Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Another rich territory of social wealth isn’t a natural resource, but it is ubiquitous and collectively created. It’s the Internet. U.S. government funding was directly responsible for developing the semiconductor industry (and other fundamental pieces of computers) and for inventing the Internet, and after that for Google, Siri, and GPS, among other platforms and technologies. If we behaved like the seed investors and venture capitalists we were and are, we’d now be collecting many billions a year from companies using our publicly funded Internet. But so far, we are not. It’s as if we built the interstate highway system but then, because free markets, let some dudes set up tollbooths along its 49,000 miles and keep all the money they collected for themselves. But it’s even more ridiculous than that. Now without all our ongoing billions of individual hours of daily keystrokes and clicks and pictures and videos, all the data and “content” that we donate to Google and Facebook and the rest of them, they’d have nothing to sell to advertisers—and selling ads is their business. So on the glorious new public digital superhighway we built, we’re also now all working as volunteer staff for the insanely profitable tollbooth-and-billboard businesses that the private companies installed.