First, do the harm

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: On orientation day at a boarding school, the prefect is briefing the junior boys about the house rules. “Over there are the girls’ dorms,” he says, “and those quarters are out of bounds. Anyone seen on those premises will be fined 500tk the first time, with a warning. The second time, the fine will jump to 2,000tk. If caught a third time, the fine is 5,000tk. Any questions?” A boy at the back raises his hand. Somewhat meekly, he asks: “How much for a season pass?”

It should be common knowledge by now that the super-rich are different from normal people, down to the biology of their brains. When the social contract and the basic rules of civic engagement are seen as negotiable in a one-sided way, pretty much everything is for sale. Tech billionaires really do think like this – edgelord levels of maturity but with way too much money and resources to blow; everything is seen as buyable. This includes justice, which rich people constantly make a mockery of. Google’s motto used to be Don’t Be Evil. It should have been First, Do The Harm. Trying to calculate the ill effect of the tech sector on human wellbeing and the fabric of society is futile. The monetary figure is likely to be beyond our comprehension. And could we fine them adequately even if we tried? “How much for a season pass?” they would ask, meek in tone but unshaken in resolve, then quietly pay the bill, peanuts compared to their quarterly earnings, and then, finally continue to go about their business of spreading the harm far and wide.

But just look at how deep we are in this muck. This piece you are currently reading – there is a close to 100% chance that you found it on a Meta-owned platform. They have bought up the market of disseminating media, so while I would like nothing better than to publish my thoughts in a 1990s style op-ed page in a crisp edition of the morning paper, you would likely miss the thing. Even if you read it, I certainly wouldn’t know, because I would be unaware of engagement levels with my ‘post’ which I have sadly become quasi-addicted to. Even proud troglodytes amongst us, those who in the early years of smartphones held out from getting one for as long as possible, have thrown in the towel. Reluctantly, we surrender to this evil economy, and then we cry and scream from inside the cage.

Meta has been harming children, to the say the least, for a long time. The company’s platforms have been harming adults too, but first things first. The irreversible damage that has been done to the tender, still-forming brains of youngster is hardly some side-effect or unforeseen consequence. The Big Brains at the company knew exactly what they were doing: willfully creating a platform designed to hijack the brain, and to take advantage of the human vulnerability to addiction. They spent astronomical amounts of money researching these things. Then these social media tools (or should we call them weapons?) were deployed with sinister, surgical precision. One can imagine a mad scientist creating ‘evil’ as a kind of green potion in a bottle while laughing with a cartoonish muhahahaha. The reality is much more disturbing. The Meta employees are bright, well-educated, largely Millennials. They are decent people, unlike their billionaire bosses. They perceive themselves as ethical, maybe sometimes give to charity and recycle diligently. Still, they are engaged in this work. Can you blame them? They need to make bank, or so says capitalism. And so, they do the job. They figure out how people’s attention can be hijacked, how their time and energy can be drained. These same employees, under different economic arrangements, in another life, would probably protest Big Tech. They might even speak up against the dubious work of harming children. But for now, they have a job to do. This surely, is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

Meta, which has been fined $12 billion in what is being called a ‘landmark’ case, got off easy. Some camps are of course saying that this may finally change things. Tech companies may finally get the message that they are no longer at an all-you-can-eat buffet. There has been talk for some time that Big Tech may be about to have its Big Tobacco moment. Fair enough, but our resistance needs to be a bit tougher than this. Already, much of the young generation and some of the older ones as well are hopelessly dependent on AI. Soon we may not even have the mental autonomy to resist, because the very grammar of our logical processes is being guided by tech. Foucault, way back in the Sixties, spoke of ‘discursive formations’ -- rather than us speaking language, language speaks us. I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to witness the almighty algorithm.

Abak Hussain is a writer and journalist.