Beware The Tales Of Techlash

According to Axios, Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently warned of the consequences of the strengthening “techlash” — the “backlash against major tech companies that is gaining strength … both at home and abroad, and among consumers and governments alike.”

My friend Arianna Huffington recently penned “The Great Awakening,” in which she opines about “how our thinking about technology fundamentally changed in 2017 and where we go from here.” And just a few weeks ago, I made “The Case for Responsible Innovation” with the help of my friends Dave Sapin and Rob Mesirow from PwC.

Here is a list of observable techno-facts:

We humans are using more digital technology today than ever before.

We will use more digital technology tomorrow than we are using today.

Technology writ large is way ahead of any policy or law that might govern it.

Societal norms and mores cannot keep up with our technological progress.

Social media addiction is real.

Social media–empowered tribalism cannot be controlled.

Echo chambers are virtual vortexes, and we need to use extreme force to escape them.

You have granted a small number of very large companies permission to transform the data you willingly provide them into wealth. Those companies are doing so with exponentially increasing efficiency.

Every item on this list will be true until the apocalypse.

The Apocalypse

I don’t really think there’s going to be an apocalypse. I think there’s going to be a bumpy ride as we transition from the old to the new. So when will the list of techno-facts go away? They won’t. Ever.

This Is Not a Time for Fear-Mongering

Let’s be careful about tales of techlash and how far we want to push the fear factor. It’s true, Big Tech has lots of data and lots of money and lots of computing power. Small Tech has none of that. The techno-haves are going to win. There really won’t be a David-and-Goliath story here. FANG’s (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google’s) only real enemy (other than itself) is the government, because only the government has the power to beat FANG. Multibillion-dollar enterprises can make huge numbers of mistakes and live to tell about it. As long as their strategies for growth are sound, they are really only stoppable by rule of law.