by JULIANNE TVETEN & PAUL BLEST
The tech industry should not be allowed near policymaking …
Back in March 2016, around the time that it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee for president, the New York Times asked a fairly simple question of the Silicon Valley-backed startup Juicero: what is it?
No one could really say. Founder Doug Evans, who compared himself to Steve Jobs, had raised $118 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firms such as Google Ventures and Artis Ventures (and even the Campbell Soup Company). “It’s the most complicated business that I’ve ever funded,” one Google Ventures partner said. “It’s software. It’s consumer electronics. It’s produce and packaging.”
The concept of the Juicero turned out to be this: you buy a $699 (later knocked down to $400) Wi-Fi connected juicer called the Juicero Press—which Evans said could create three to four tons of pressure, enough “to lift two Teslas.” Then you subscribe to a delivery service for the juice itself, which comes in little pouches. (Only owners of the Press can buy the pouches, which were to cost around $5 to $8 each.) Lock the pouches into the Press, hit a button, and the juice is squeezed out. It was marketed as the Keurig for juice.
Yet the Juicero had a hilarious design flaw. Reporters from Bloomberg News discovered that there was a far more efficient way, using a somewhat older form of technology, to squeeze the juice out of the bags than by using the $400 press: with a pair of human hands. Squeeze the bag, the juice goes into the glass, no Juicero needed. The whole elaborate apparatus was an utterly useless hi-tech substitute for something that people could already do.
In that sense, the Juicero was a perfect encapsulation of the tech industry as a whole. Stuff nobody needs, at prices nobody should pay, invented by “visionaries” who think they’re Steve Jobs and pretend to be revolutionizing an industry while actually just finding new ways of robbing and tricking people.
Yet perhaps we could laugh a bit more at the Juicero if the worldview that made it was inconsequential. Lately, however, Silicon Valley has begun threatening to export its values to our political system. Leaders of the industry like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Cuban are now publicly entertaining the idea of running for president, Google is introducing its products into schools around the world, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are plotting their own unaccountable social experiments under the banner of philanthropy. As David Callahan writes in the New York Times, while government programs stagnate or diminish under Republican rule, ultra-rich donors “will increasingly slide into the driver’s seat of public life,” appropriating government functions but without any actual accountability.
The increasing power of Silicon Valley tech billionaires means the increasing influence of a political philosophy that would be catastrophic for ordinary people, giving them less and less control over their workplaces, schools, and government, while funneling wealth upward to further enrich a tiny minority of people at the top. But, like the Juicero, proposals that would only serve to bilk people of their money for nothing in return will come disguised beneath a thick layer of vacuous, dishonest hype.
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