‘The Nvidia case can help us limit East India Company-like practices’

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. As tech leader Jensen Huang lands in an espionage scandal, Turner speaks with Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke about the larger implications of the Nvidia news — and the US industrial culture, from Pilgrims to hippies and 'tech bros', it highlights:

Q. What is the core of your research?

A. I study the social and cultural impacts of new media technologies. I focus on a post-World War II era that's when computing takes off and science and technology explode in the United States. I'm particularly focused on America but the things that have been developed here have had global impact.


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Q. How did, as you write, the Cold War computing era in the US eventually get shaped by hippies and counterculture?

A. After World War II, Americans began to imagine a world that would be made up of information systems, one we could model and think through using mathematics. In 1946, we built the first digital computer, the ENIAC computing proceeded from there. Interestingly, the Cold War research world imagined itself as an enormously flexible place it was deeply collaborative and highly playful. We think of military-industrial research as being vertically integrated and hierarchical — but it wasn't so. It was a try-everything environment where the US was trying to win World War II and then, the Cold War. In that setting, computers seemed to model a vision of the world we hadn't had before. That was called 'cybernetic', where the world itself was a system of information — the things you saw were objects but they were also signaling systems. If you understood the world as a system of information, computers became tools by which you could model and manage that globe.

That sounds like a technical vision — but it had a deep political valence. In the Cold War era, America was very concerned about promoting democracy and avoiding authoritarianism. The US imagined a world made of information would be one where every person could share knowledge with each other. Order wouldn't be imposed from above, it would come through interactions between people in information processes I would signal you, you would signal me, I'd say something to you, you'd give me feedback and gradually, order would emerge. This vision permeated all of American culture in the 1950s. It was everywhere, from academia to political science, with books like 'The Nerves of Government' in which government had to receive information and give feedback, marriage manuals like 'I'm Ok, You're Ok' where you were supposed to give and get feedback via your partner, etc.

Then came the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war protests and two countercultures. One, based in Berkeley, did politics to change politics and was called the New Left. The other, based in San Francisco, didn't want to do politics at all they wanted to change consciousness and mindsets. They bought into the cybernetic vision of the world as an information system and tried to make that something they could live out on their communes of the late 1960s. They imagined if they could find the right technology to make a system visible and manageable, they could live differently computers were one of those technologies, alongside, say, giant rock concerts like the Woodstock vision of everyone being independent, together and collective, managed by a technology of sound rather than a state.

By the early 1980s, that counterculture had collapsed. People based in the northern California counterculture needed jobs — and they began to work in the tech industry. As they joined it, they brought with them this dream of a community of consciousness, a society built around shared mindsets instead of politics or institutions. That idea came to define computing. They said, "The 60s didn't work but computers did and now, we can finally have the technology that will let us build this leveled, democratic, cybernetic society."

Q. From there, how did cyberculture become embodied by 'tech bro' culture?

A. There was a 'bro culture' embedded in the counterculture, as any woman who was there would tell you. The communal vision of the 1960s contained in it the seeds of the 'bro culture' we have today. Importantly, between 1966-73, there was the largest wave of commune building in American history three-quarters of a million Americans left their houses to live communally. This meant they had to leave rules behind and live by shared consciousness. The phrase was, Let's go back to the land and get our heads together. You lived in a friendly and collaborative way but then, they discovered, when you take away rules and institutions, you get controlled by charismatic men. The cultural privileges that adhered to men in traditional society were now dominating communes hence, folk there often became misogynist, racist or homophobic.

That mode of organising is still alive in Silicon Valley and replicates the same problems. Consider Steve Jobs. He spent some time at the All One Commune and when he took over Apple, he ran it like a commune too, almost as a cult of himself, based on his charismatic leadership. Today, we see several charismatic tech leaders who run their companies with a similar authoritarian, personalised style. We still hear a communal rhetoric of how we ought to be together, collaborate, be loose together. That tends to produce a world that's very deregulated, which doesn't have many institutions stepping in to control things and where charismatic males control corporations, carrying the prejudices and privileges of traditionally charismatic men.

Q. How do you contextualise the Nvidia news within this culture?

A. I wouldn't see it only as a Silicon Valley story but Jensen Huang's misbehaviour is possibly quite common among people who have the kind of power he's had. The carelessness he might have shown is also common among people with such power a more wary CEO might have recognised it wasn't his personal attractiveness alone that was drawing people to him. It might also have been an attempt to gain information.

However, at the highest levels of tech, a certain kind of obliviousness sets in you can see leaders starting to think the companies they've built and the wealth those bring are evidence that they are somehow special most with divine characteristics. They can have everything they want — in their view, that is evidence they deserve everything they seek. Of course, as they begin to pursue those things, they risk getting into the kind of trouble we see Jensen Huang in now.

Q. Silicon Valley is usually seen as the apex of American success. You write of it as representing a 'fraying America' why?

A. Silicon Valley is a deceptive place. It is what Americans call 'a city on a hill'. The story goes back to 1630, to a Pilgrim minister coming to the US from England who said to his Puritan congregants, 'When we get to America, we will be as a city upon a hill and the eyes of the world shall be upon us.' They arrived with this religious notion of predestination where God had already decided who'd go to heaven. These pilgrims thought, 'If I'm going to heaven, God's not going to make me suffer on Earth — he'd want me to be wealthy.' So, wealth became an emblem of salvation, a sign that someone's going to go to heaven later.

That idea of a city on a hill being a place where wealth is pursued as a sign of divine election, almost a magical thing that ideology suffuses Silicon Valley. It defines the Valley and because such enormous money is generated here, more than 50% of the people in Silicon Valley now were born outside it, coming to the city on a hill to be part of a global magical mission, make wealth and change the world.

However, on the ground, that's not what actually happens. Silicon Valley spans two counties, a valley between the city of San Jose and San Francisco. One of its counties, Santa Clara, is among the most polluted places in America. It has dozens of extremely toxic 'Superfund' sites originally created by the high-tech industry. That pollution has even meant people suffering brain damage here. Further, the level of poverty is astonishing around a quarter of expectant mothers here don't get nutritionally adequate food. Multiple billionaires live here yet, we cannot give our vulnerable citizens nutritionally adequate meals. Prejudice also remains strong. We are not outside the traditional biases of American life on the contrary, we've fueled them. I say 'fraying America' because Silicon Valley has produced a radically unequal society and that inequality is now tearing America apart.

Q. You compare Silicon Valley to the East India Company — why?

A. The notion of a massive colonial effort to use technologies in that case, ships, in ours, computers to extract resources from countries not your own defined the East India Company. It defines our times as well. Large scale computing systems, from social media to AI, are social resource extraction systems. We think of 'extraction' as a natural process, where people dig things out of the ground, find spices, metals, etc. That is what the East India Company did. What computer folks in Silicon Valley have figured out is how to solicit our social interactions on technology, show them as graphs and maps and then monetise them, sell them as patterns of behaviour to people who use this knowledge to make more money.

We are at a stage now where our attention, our interactions, things that used to be outside the marketplace, are being extracted. If you can make that a global process, you can literally turn all human social interaction into an oil field or a plantation. You can send your machines out, as the East India Company sent its ships, to extract those resources and bring them back to the motherland — now, Silicon Valley and turn them into wealth. It's a new age of extraction by surveillance capitalism where large American computing firms are causing collateral damage in ways the East India Company did back then and other extraction industries, like oil, do today.

A kind of social pollution is occurring alongside a predation on underpaid populations in places like India, which has both incredible expertise and poverty. Many people in Silicon Valley take advantage of both, using Indian learning but keeping costs well below American standards. This is an old East India Company trick, to take advantage of the cost differential between the provinces and the home country in ways that disadvantage the provinces. We see that happening again.

Q. You write of American politicians like Ronald Reagan extolling the microchip as a flag of liberty — you say it's moving us to authoritarianism. Can you elaborate?

A. Ronald Reagan's view of the microchip came out of the cybernetic era in the 1980s, he imagined computers would be systems for massive interconnection. That was exactly when America was starting to build the internet, this global system of interconnection, and Reagan's dream was like the cybernetic fantasy of the 1950s where, once you connected everybody to talk to everyone, you wouldn't need government or regulation. Of course, that meshed very nicely with Reagan's own view of deregulating the economy. So, for Reagan, the microchip seemed like a pro-democratic, pro-libertarian, pro-right-wing, deregulatory economic technology.

Today is a very different era. The time of networking is over we've entered the era of extraction. The net works we built to communicate with one another now allow corporations to solicit, monitor and take financial and political advantage of our social interactions. Our social world is the new 'nature' that's being extracted from — in that context, chips take on an entirely different importance. Controlling chips is like control of the 18th century's shipping technology. Chips are now the tools by which extraction occurs, wealth is built and political power deployed.

Chips are also a mode of political control — they can be weaponised and, using AI, turned into systems for defeating enemies in the material world, not just in cyberspace. Hence, chips are like the ships of the 18th century, technologies of political control and extraction whoever has the best ships or chips wins the battle for resources and control.

Q. Given the centrality of the microchip in this history, how do you see the Nvidia event play out? Will it be suppressed or investigated fairly?

A. It'll be a struggle. The Nvidia event is like a little crack in a teacup. Think of the early 20th century and its oil and steel barons, Andrew Carnegie to JD Rockefeller, how they exploited and polluted the land. They were eventually broken up by the government and made to compete in different ways. To get there though, we had to recognise the problems associated with centralisation and resource extraction. I think the Nvidia case gives us a chance to put a little lever in the crack and say, there is a bigger problem here, one of extraction and control, issues seen in earlier capitalist eras.

The digital era is not somehow 'after history', as its proponents claim it's a new stage in capitalism and the Nvidia case gives us a chance to say, wait, how exactly are we centralising power? Which resources are we extracting and can we reallocate the social benefits and modes of control being so deftly centralised today?

(Views expressed are personal)