26 newyork| december9–22, 2019
intelligencer
PHOTOGRAPHS:
©
2018
G.
RONALD
LOPEZ/DIGIPIXSAGAIN.US/ALAMY
LIVE
NEWS
WALKOUT);
PATRICK
MCMULLAN
(BERNERS-LEE,
THIEL);
GLOBAL
CLIMATE
ACTION
SUMMIT, NIKKI RITCHER PHOTOGRAPHY/WIKIMEDIA (BENIOFF);
SUSANTHES
QUARK/TWITTER (FOWLER); DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE/ALAMY LIVE NEWS (LANIER); STEPHENMCCARTHY/COLLISION VIA SPORTSFILE/WIKIMEDIA (HARRIS); CNN (MCNAMEE); CHRISTOPHER MICHEL/WIKIMEDIA (PAO); NBC (HUGHES)
➸ last month, as Sacha Baron Cohen was delivering his made-for-social-
media anti-social-media diatribe at the Anti-Defamation League, Tim
Berners-Lee, the literal inventor of the World Wide Web, was preparing to
step out from the shadows to acknowledge that, well, things online hadn’t
gone exactly how he’d hoped—that the internet was at a “tipping point” and
in need of root-and-branch remodeling. But Berners-Lee isn’t alone. In
fact, it can seem these days like tech apostates might outnumber evangelists
in Silicon Valley, which once looked from afar like a practical cult of sunny-
side-up solutionism but now offers a new opportunity for self-promotional
branding: pivoting to tech-flagellation. Here, a survey of which of those
new turncoats are most likely to make an impact, which are speaking out as
a salve to their own consciences, and which are just reading the direction of
public opinion and torquing themselves accordingly.Ranking:Big Tech’sMost PowerfulApostates
Self-criticism is suddenly huge
in Silicon Valley. But not all
critiques are created equal.
By Max ReadNo.1 Google Workers
➸ even in a world
that seems to run on
conference-circuit oxygen,
mass protests matter,whichis
why the most significant
recent act of tech apostasy probably
wasn’t by an individual but an enormous
group. A 20,000-employee-and-
contractor walkout at Google in
November 2018 has flowered intoa year’s
worthofemployeeactivismagainst
internal policies on sexual assaultand
partnerships with ICE and U.S. Customs
and Border Protection, among other
issues, and helped inspire similarinternal
protests at Microsoft and Facebookled
by engineers who literally hold thekeysto
the whole ecosystem.
No.2 Tim Berners-Lee
➸ berners-lee maynotown
a company or lead a union,
but he invented the World
Wide Web, which is prettyhard
to beat as far as influence goes. What
Berners-Lee is proposing is pretty
radical—a total overhaul of thewebthat
even has some buy-in from governments
in Germany and France and companies
like Facebook and Microsoft.
No.3 Marc Benioff
➸ just behind the
bottom-up efforts of workplace
re formers lie the top-down
ef forts of Silicon Valley’smost
widely liked and respected CEO.
Salesforce’s Benioff has pushed fora “new
capitalism” and demanded that tech
CEOs be activists. If tech executiveswon’t
listen to politicians and journalists,they
might at least listen to one of theirpeers?
No.4 Peter Thiel➸ thiel is indubitably
a tech critic—he’s justcoming
at it from a different angle
than most. But an apostasy
on the right counts, too, and the
enigmatic investor spent the summer
all but accusing Google of treason
and suggesting that tech companies
were betraying American interestsin
their quest for global markets. That
Thielis regardedasa Valleyintellectual,
even if he’s not politically aligned
with many of its reformers, makeshim
a force to be reckoned with.No.5 Susan Fowler➸ f owler is best known
for helping kick off a movement
to expose sexual harassment
and gender discriminationin
Silicon Valley with a blog post abouther
experiences at Uber. But she’s only
expanded her platform since: She’snow
an editor for the New York Timesop-ed
page, which has ramped up its unsparing
coverage of the tech world. Her name
may not be as recognizable as Thiel’sor
Benioff’s, but the pieces she writesand
edits are read by many of the country’s
most powerful people.No.6 Jaron Lanier➸ there are a lot of
industries that wouldn’ttake
very seriously a white guywith
dreadlocks who plays rareAsian
flutes. Not Silicon Valley. Lanier’sstatus
as a virtual-reality pioneer gives aspecial
authority to his condemnations ofthe
practices and faults of tech—mostrecently
in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting
Your Social Media Accounts RightNow.No.7 Tristan Harris➸ harris, a onetime
design ethicist at Google, has
become the face of the “time
well spent” movement—the
idea that social net works and other tech
companies shouldn’t participate in a “race
to the bottom for attention.” Journalists, at
least, are paying attention.No.8 Roger McNamee➸ as an early investor in
Facebook, quasi-hippie venture
capitalist McNamee helped
Mark Zuckerberg hire Sheryl
Sandberg—exactly the kind of I-was-there
authority necessary to become a powerful
critic. Now he’s doing all he can to stop the
company—including writing Zucked, an
excoriating book about his former mentee.No.9 Ellen Pao➸ pao lost a gender-
discrimination lawsuit filed
against her former employers
at the famous venture-capital
firm Kleiner Perkins, but her long
résumé—she was, briefly, the CEO of
Reddit—and extensive Silicon Valley
network have elevated her profile as one
of the fiercest critics of Silicon Valley’s
deeply ingrained sexism.No.10 Chris Hughes➸ zuckerberg’s sophmore-
year roommate—and probably
one of Silicon Valley’s most-
accidental elites—has recently
tried to make himself relevant by
reading the mood of the country, turning
on Zuck and endorsing an antitrust
approach to big tech.