Did you catch a clip of the tech CEOs in Washington this week? The Senate judiciary committee had summoned five CEOs to a hearing titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. There was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, Discord’s Jason Citron and X’s Linda Yaccarino – and a predictable vibe of “Senator, I’m a parent myself …” Listen, these moguls simply want to provide the tools to help families and friends connect with each other. Why must human misery and untold, tax-avoidant billions attend them at every turn?
If you did see footage from the hearing, it was probably one of two moments of deliberately clippable news content. Ranking committee member Lindsey Graham addressed Zuckerberg with the words: “I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.” Well, ditto, Senator. “You have a product that is killing people,” continued Graham, who strangely has yet to make the same point to the makers of whichever brand of AR-15 he proudly owns, or indeed to the makers of the assault rifles responsible for another record high of US school shootings last year. Firearms fatalities are the number one cause of death among US children and teenagers, a fact the tech CEOs at this hearing politely declined to mention, because no one likes a whatabouterist. And after all, the point of these things is to just get through the posturing of politicians infinitely less powerful than you, then scoot back to behaving precisely as you were before. Zuckerberg was out of there in time to report bumper results and announce Meta’s first ever dividend on Thursday. At time of writing, its shares were soaring.
Anyhow, if it wasn’t that clip, maybe it was the one of Zuckerberg being goaded by sedition fist-pumper Josh Hawley into apologising to those in the committee room audience who had lost children to suicide following exploitation on his platform. Thanks to some stagey prodding by Senator Hawley, who famously encouraged the mob on 6 January 2020 (before later being filmed running away from them after they stormed the Capitol), Zuckerberg turned round, stood up, and faced his audience of the bereaved. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” he began. Helpfully, a transcribed version of this off-the-cuff moment found its way into a Meta press release minutes after the event.
So I guess that was the hearing. “Tense”, “heated”, “stunning” – listen, if adjectival cliches were legislation, this exercise would have been something more than pointless. And yet, they’re not and it wasn’t. There really ought to be a genre name for this kind of performative busywork – the theatre of failure, perhaps.
Other outcomes were once available. Back in 1994, the CEOs of seven big tobacco firms took their oaths before a Senate committee, then spouted a communal line that nicotine wasn’t addictive. Within two years, all seven had quit the tobacco industry – a development not unrelated to the fact that all seven were under investigation by the justice department for perjury. Those were different times, and not just because we probably wouldn’t slap them with the “seven dwarfs” moniker now. These days, you can’t escape the sense that old guys were shouting at Zuckerberg at a hearing six years ago, while he offered 2018’s variation on his favourite blandishment: “We know we have more work to do”. And you suspect they’ll be shouting at him again in five years’ time, when he will still know they have more work to do. “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” sniffed Graham of the tech CEOs, “we’re gonna die waiting.” Again, the senator speaks of what he knows. There is always talk of legislation, but there is never really much legislation.
There’s a line near the start of the movie version of Ready Player One, the cult dystopian book about a VR world that weirdly feels like the lodestar for Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the metaverse: “I was born in 2027,” explains the teenage protagonist, “after the corn syrup droughts, after the bandwidth riots … after people stopped trying to fix problems, and just tried to outlive them.” It was hard to watch any amount of Wednesday’s hearing – it’s hard to watch a lot of news about the intersection of politics and mega-business these days, in fact – and not feel we are in a very similar place. Few of the politicians giving it the hero act could be said to have left the world in a better place than the one in which they found it when they took office. A necrotic form of politics has gripped the Republican party in particular, and this is the vacuum in which they have been downgraded by corporations they don’t even understand, let alone have the will, foresight, or political skill to control.
“Companies over countries,” as Mark Zuckerberg said a long time ago. This once-unformed thought becomes more realised all the time, with the Meta boss last year explaining that, “Increasingly, the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit and the digital world we are building.” The added irony is that the more the Lindsey Grahams fail the real world, the more people retreat further into the unregulated embrace of the worlds that the Mark Zuckerbergs run. It’s going to take so much more than the theatre of failure to solve it – but bad actors currently dominate the bill.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
