorrow.

Because what’s to stop it? The real scandal of DoorDash’s pay scandal is that the company stuck with it for so long despite its clear unfairness. The company was betting that it would blow over, because usually such things do.

That instinct was probably correct. The rules of digital society won’t be much different from the rules of analog society: Working people will get shafted.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/doordash-tipping.html" id="95bf08be-5d87-3477-a985-540584b0793a">The New York Times</a>.

DoorDash is the most popular food delivery service in the country, a freakishly fast-growing unicorn valued at $7 billion just six years after its founding, backed by some of Silicon Valley’s and Saudi Arabia’s leading investors. I’ll slinkingly confess that it is also a provider of my lunch two or three or five times a month, depending on how lazily bougie and nihilistic I happen to be feeling about leaving the house.

The Tech Industry Is Building a Vast Digital Underclass

Car ownership is a financial and environmental blight. Cars are one of the most expensive products we buy, but they barely get any use (most cars spend most of the day parked). UberCab — which shortened its name to Uber — was using technology to push a radical new urban vision, and it quickly became a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision. Allowing strangers to share their cars sounded crazy, but if it took off, Uber might reduce the need for car ownership and increase the utilization of each car. It could make transportation cheaper and far more environmentally friendly, and it might create sustainable jobs for many drivers.

Dumbly, I once bought into this vision. Here was a company that could credibly claim to be changing the world. It might unpave paradise and tear down the parking lots.

Boy, was I a dope. Nearly a decade later, as Uber begins pitching its business to Wall Street in advance of an initial public offering that could value the company at $100 billion, I’m sickened and saddened by my naiveté.

In the years since, Uber skirted laws and cut corners to trample over regulators and competitors. It accelerated the startup industry’s misogynistic and reckless hustle culture. And it pushed a frightening new picture of labor — one in which everyone is a contractor, toiling without protection, our hours and our lives ruled by uncaring algorithms in the cloud.

Uber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech IPO since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.

Today’s Uber is more responsible than yesterday’s: Travis Kalanick, Uber’s onetime Night King, was ousted as chief executive in 2017, and Dara Khosrowshahi, its new chief, has led a thorough rehabilitation. Yet Uber’s early insiders paid no real price for their sins. Kalanick’s stake will be worth nearly $9 billion. Tech giants — including Apple, Google and Jeff Bezos, who all acquired significant stakes in Uber — will make a killing. Saudi Arabian petromonarchs will too.

Not Uber’s drivers. Recent studies show that Uber drivers make poverty wages — about $10 an hour after their vehicle expenses are deducted from their pay. Drivers’ fortunes might only worsen after the company goes public. Uber lost nearly $2 billion in 2018, and the best long-term hope for Uber’s business is that drivers disappear altogether, replaced by cars that drive themselves. In rushed pursuit of that profitable vision, one of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a pedestrian last year.

The environmental gains have also yet to materialize. Though ride-sharing has prompted some people to go car-free, vehicle ownership has gone up in cities where Uber and Lyft are popular. Car services might also be prompting wealthier people to ditch public transit, thus reducing political support for it.

It didn’t have to be this way. A different, better Uber could have employed drivers and paid them a living wage. A better Uber might have found a way to work with municipalities on improving transit rather than treating city governments as enemies to be tricked and trampled.

But because of where it came from and how it was cheered on, Uber felt little cultural pressure to divvy up its gains more equitably. The worse it behaved, the more money investors poured into it.

And who can blame Uber? The Uber IPO should be regarded as a moral stain on Silicon Valley. But that won’t happen. Soon the opening bell will ring and a few new billionaires will roam the earth. All will be forgotten and forgiven — and Silicon Valley will move on to the next big idea to be squandered.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/uber-ipo.html" id="3c83b1ab-f995-350f-a951-870d3ecba104">The New York Times</a>.

In 2010, I received an email from an ecstatic employee at a startup called UberCab. “What our tiny company is doing for San Francisco right now is huge,” he told me. The employee’s joy was contagious. Back then, as a naive, baby tech pundit, I was prone to spinning out elaborate visions of tech-abetted progress, and the more I learned about UberCab’s bold idea, the more deeply I swooned.

The Uber IPO Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley

Privacy is also something many people are happy to trade away at a moment’s notice, for the slightest reward: your address to win this car, your purchase history for discounts on peanut butter, your life for Facebook.

This sounds like a contradiction, but it’s more of a resignation. People claim to want privacy, companies claim to provide it, but neither side is being entirely transparent or honest about the terms of the trade. When something goes wrong, we all get very angry for a minute and then go back to business as usual. Secretly, we might already have made peace with the idea that no one has any privacy online.

It’s time to stop shrugging about privacy.

The next decade will be marked by the rise of technologies that are deeply dependent on the most intimate information about our lives. I’m talking about things like artificial intelligence, wearable sensors, genetic sequencing, drones and tiny cameras everywhere. Then there’s the emerging dynamic of the tech industry, in which a small number of all-powerful giants are becoming central collectors of all digital information. These facts point us toward doom. Soon, a handful of companies will enjoy almost total information awareness over just about everything that every one of us is doing at all times.

Let’s play a game I like to call “This Gadget’s Worst Nightmare.” The game goes like this: Pick some newish tech thing. Then spin the story out in your head. Imagine all of the ways the technology might be misused, and ask yourself if our laws and politicians are prepared to handle the dystopian nightmare that emerges. I’m going to warn you: The game gets very scary very quickly.

Consider home surveillance cameras. In particular, think about doorbell cams, which appeared on the scene a few years ago and became an instant hit. They’re handy — when people ring your bell, you can see their faces and chat with them. Today, two of the most popular home cameras brands are owned by tech giants: Amazon makes Ring, and Google owns Nest.

Privacy-wise, these cameras might initially seem like no big deal — just a new take on the old video intercoms you’d see on jewelry stores in ’80s heist movies. But if you consider their dystopian possibilities, doorbell cameras raise many profound social, moral, economic and even political questions.

First, they are motion-triggered cameras that are connected to the cloud. This means that by installing a doorbell cam, you are recording an image of everyone who comes to your door and sending pictures of that person’s face to unknown servers far away. This might sound OK — after all, it’s your house, and you have a right to film people — but remember that your property can also be someone else’s workplace. Delivery people, for instance, might have to come to your door every day. Without obtaining any permission, you’re sending a daily dossier of a UPS driver’s face — and location at a certain time of day — to some internet company.

While you figure that out, here are some other complications. Manually screening every face that appears at your door is a trudge. Luckily, software can do it for you. Through face recognition, doorbell cameras can be taught that certain people are friendly and others are not. This could be convenient: You’re traveling on business and you want to be alerted when your spouse gets home. But it could just as easily turn nightmarish: A domestic abuser wants to be alerted when his spouse gets home. Indeed, “smart home” gadgets are already becoming a key weapon of domestic abuse.

Now imagine what might happen when the doorbell camera finds someone it doesn’t recognize. Ring, the doorbell camera startup owned by Amazon, offered some creepy ideas in a patent application it filed last year. The company described a way to stitch together a composite of a face that might have been captured by several different cameras. The face could then be remembered and shared by neighbors, and checked against a “database of suspicious persons” — either databases created by the neighbors themselves, or perhaps law-enforcement or immigration databases.

This sounds like the far-off future, but much of it is here today. Ring already offers a neighborhood social network that lets users share pictures of “suspicious” people. Note also that neighborhood social networks are known hotbeds of racial profiling, and that facial recognition software is shot through with gender and racial bias. On top of all that, Ring offers ways for the police to tap into its neighborhood networks: As The Intercept reported, cops can look up neighbors’ comments and even request their video footage.

Do we want a semipublic or even fully public, searchable database of everyone’s “suspicious” doorbell pictures? Is that OK?

But it gets worse. Doorbell camera companies say they don’t spy on your videos. But they do not forswear using other information gleaned from the smart home — like a log of times you’re likely to be home and not — to make predictions about you, to develop new products and business ideas, and to better market to you. And it’s not just the doorbell camera manufacturers you have to worry about. Last year, Congress repealed privacy rules meant to prevent broadband companies from analyzing your private information; as a result, your internet service provider might well be able to glean information about your comings and goings from your doorbell camera — and perhaps to sell it.

Think about all the economic, social and even political power we’re handing over here. Amazon and Google already know loads about you. By blindly buying into these tiny conveniences, we are giving them eyes on every other door in America. Is that the kind of information we want private corporations to have?

And someday the decision may not even be voluntary. One life insurance company is now requiring the people it covers to wear activity trackers. What if your homeowners insurance company gives you a significant discount for installing home cameras? What if the doorbell cameras take off, but not so much because people love them but because they don’t hate them enough to say no to what looks like a convenient bargain?

Now play this game for other technology: drones, ancestry databases, self-driving cars ...

To examine how carelessly we’re thinking about privacy as we head into this digital future is to be confronted with a stark truth: We are building a surveillance state no less totalitarian than the one the Chinese are rigging up. But what China is doing through government, we are doing through corporations and consumer products, in the absence of any real regulation that recognizes the stakes at hand.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/sunday/privacy-corporation-surveillance.html" id="6d83c915-5ac6-37ce-af12-c0e6eea423c3">The New York Times</a>.

“Privacy” is something we all seem to want. You get mad when your privacy is invaded or in some way mishandled; when Equifax leaks your credit info, when your sexts show up on Reddit, when your psychiatrist’s office gets hacked.

It's Time to Panic About Who's Watching Us

Here’s what I do: Instead of writing, I speak. When a notable thought strikes me — I could be pacing around my home office, washing dishes, driving or, most often recently, taking long, aimless strolls on desolate suburban Silicon Valley sidewalks — I open RecUp, a cloud-connected voice-recording app on my phone. Because I’m pretty much always wearing wireless headphones with a mic — yes, I’m one of those AirPod people — the app records my voice in high fidelity as I walk, while my phone is snug in my pocket or otherwise out of sight.

And so, on foot, wandering about town, I write. I began making voice memos to remember column ideas and short turns of phrases. But as I became comfortable with the practice, I started to compose full sentences, paragraphs and even whole outlines of my columns just by speaking.

Then comes the magical part. Every few days, I load the recordings into Descript, an app that bills itself as a “word processor for audio.” Some of my voice memos are more than an hour long, but Descript quickly (and cheaply) transcribes the text, truncates the silences and renders my speech editable and searchable. Through software, my meandering memos are turned into a skeleton of writing. The text Descript spits out is not by any means ready for publication, but it functions like a pencil sketch: a rough first draft that I then hammer into life the old-fashioned way, on a screen, with a keyboard, lots of tears and not a little blood.

Writing by speaking has quietly revolutionized how I work. It has made my writing more conversational and less precious. More amazingly, it has expanded my canvas: I can now write the way street photographers shoot — out in the world, whenever the muse strikes me (or more likely, when I’m loafing around, procrastinating on some other piece of writing). Most of my recent columns, including large portions of this one, were written this way: first by mouth, not fingers.

There is something more interesting here than a newspaper columnist’s life hack. I began writing-by-speaking as part of a deeper exploration into living inside what I call the “screenless internet” — which may well become the internet of tomorrow, for better and worse.

Late last decade, smartphones liberated computers from our desks, which was thrilling until we realized they were also shackling us into a distracted, addictive existence ruled entirely by multitouch glass. Now, as we reach the heights of Peak Screen, it is becoming possible to see the outlines of a less visually arresting path ahead.

New advances — like smarter and more ubiquitous voice assistants; better text-to-speech synthesis; easy-to-use audio and video production apps like Descript and Anchor; and gadgets that burrow the internet into your ears, like Apple’s AirPods and Amazon’s reported forthcoming AirPod clones — point to a profound shift in computing. Soon it might be possible to conduct a large slice of digital life, including work, without being glued to a screen. What will that be like? In what ways will it be better than what we have today — and in what ways worse?

To begin to understand these questions, I’ve been trying to live without screens. Two or three mornings a week, I’ll put on my headphones and some comfortable walking boots (Docs and Timbs are my go-to), then I’ll head out to the beaten sidewalk. My aim is to see how much I can get done with my mouth and my ears, to understand how interacting with computers mostly by speaking and listening might change computing, and how it might change us.

Now, I’ll grant that my “work” is unnatural and a little bizarre. Still, I was surprised at how much of it can be done without a screen. As a columnist, I spend large chunks of the day ingesting and analyzing information. I’ll read the news, read magazines and books, and try to find sources and experts to talk about whatever I find interesting.

At my office, I’d do all of this on a screen. But I can now find just as much news and expertise on the screenless internet. Indeed, in many ways, screenless content is better. Podcasts and audiobooks offer the sort of intimate peek at expertise that I remember from the amateur blogosphere circa 2003: a nuanced, serious, ongoing conversation about the news, one that feels more intimate, less clickbaity and less reflexively partisan than today’s visual web. And it’s efficient, too. Listening on double-speed, I can power through news and audiobooks in no time, and without distraction. When information is coming through my ears, I feel less anxiety to constantly look for something new, the way we are encouraged to do on the pull-down-for-more touch-screen internet of today.

There are readers who’ll say this experiment sounds silly, that the pull of screens is so strong it is folly to imagine a world without them. Others might suggest that the screenless internet, if it comes, will bring its own peculiar horrors: Picture dead-eyed AirPodders mumbling incantations to robotic assistants as they amble zombielike through Times Square (directed by Jordan Peele).

I’m wary of such dangers (and others yet to be imagined). Yet the more I write by speaking, the more hopelessly I fall for a screenless future. The bottom line, for me, is how magically even my jury-rigged method collapses the distance between my thoughts and the computer.

As this distance collapses further — as computers begin to understand our speech and then our thoughts with high fidelity — the internet will cease to be stuck in glass. It will come alive, all around us, and that could be amazing. (Or, you know, the worst).

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/screenless-internet.html" id="04092ab8-81dd-3471-ac08-aa8b9cd79bcf">The New York Times</a>.

A few months ago, I stumbled onto a new way of writing. I don’t mean an unusual literary or textual style; I mean a new physical method for the painstaking task of chiseling the formless geologic schists inside my brain into words and sentences crisp and coherent enough to please at least a few of my fellow human beings.

I Didn't Write This Column. I Spoke It.

And so it was meant to go once more last week, when Apple invited journalists and celebrities to an event billed as “a Think Different production.”

Some different thinking did seem in order. Since becoming the first trillion-dollar corporation last summer, Apple has battled a souring assessment on Wall Street. The iPhone is the most profitable product in the history of business, but more than a decade after its debut, pretty much everyone on the planet who can afford one already has one, and many customers see little reason to upgrade.

So now, instead of selling better stuff to more people, Apple’s new plan is to sell more stuff to the same people. “Today is going to be a very different kind of event,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, taking the stage.

It was not. From start to finish, Apple’s affair was a brushed-aluminum homage to sameness — a parade of services that startups and big rivals had done earlier, polished with an Apple-y sheen of design and marketing. Among other offerings, Apple showed off a service for subscribing to news on your phone and a credit card, and it offered vague details about a still-in-development TV service involving Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey (who are not exactly edgy or up-and-coming).

None of these efforts look terrible. Some, like the news service, might be handy. Yet they are all so trifling and derivative. As analyst Ben Thompson noted, Apple’s crush of me-too announcements falls far short of Jobs’ goal of putting “a ding in the universe.” As I watched Apple’s event, I felt the future shrink a little. In its gilded middle age, Apple is turning into something like a digital athleisure brand, stamping out countless upscale accessories for customers who love its one big thing, a company that has lost sight of the universe and is content merely to put a ding in your pocketbook.

In an ordinary time, such an ordinary corporate vision might be fine. But these aren’t ordinary times, and Apple is no ordinary company. Here is a corporation with the resources of an empire, the mass devotion of a religion and the operational capacity of a war machine. Under Cook, Apple has cannily avoided every minefield in tech and politics over the past couple of years, winning a windfall from President Donald Trump’s tax cut, avoiding getting burned in his trade war — all while enjoying the loyalty of every moneyed hipster and suburbanite on earth.

Yet, all around Apple, the digital world is burning up. Indirectly, Apple’s devices are implicated in the rise of misinformation and distraction, the erosion of privacy and the breakdown of democracy. None of these grand problems is Apple’s fault, but given its centrality to the business, Apple has the capacity and wherewithal to mitigate them. But instead of rising to the moment by pushing a fundamentally new and safer vision of the future, Apple is shrinking from it.

Consider privacy. Cook is one of the tech industry’s strongest champions of the sanctity of our private information, and Apple has pushed for more stringent privacy regulations — which is just about the least Apple could do. But what if it thought a little bigger? For example, it could directly take on Google and Facebook — the demons who rule our era of surveillance capitalism — by placing far more stringent restrictions on their culture of rampant invasion, or at least removing them from preferential places in the iPhone. (Google will pay Apple an estimated $12 billion in 2019 to act as the default search engine on the iPhone.)

More than restricting the present, Apple could deploy its billions to build a better digital future. In particular, I wonder why Apple isn’t working feverishly to create new privacy-minded versions of social-media services the world needs.

Take messaging, for starters. There is a strong moral case for Apple to turn iMessage, its encrypted messaging app, into an open standard available to anyone, even Android users, who currently lack many privacy-minded messaging apps that aren’t run by an ad company or aren’t friendly with the Chinese government.

There might be a business case, too. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, recently reoriented his company toward messaging. As Will Oremus noted in Slate, the move brings Facebook into direct competition with Apple. This presents an opportunity for Apple to turn a cold war into a hot one; Apple could swiftly undercut Zuckerberg’s ambition by freeing iMessage and bringing the gift of privacy to the non-Apple world.

Here are some other big ideas: Apple could embark on a long-term project to create a privacy-minded search engine to rival Google’s. It could build an ad-free Instagram (its founders just left Facebook in frustration). It could create a YouTube that isn’t a haven for neo-Nazis.

Some (or many) of these may be dumb ideas — ideas that would ruin Apple, or at the very least kneecap its short-run profits. But they are at least big ideas; they match in scope and daring what Apple was created to do. Let other companies handle streaming entertainment. To paraphrase a wise man: Does Cook want to sell prestige TV for the rest of his life, or does he want to change the world?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/apple-steve-jobs.html" id="0ba9a2f8-268e-3af7-a273-5699013e68c2">The New York Times</a>.

The Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s spendy new campus in Cupertino, California, is a majestic temple to pomp. An ethereal glass-and-marble cylinder set high on a serene hill, the venue feels like the architectural manifestation of the Apple co-founder’s famous “reality-distortion field.” It is an edifice meant to recall those moments when Jobs, smirking joyfully, would bound up to the stage, teasingly pull a black shroud off some new invention and instantly alter your picture of the future.

The Incredible Shrinking Apple

I found such a place in a British reality baking contest. By which I mean I found it on Netflix, which has become the internet’s most invaluable and intoxicating portal to the parts of planet Earth that aren’t America.

On Sunday, Netflix will compete for its first Best Picture Oscar for “Roma,” Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s exploration of his childhood in Mexico City. A win by “Roma” would be a fitting testament to Netflix’s ambitions. Virtually alone among tech and media companies, Netflix intends to ride a new kind of open-border digital cosmopolitanism to the bank.

For me, it was nice British people politely baking against one another that offered one of the first hints of Netflix’s unusual strategy. “The Great British Baking Show,” for those not in the cult, is an amateur baking contest, and it is one of the least American things you will ever see on TV. It depicts a utopia: a multicultural land of friendly blokes and mums with old-timey jobs — Imelda is a “countryside recreation officer” — blessed with enough welfare-state-enabled free time to attain expertise in British confectionary. To an American, the show suggests a time and place where our own worries have no meaning. And that, more than baking, is what “The Great British Baking Show” is really about.

The show was first produced and aired on British broadcast television (as “The Great British Bake-Off”) and imported to the United States by PBS, which then licensed it to Netflix; more recently, Netflix has licensed the show directly from its British broadcaster, Channel 4. But Netflix, which has 139 million paying members around the world, has lately become something more than a licenser of other countries’ escapist television.

In 2016, the company expanded to 190 countries, and last year, for the first time, a majority of its subscribers and most of its revenue came from outside the United States. To serve this audience, Netflix commissions and licenses hundreds of shows meant to echo life in every one of its markets and, in some cases, to blend languages and sensibilities across its markets (see Marie Kondo’s half-in-Japanese tidying-up blockbuster).

In the process, Netflix has discovered something startling: Despite a supposed surge in nationalism across the globe, many people like to watch movies and TV shows from other countries. “What we’re learning is that people have very diverse and eclectic tastes, and if you provide them with the world’s stories, they will be really adventurous, and they will find something unexpected,” Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice president for original content, told me.

The strategy may sound familiar; Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long pursued expansion internationally. But Netflix’s strategy is fundamentally different. Instead of trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas to a global audience. A list of Netflix’s most watched and most culturally significant recent productions looks like a Model United Nations: Besides Kondo’s show, there’s comedian Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” from Australia; from Britain, “Sex Education”; “Elite” from Spain; “The Protector” from Turkey; and “Baby” from Italy.

I’ll admit there’s something credulous and naive embedded in my narrative so far. Let me get this straight, you’re thinking: A tech company wants to bring the world closer together? As social networks help foster misinformation and populist fervor across the globe, you’re right to be skeptical. But there is a crucial difference between Netflix and other tech giants: Netflix makes money from subscriptions, not advertising.

This simple difference flips all of its incentives. It means that Netflix has a reason to satisfy every new customer, not just the ones in the most prosperous markets. Each new title carries subtitles in 26 languages, and the company is creating high-quality, properly lip-synced audio dubbing in 10 languages. For years, Netflix has roiled the film and TV business in Hollywood with its billions. Now it’s taking its money — the company spent $12 billion on content in 2018 and is projected to spend $15 billion this year — to film and TV producers in France, Spain, Brazil, India, South Korea and the Middle East, among other places.

Because it is spending so much on shows from everywhere, Netflix has an incentive to get the biggest bang for its buck by pushing them widely across its user base. Its algorithms are tuned toward expanding your interests rather than narrowing them. As a result, many of Netflix’s shows are watched widely beyond their local markets. Dystopian thrillers seem to travel particularly well. In 2016, the company added Brazilian dystopian thriller series “3%,” a bleak look at the near future; about half of its viewers were from outside Brazil. When German thriller “Dark” dropped in 2017, it hit the company’s Top 10 list in 136 countries, and about 90 percent of the series’ viewers were outside Germany.

“The industry here feels liberated by it,” Dario Madrona, one of the creators of “Elite,” told me. According to Netflix, “Elite” has been seen by 20 million viewers around the world. That level of popularity is huge for a teen drama from Spain; an audience of 20 million would be a decent hit on American broadcast TV. “We’re starting to feel, I think, like how you guys in the U.S. have felt for a long time,” Madrona said. “You can create a show there, and you can be seen all over the world.”

Netflix’s push abroad has not been without incident. Late last year, the company earned international condemnation for pulling an episode of “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj” from its service in Saudi Arabia. The comedian had criticized Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the CIA’s conclusion that the prince had ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist.

Netflix argued that it had no choice but to obey the Saudi legal authority, which said the episode violated a statute, if it wanted to continue operating in that country. The company’s executives suggested that bringing the Saudis the rest of Netflix — every other episode of “Patriot Act” or shows that explore issues of gender and sexuality, like “Big Mouth” and “Sex Education” and “Nanette” — was better than having the entire service go dark in that country.

It’s certainly a slippery argument — but I believe it’s a valid one. Netflix does seem to be pushing cultural boundaries and sparking new conversations all over the world. After it plastered Bangkok with billboards advertising “Sex Education” last month, a conservative Thai political party filed a complaint against the company for airing the racy British comedy, which the party called “a great challenge to Thai society.” The young, progressive Thai internet responded in fury, and in the outrage, people started talking about actual problems in Thai society, like the lack of sex education and the high rates of teenage pregnancy.

Consider, too, “Nanette,” in which Gadsby, who was virtually unknown beyond Australia before Netflix, delivers a groundbreaking standup performance about, roughly, art history, homosexuality, women’s rights and the tragic limits of comedy. The show was eye-opening to me, and I live in the progressive wonderland of Northern California; to a young lesbian in India, where people like Gadsby are not easily visible in media, it might have been a revelation. In fact, “Nanette” was a hit across Southeast Asia and India.

It’s legitimate to ask how long Netflix will be able to keep up this cross-border conversation — whether, as it keeps growing, it will have to make legal or moral compromises with local censors or other would-be cultural arbiters. But I’m optimistic about its chances. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the internet did turn out to bring the world together after all?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/sunday/netflix-oscars.html" id="9bca1cbd-e37a-3cc1-a0c6-0d210f3fc45e">The New York Times</a>.

For months after the 2016 election, I wanted nothing more than to escape America. I don’t mean literally — in the cliché liberal way of absconding to Canada — but intellectually, socially, psychically. Donald Trump was all anybody talked about, and I needed sanctuary. I wanted to find places where the American president-elect and his American opponents and their American controversies simply did not exist.

Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth

And should they escape death, your children and grandchildren might subsist instead through proto-apocalyptic ruin. There is a strong chance that warming will reduce global economic output by more than 20 percent and a chance that output could fall by half — a toll you might better describe as at least one, and possibly two or three, Great Depressions. War will not merely break out; a continuing, all-out resource war might be the steady-state of the next chapter of human civilization.

In 2017, when Wallace-Wells, a writer at New York Magazine, published similarly dire projections in a blockbuster article, he was criticized even by some climate scientists for reveling in the bleakest case. But his piece was one of the first articles I’d read that honestly drew out the most horrific possibilities of climate change, and in the two years since — years of hurricane and monsoon, fire and flood, mudslides, heat waves, the polar vortex — Wallace-Wells’ imagine-the-worst approach has become prescient.

The Earth keeps surpassing all superlatives, right before our eyes. “The weather is cooperating,” Wallace-Wells told me recently.

We should expect it to continue cooperating. I read this book with an unfolding mix of horror and hopelessness, the way you might learn of a terminal diagnosis that affects yourself and your family and everyone else you might ever hope to know. My Google searches over the past few weeks include queries like “global warming best cities” and “prepping 101.”

What so riled me up was not just the projected devastation but also the obvious incapacity of our political system to even begin to comprehend the suffering to come, let alone mitigate it. It struck me that what we need to fight climate change is not just some new political plan but a whole new politics — the sort of thorough reimagining of stakes that humanity has only previously achieved during times of total war.

But climate change is not war. There is no enemy, other than ourselves. And we are very bad, as individuals or collectively, at fighting ourselves over anything.

Then, one late night after taking a dose of a kind of sleep medicine that is now widely available in California, I had an epiphany:

“Pretend” is a strong word, but we live in an age of delusion. People who think vaccines are accursed; NBA players who believe the planet is shaped more like a Frisbee than a basketball; full-grown adults who maintain, against all evidence, that immigration poses an existential threat to the United States — every day, we encounter rivers of rank ridiculousness. And for the most part we have come to grudgingly accept this ubiquity as the price of living in a digital wonderland.

Yet if delusion can elevate the trivial to the top of cable news, why couldn’t it perform the same sleight of hand for the actually important?

Last year, Avi Loeb, a renowned astrophysicist at Harvard, co-authored a paper speculating that a recently discovered interstellar object named Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Loeb’s suggestion has been pooh-poohed by his academic colleagues. But experts, schmexperts, right?

Allow yourself to imagine that Oumuamua isn’t just space rock. What if the thing was indeed captained by little green people, gangly and ferocious? And what if their leader let us know her plans for us — perhaps via tweet?

I’m joking, sure; and I’ll admit I had a lot of fun playing out the scenes here. I’m picturing Logan Paul, elevated from YouTube star into commander of the U.S. Space Force, briefing President Donald Trump on a plan to turn coal-power plants into peace museums as a way to fight the aliens. The president is on board, but he has one question: “Can we save America without saving the Earth?”

But I am not spinning out this yarn merely as a dumb joke about a blinkered president. Even for people who do believe in global warming, pretending that aliens are attacking the Earth accomplishes a neat mental trick. It helps to frame the scope of the threat — civilizational, planet-encompassing — while also suggesting how we might respond: immediately, collectively and for as long as it takes.

Before I understood the horrors that await us, I had thought of climate change as one of a grab-bag of important issues on the lefty to-do list: Give people health care, help them pay for college, fix the climate.

The scale of potential devastation renders such visions laughable. Mitigating climate change and attending to its fallout isn’t going to be a policy plan passed by the next progressive administration. Instead, like the internet and nuclear weapons, the climate is going to be a permanent new feature of our politics. This will be a long-term existential battle that will require remaking every part of society, that might consume other worthy parts of a progressive agenda, that may involve costly and politically unpopular changes to our way of life for years to come, and will necessarily make some people worse off than if we did nothing. But that will be justified, because we understand the stakes: we are fighting murderous aliens.

And all the while, the problem keeps getting worse. Not long ago, a planet that warms by 2 degrees Celsius over the course of the coming century was considered an unimaginable catastrophe to be avoided at any cost. Today, 2 degrees — a level of warming that might induce death from air pollution on the order of “25 Holocausts,” Wallace-Wells notes — is looking like our best hope. On our current track, we’re shooting for at least 3 degrees of warming, according to the United Nations; according to the Trump administration, we’re headed for at least 4 degrees.

Four degrees of warming will wreak devastation unparalleled in human history. Hundreds of millions will die prematurely, large sections of the planet will be rendered uninhabitable, great herds of humanity will be on the run, and in the most prosperous remaining places, economic growth of any kind might be the exception rather than the norm.

That’s the current path. Yet just about nobody in any position of power talks about global warming with anything reflecting the required level of honesty and alarm. The Green New Deal, the high-level strategy document put out last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her allies, lacks any specificity for how we might accomplish its goals. Not even democratic socialists will frankly describe the costs of averting a warming planet.

And the swiftness with which critics pounced on the Green New Deal suggests that even as the climate gets undeniably less hospitable, we’ll still fall into the same old political trap in which climate remains a small, partisan issue rather than the all-consuming emergency it ought to be.

The whole thing is tragic and lazy, when what we need is heroism and bravery.

If the aliens attacked, we’d do better. I’m sure of it.

We would understand the stakes in the battle ahead. We would apprehend the necessity of sacrifice and perseverance. We would be able to perceive what is happening to our planet and our species as what it plainly is: a war for survival.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/aliens-climate-change.html" id="75d286a6-01cd-360e-a755-5a0451a75eb4">The New York Times</a>.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet: death by water, death by heat, death by hunger, death by thirst, death by disease, death by asphyxiation, death by political and civilizational collapse.

Pretend It's Aliens

“Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” he began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”

Scocca — a longtime writer at Gawker until that site was muffled by a billionaire — offered a straightforward argument for kneecapping the wealthiest among us. A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society.

At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts. On the left and the right, it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good. For Scocca, that level is self-evidently somewhere around $1 billion; beyond that, you’re irredeemable.

I cover technology, an industry that belches up a murder of new billionaires annually, and much of my career has required a deep anthropological inquiry into billionairedom. But I’m embarrassed to say I had never before considered Scocca’s idea — that if we aimed, through public and social policy, simply to discourage people from attaining and possessing more than a billion in lucre, just about everyone would be better off.

In my defense, back in October, abolishing billionaires felt way out there. It sounded radical, impossible, maybe even un-American, and even Scocca seemed to float the notion as a mere reverie.

But it is an illustration of the political precariousness of billionaires that the idea has since become something like mainline thought on the progressive left. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are floating new taxes aimed at the superrich, including special rates for billionaires. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires. Dan Riffle, her policy adviser, recently changed his Twitter name to “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.” Last week, HuffPost asked, “Should Billionaires Even Exist?”

I suspect the question is getting so much attention because the answer is obvious: Nope. Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power, garnering this level of adulation, while the rest of the economy scrapes by.

I like to use this column to explore maximalist policy visions — positions we might aspire to over time rather than push through tomorrow. Abolishing billionaires might not sound like a practical idea, but if you think about it as a long-term goal in light of today’s deepest economic ills, it feels anything but radical. Instead, banishing billionaires — seeking to cut their economic power, working to reduce their political power and attempting to question their social status — is a pithy, perfectly encapsulated vision for surviving the digital future.

Billionaire abolishment could take many forms. It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty, but more likely it would mean higher marginal taxes on income, wealth and estates for billionaires and people on the way to becoming billionaires. These policy ideas turn out to poll very well, even if they’re probably not actually redistributive enough to turn most billionaires into sub-billionaires.

More important, aiming to abolish billionaires would involve reshaping the structure of the digital economy so that it produces a more equitable ratio of superrich to the rest of us.

Inequality is the defining economic condition of the tech age. Software, by its very nature, drives concentrations of wealth. Through network effects, in which the very popularity of a service ensures that it keeps getting more popular, and unprecedented economies of scale — in which Amazon can make Alexa once and have it work everywhere, for everyone — tech instills a winner-take-all dynamic across much of the economy.

We’re already seeing these effects now. A few superstar corporations, many in tech, account for the bulk of American corporate profits, while most of the share of economic growth since the 1970s has gone to a small number of the country’s richest people.

But the problem is poised to get worse. Artificial intelligence is creating prosperous new industries that don’t employ very many workers; left unchecked, technology is creating a world where a few billionaires control an unprecedented share of global wealth.

But abolishment does not involve only economic policy. It might also take the form of social and political opprobrium. For at least 20 years, we’ve been in a devastating national love affair with billionaires — a dalliance that the tech industry has championed more than any other.

I’ve witnessed a generation of striving entrepreneurs join the three-comma club and instantly transform into superheroes of the global order, celebrated from the Bay Area to Beijing for what’s taken to be their obvious and irrefutable wisdom about anything and everything. We put billionaires on magazine covers, speculate about their political ambitions, praise their grand visions to save the world and wink affectionately at their wacky plans to help us escape — thanks to their very huge and not-in-any-way-Freudianly-suggestive rockets — to a new one.

But the adulation we heap upon billionaires obscures the plain moral quandary at the center of their wealth: Why should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?

As Ocasio-Cortez put it in a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates: “I’m not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” (She meant hookworm, she later corrected.)

Last week, to dig into this question of whether it was possible to be a good billionaire, I called up two experts.

The first was Peter Singer, the Princeton moral philosopher who has written extensively about the ethical duties of the rich. Singer told me that in general, he did not think it was possible to live morally as a billionaire, though he made a few exceptions: Gates and Buffett, who have pledged to give away the bulk of their wealth to philanthropy, would not earn Singer’s scorn.

But most billionaires are not so generous; of the 2,200 or so billionaires in the world — about 500 of whom are American — fewer than 200 have signed the Giving Pledge created by Bill and Melinda Gates and Buffett.

“I have a moral concern with the conduct of individuals — we have many billionaires who are not living ethically, and are not doing nearly as much good as they can, by a wide margin,” Singer said.

Then there is the additional complication of whether even the ones who are “doing good” are actually doing good. As writer Anand Giridharadas has argued, many billionaires approach philanthropy as a kind of branding exercise to maintain a system in which they get to keep their billions.

When a billionaire commits to putting money into politics — whether it’s Howard Schultz or Michael Bloomberg or Sheldon Adelson, whether it’s for your team or the other — you should see the plan for what it is: an effort to gain some leverage over the political system, a scheme to short-circuit the revolution and blunt the advancing pitchforks.

Which brings me to my second expert on the subject, Tom Steyer, the former hedge-fund investor who is devoting his billion-dollar fortune to a passel of progressive causes, like voter registration and climate change and impeaching Donald Trump.

Steyer ticks every liberal box. He favors a wealth tax, and he and his wife have signed the Giving Pledge. He doesn’t live excessively lavishly — he drives a Chevy Volt. Still, I wondered when I got on the phone with him last week: Wouldn’t we be better off if we didn’t have to worry about rich people like him trying to alter the political process?

Steyer was affable and loquacious; he spoke to me for nearly an hour about his interest in economic justice and his belief in grass-roots organizing. At one point I compared his giving with that of the Koch brothers, and he seemed genuinely pained by the comparison.

Farhad Manjoo

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The Incredible Shrinking Apple

Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth

Pretend It's Aliens

Abolish Billionaires

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There's Nothing Wrong With Open Borders

America's cities are unlivable, blame wealthy liberals

The next president should not be a man

Collusion was a seductive delusion

The white-extinction conspiracy theory is bonkers

The college bribery scandal and the uberization of graft

The India-Pakistan conflict was a parade of lies

The BuzzFeed layoffs as democratic emergency

You should meditate every day