The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
organize to supply an essential public good, such as education, or have no incentive to prevent a clear harm to the public, such as pollution. Market failure is the chief justification for public intervention.57 For instance, market actors don’t envision sufficient financial returns to justify investing in the production of children’s educational television, folk festivals, or opera. If a society wishes to enjoy the benefits of such productions, then it must subsidize them with public funds. The U.S.
government justified the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 to correct for precisely these market failures.58
Public failure, in contrast, occurs when instruments of the state cannot satisfy public needs and deliver services effectively. This failure occurs not necessarily because the state is the inappropriate agent to solve a particular problem (although there are plenty of areas in which state service is inefficient and counterproductive); it may occur when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfunded, while expectations for its performance remain high. Examples of public failures in the United States include military operations, prisons, health-care coverage, and schooling. The public institutions that were supposed to provide these services were prevented from doing so. Private actors filled the vacuum, often failing spectacularly as well and costing the public more than the institutions they displaced. In such circumstances, the failure of public institutions gives rise to the circular logic that dominates political debate. Public institutions can fail; public institutions need tax revenue; therefore we must reduce the support for public institutions. The resulting failures then supply more anecdotes supporting the view that public institutions fail by design rather than by political choice.
The most lucid example of public failure in recent years involves the role of private firms in the relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the United States in 2005. After the hurricane wiped out large sections of New Orleans and much of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, state and federal relief efforts were slow and ineffective. Officials had not planned for massive evacuations and medical relief, despite ample warnings. In addition, poor engineering and maintenance and years of general underfunding and neglect had left much of New Orleans vulnerable to breeches in the essential levees intended to protect the city from high water. Under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) directorship had been raised to a cabinet-level position and had been held by an acknowledged expert in disaster management. Every major disaster in those years was handled deftly. Once President George W. Bush assumed control, he appointed as head of the agency former campaign staffers who had no training or experience in disaster relief. In addition, Bush moved FEMA out of the cabinet and into another new agency, the Department of Homeland Security. The failures of FEMA to help people stranded and left homeless are well documented and deeply troubling. Ultimately, 1,836 people lost their lives in the hurricane and subsequent floods. More than 60,000 people were stranded in New Orleans during the flooding. Bush publicly commended the director of FEMA for the job he was doing, even in the face of his obvious ineptitude. The public sector failed, and it failed by design.59
In contrast, the American department store company Walmart managed to use its wealth, inventory, distribution networks, and logistical expertise to deliver water and supplies where FEMA could not.60 The American private sector in general greatly assisted many thousands of people by donating labor and funds to the relief and reconstruction effort, even though these efforts were often poorly coordinated. As a result, market fundamentalists used the designed failure of the public sector to argue that it should be structured to do less in future emergencies.61 Such arguments occur in other areas of public policy as well, as citizens in the United States witnessed during the efforts to pass an economic stimulus package and comprehensive health-care reform legislation in 2009. The very hint of government involvement was enough to disrupt rational debate over policy.
Public failure has had two perverse effects on politics and policy. First, it has corroded faith in state institutions, effectively precluding arguments for their extension or preservation (in the United States, anyway). For example, President Barack Obama apparently considered that proposing a Canadian-style, single-payer health-care system would be completely unpalatable to the American public and powerful health-care interests. So he quickly and publicly dismissed the idea early in 2009, reversing years of endorsing such a system’s proven success in Canada and many other places.62 In the United States any suggestion of regulation or public investment must be couched in the language of the market if it is to be taken seriously.
The second pernicious result of public failure is the rise of assertions of “corporate responsibility.” As the state has retreated from responsibility to protect common resources, ensure access to opportunities, enforce worker and environmental protection, and provide for the health and general welfare of citizens, private actors have rushed in to claim the moral high ground in the marketplace. So, for instance, instead of insisting that farms grow safe food under environmentally sound conditions, we satisfy our guilt and concerns by patronizing stores like Whole Foods and celebrating the wide availability of organic products. Thus food that keeps people healthy and the earth livable remains available only to the well informed and affluent.
Because market fundamentalism declares that consumers have “choice” in the market, doing little or no harm becomes just another tactic by which vendors exploit a niche market. Consumers have become depoliticized, unable to see that personal choices to buy Timberland shoes (not made in sweatshops by children) and Body Shop cosmetics (not tested on animals) make no difference at all to the children and animals that suffer supplying the bulk of similar, less sensitively manufactured products to the vast majority of the world’s consumers. Feeling good about our own choices is enough. And instead of organizing, lobbying, and campaigning for better rules and regulations to ensure safe toys and cars for people everywhere, we rely on expressions of disgruntlement as a weak proxy for real political action. Starting or joining a Facebook protest group suffices for many as political action.
Since the 1980s, firms in the United States and Western Europe have found it useful to represent themselves as socially responsible. As states have retreated from their roles as protectors of the commons and mitigators of market failures, firms have found that trumpeting certain policies and positions puts them at an advantage in competitive markets, especially for consumer goods and services.63
The problem, however, is that corporate responsibility is toothless. Corporations do—and should do—what is in the interests of their shareholders, and nothing more.64 We become aware of the voluntary benevolence of certain firms only when it is in their interest to make that benevolence known.
The principal reason why the idea of corporate responsibility appeals to us is that for thirty years, we have retreated from any sense of public responsibility—any willingness to talk about, identify, and pursue the public good. In the absence of the political will to employ state power to push all firms toward responsible behavior, the purported responsibility of one firm is quickly neutralized by the irresponsibility of the rest. Because we have failed at politics, we now rely on marketing to make our world better. That reliance is the height of collective civic irresponsibility. It’s a meaningless pose.
Google has taken advantage of both of these externalities. It has stepped into voids better filled by the public sector, which can forge consensus and protect long-term public interests instead of immediate commercial interests. The Google Books project, as I show in chapter 5, is the best example of this tendency. Google has used such undertakings to its advantage by generating a tremendous amount of goodwill and pushing a strong ethic of corporate responsibility. This in turn retards efforts to propose even mild and modest regulations on the firm to protect users’ privacy and ensure competition in the Web advertising world. After all, if you can’t trust Google to do something well and ethically, whom can you trust?65
WHO’S REGULATING WHOM?
The ways we talk about markets and regulation have become impoverished in recent decades. In June 2009, the radio journalist Brian Lehrer asked Eric Schmidt about the potential for the regulation of Google. “I use Google all day every day like a lot of people in this room,” Lehrer