Alexis Wichowski - The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World

O n January 9, 2007, 45,000 software developers, computer engineers, and everyday tech enthusiasts gathered in Silicon Valleys go-to conference spot, San Franciscos Moscone Center, a three-story, glass-enclosed conference space that shared a block with the Yerba Buena Ice Skating and Bowling Center and the Dosa Brothers Indian restaurant. The occasion: the 22nd annual Macworld Expo. The highlight: bearing witness to their patron saint, Apple visionary Steve Jobs.

Wearing his signature uniformblack turtleneck, wire-frame glasses, white sneakers, and blue jeansJobs took to the stage. A giant backlit Apple logo loomed on a wall-size screen behind him.

Twenty-two minutes into a speech sprinkled with updates about various Apple products, Jobs stopped. A moment of silence passed. This is a day Ive been looking forward to for the past two and a half years, he announced. Scattered applause peppered the room, but Jobs waved it away.

With something like defiance, he declared, The most advanced phones are called smartphones, so they say. The audience burst into laughter. In 2007, when most people still carried flip phones and PDAs, the very notion of such a thing seemed absurd. Jobs went on to blast then-current smartphonesBlackBerries and Nokias, namelyas being difficult to navigate, even for basic functions. What we want to do is make a product thats way smarter than any cell phone and thats easy to use. This is what iPhone is.

The iPhone launch is worth cherishing. It may very well have been our last mass-magical tech moment, a time when the entire world got truly excited over a technological breakthrough.

This was a time before tech got scary.

It was almost four years before WikiLeaks released 251,287 diplomatic cables to the press, which contributed to the bloody and largely unsuccessful Arab Spring and drove home the terrible power and scale of leaks now possible in the digital age.

It was six years before Edward Snowdens revelations shattered public trust in the US government by unveiling the National Security Agency (NSA) mass covert data collection program that sought info on American citizens.

It was almost a decade before the Russian militarys Information Research Agency infiltrated the 2016 US presidential election through misinformation warfare, peeling away the belief that our social networks consisted of our friends, or at the very least, our compatriots.

And it was eleven years before Facebook was outed for giving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to 87 million users data, finally tipping the worlds wide-scale disillusionment with the tech industry into outright anger.

In 2007, we still loved our tech and its keepers. The proof is in the purchases. Half a million people bought iPhones the first weekend they were available. Buyers lined up around the USfor days, in some places.

I feel wonderful. Its exhilarating, reported 51-year-old engineer David Jackson as he finally held an iPhone in his hands, having waited in line more than 24 hours for the moment. Man, that was cool. I was shaking at the counter. I couldnt even sign my name.

With the iPhone, Apple gave us what seemed like one of the greatest godsends of the digital era: a keyboardless, full-color, internet-enabled, do-everything deviceone that was pretty and sleek and fit in your pocket, to boot.

We may not have recognized it at the time, but Apple did more with the iPhone than create a next-generation personal computer. They created the first wearable computer: a device that you could keep on your body, in your pocket, at all times. In 2019, this was a reality for roughly 2 billion smartphone users, whether they carried an iPhone or its chief competitor, an Android (Google) phone. The smartphone didnt just make life easier; it didnt just make us, as Apples 90s-era slogan urged, think different. It made life different.

ALMOST EXACTLY 10 YEARS AFTER JOBS INTRODUCED THE IPHONE TO the world, another tech luminary addressed a similarly massive audience at the Moscone Centerfor quite different reasons.

On Valentines Day 2017, Brad Smiththe affable, sandy-haired president of Microsofttook the stage at the annual RSA Conference, the tech industrys premier security conference. Cyberspace, he declared, is the new battlefield.

The world of potential war, he warned, has migrated from land to sea to air and now cyberspace. As a global technology sector, we need to pledge that we will protect customers. He paused. We will focus on defense.

Lets take a moment to digest this. The president of MicrosoftMicrosoft, the company whose products are virtually synonymous with corporate cubicle cultureannounced to 40,000 of the tech industrys frontline programmers that they were, for all intents and purposes, at war.

Because when it comes to attacks in cyberspace, we not only are the plane of battle, we are the worlds first responders. He continued, Instead of nation-state attacks being met by responses from other nation-states, they are being met by us.

Lets see that again: They are being met by us.

Who is us?

Smith was talking about something newsome higher-order embodiment of digital power. These new entities are tech companies next stage of evolution, a giant technological leap from Jobss iPhone.

These tech entities are no longer simply making spreadsheet software and calendar apps and gadgets. They are battlefields. They are weapons. And, most important, in this speech Smith declared that these new entities should bemust bea force for good.

The problem here is that no one knows what to call these new things. As I first introduced in a 2017 WIRED article, I propose that we call them net states.

Why not just keep calling them the tech industry? The short answer is that the tech industry is no monolith, with all its companies pursuing the same goals with the same business practices.

As hard as it may be to think of the worlds newest industry as traditional in any way, a handful of traditional companies have undergone a metamorphosis. And, in the same way we dont keep calling butterflies caterpillars once theyve transformed, these particular companiesAmazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, specificallyhave morphed into something altogether different from the tech industry.

They no longer only make products and offer services. Theyre reaching beyond their core technologies to assert themselves in our physical world. Theyre inserting digital services into our lived environments in ways both unseen and, at times, unknown to us. And, most important, theyre exerting formidable influence over the way our world works on individual, societal, and geopolitical levels. These tech companies are unlike anything weve encountered before.

Net states vary in size and structure but generally exhibit four key qualities: They enjoy an international reach. Their core work is based in technology. Their pursuits are influenced, to a meaningful degree, by beliefs, not just a bottom line. And, perhaps most significant, theyre actively working to expand into areas formerly the domain of governments, areas that fall outside their primary products and servicesareas they pursue at times separate from and even above the law.