Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said that Norman Mailer endured the most terrible shock that can happen to the mind of man. He became famous at 25. His point was that a few hard knocks along the way may provide some useful perspective and humility, some ballast to keep the boat under control.
The overnight sensation is all too likely to believe the reviews and internalize the notion that he is not just a rare genius, but is invincible and deserves to be that way, may feel any setbacks or dissent are evidence of envy, stupidity and malice.
This remark came to mind on the heels of what has become known as #ubergate. A senior VP of the amateur taxi service, Emil Michael, was annoyed at press reports that didn’t show proper deference to the company. As a result he proposed, aloud, in public, spending $1 million to teach reporters a lesson by combing through data on “your personal lives, your families.”
Ah, the voice of the cyberbully is heard in the land. And this is not an isolated instance, as a report in the Washington Post (apparently unintimidated by the threat) makes clear. Another Uber executive accessed a reporter’s travel records and the company has also analyzed data from its service “to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers,” a practice described inside Uber as ”Rides of Glory.” Spying on individual Uber riders by senior management is also done, using a feature know as the “God View.” Tells you something about the egos at the top.
The Post article makes clear that Uber is far from being the only company whose employees suffer from the delusion that that are, if not God, then ubermenschen — superior beings to whom the rules don’t apply. The author of a book on the top Facebook people is called “The Boy Kings.” That sounds about right. Or perhaps the Frat Boy Kings.
In the early days of Facebook, the Boy Kings granted themselves access to all the supposedly private data collected by the company, even though no one friended them. Microsoft has trolled through an employee’s hotmail account. A Google engineer used his position to spy on female teen-age uses of the service. A Walgreen’s employee shared with her husband the prescription drug records of his previous girlfriend. And these are just examples we know about.
Note that we are not discussing the Chinese government or Russian mobsters trying to steal cyberdata from companies but the companies themselves abusing the public’s trust by prying into ostensibly private information. Who do these guys think they are, the NSA?
No, they think they are Silicon Valley royals. I suppose if you started a dopey app to compete with taxis in 2009 and five years later it was worth $18 billion and operated in 200 cities and 45 countries you too might be inclined to regard yourself as a demigod immune to rules designed for mere mortals.
The Greeks had a word for this — hubris. And it generally preceded a brutal comeuppance. By now we’ve seen enough of these little twerps to recognize the arrogance, contempt and entitlement they exude. Close your eyes and imagine Bill Gates and Steve Jobs before they were canonized, Mark Zucherberg, Steve Balmer, Elon Musk. Okay, we grant them rich, clever, ambitious, powerful, but are they trustworthy men of integrity, models of probity, prudence and fair dealing? Would you trust them with your most intimate secrets — or those of your teenage daughter? If they saw a way to turn a buck by selling them? Not a chance.
By now we all ought to know that with great power comes great irresponsibility. Many of the internet era moguls are libertarians or never got over reading Ayn Rand in study hall and imagining they are John Galt. They are appalled that their inferiors — the people and their elected representatives — might have the temerity to regulate their business or subject them to the rule of law.
As superior beings who know a great deal about digital life, their desire to follow their destiny and build empires unfettered ought not to be thwarted by lesser creatures like their customers. Of course, those are exactly the sort of people who can’t be trusted to operate without restraint.
If they knew as much about real life as digital life, if they hadn’t dropped out of college to manipulate binary code and make a $1 billion before the age of 25, they might have learned that robber barons always go too far. Unfettered tycoons provoke a backlash. Boy Kings end in the tumbril. Icarus plunges to earth. And the thousand-year Reich of the Ubermensch ends in rubble after only 12 years.