In the first season of Veep, the brilliant political comedy from HBO, Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gets, um, wind that in the coming year, a hurricane will share her name. "Shit!" she says. "What if it hits and we get headlines saying, 'Selina causing large-scale devastation?'" Needless to say, her staff eventually gets the name of the storm changed.
It’s hilarious, and it's consistent with the show’s portrayal of much of Washington as an endless cycle of image control and crisis management. How much should we trust it?
In 2015, we learned that the tech industry in many ways is a lot like Washington. As much as Silicon Valley likes to portray itself as a noble practitioner of well-intentioned entrepreneurship and innovation, that image itself is largely the product of spin. Tech, it turns out, is very much about image. It's about power. And it's about politics.
Consider just a few of the most prominent examples:
- Uber pushing its way into yet more cities and lobbying until regulators relent, which may largely be thanks to having a consummate political insider, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, on the payroll.
- Amazon PR boss Jay Carney—Obama's former press secretary—dropping a weird, defensive blog post in response to an August New York Times exposé on the online retailer’s brutal workplace culture.
- The Wall Street Journal's in-depth report detailing the grossly underdelivered promises of blood test company Theranos and exposing the problem with tech’s hype cycle.
- Airbnb running an ill-conceived ad campaign in San Francisco congratulating itself for obeying the law like everybody else.
- The daily fantasy sports sites DraftKings and FanDuel coming under fire from regulators who said their supposedly new kind of contest amounted to little more than old-school gambling.
- Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, would put most of their wealth into a new philanthropic organization that journalists pointed out would be structured as an LLC, giving the couple far more control than they first let on.
In short, tech companies can no longer take for granted that the public will hail them as brave disruptors of the status quo, the noble entrepreneurs on whom much of society has bet its optimism. These days, it seems, a lot of that optimism has given way to cynicism. Tech, it turns out, can also be the bad guy.
Some of this souring has to do with the nature of the new kinds of businesses technology has bred. Nowadays, tech success isn't necessarily predicated on building whole economies around new industries, as Amazon did with online retail, for instance, or Facebook and Twitter did with social networking. Instead, many wildly successful startups of today—the Ubers and Airbnbs and FanDuels—depend on seeking out legal ambiguity and exploiting it.
And these companies have recognized that when they're playing in the world of public policy, political savvy matters at least as much as innovative technology. "Most of the political campaigns that are happening are from the companies that are facing some kind of government scrutiny or regulation of their industry," says Matt Stempeck, director of civic technology at Microsoft.
Indeed, whole businesses have sprung up to help startups leap regulatory hurdles. Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures spearheaded an Uber campaign to resist increased regulation in New York City—and he says there’s been no shortage of interest in his expertise. "You have more and more startups in a space where they're part of traditional industries regulated by the government, so they tend to run into challenges that require running a campaign of some kind," Tusk says. Most recently, Tusk Ventures added FanDuel to its list of clients.
The influence of tech is increasingly seeping into government itself—and vice versa. Tech companies are spending millions to lobby Congress. Meanwhile, many former political strategists have left the White House for the West Coast, including not just Plouffe and Carney, but many mid-level operatives now bolstering the ranks of some of the most successful startups.
Among the greatest challenges for tech companies embroiled in controversy is to wrest control of the framing from the media, both of the mainstream and social varieties.
Witness Carney's decision to publish his defense of Amazon's employment practices on Medium. “If it were on [Amazon’s] company blog, I think it would have been less of a story, and more boring,” Kathleen Schmidt, a longtime publicist and the director of marketing for publishing company Running Press, told WIRED at the time. “It would have really attached it to the brand. This story is a story about Amazon on Medium.” In other words, publishing on a third-party platform (or "plogging") gave the post a patina of objectivity—something more like the news.
Microsoft’s Stempeck points out, however, that the platforms themselves don't get to stay neutral. They have their own responsibilities when they become part of the news. When a very public back-and-forth between The New York Times and Amazon ensued on Medium after Carney published his first post, Medium became a piece of the story.
Or consider Facebook becoming part of the story after the Paris attacks in November. The company turned on its Safety Check feature for the first time in the aftermath of a human-spawned tragedy rather than a natural disaster. The decision opened the company to widespread criticism for not making the same decision when similar horrors afflicted other parts of the world.
“There’s this line between doing social good and taking the editorial stance when you’re the platform owner,” says Stempeck.
One of the most popular approaches for “disruptive” startups finding themselves in a bind is mobilizing its own customers to campaign for them. Uber pulled this off successfully in New York City to defeat a restrictive bill proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Airbnb used the tactic in San Francisco to fight off a ballot measure that would have clamped down on its business.
In both cases, the companies relied on a startup-friendly re-framing of old-school populism to carry the day. Uber sought to show that de Blasio’s proposed caps on new licenses for on-demand drivers would have stranded regular New Yorkers and left new drivers without jobs. Airbnb pushed the idea that its business makes it possible for middle-class citizens to make ends meet in cities where rent is skyrocketing (though critics say Airbnb itself has helped push rents up as landlords convert apartments into quasi-hotels).
"There’s a little bit of awkwardness because these are firms that position themselves as the little guy," says Edward Walker, a sociology professor from the University of California, Los Angeles. "And we’re in the middle of this awkward transition where firms that have multibillion-dollar valuations can’t exactly call themselves small-scale, mom-and-pop startups.”
Another advantage these companies have, Walker says, is that they have the resources to organize, unlike smaller groups that oppose them. However, he stops short of calling the companies' campaigns astroturfing—or masking the sponsors of a message to make it seem like it's truly coming from the grassroots. The groups lobbying for Airbnb and Uber truly do want to be able to keep using the services, Walker says.
And that gets at the real secret these companies succeed despite their image problems. Even many ardent critics of tech companies' more egregious practices are unwilling to give up the convenience of catching an Uber, or the addictive efficiency of Amazon Prime. Tech may no longer get a free pass from the public. But many of these companies are still winning the most important campaign of all: we're voting for them with our wallets.
