Description
Book SynopsisA Wall Street Journal Bestseller
An insider's revealing and in-depth examination of Big Tech's failure to keep its foundational promises and the steps the industry can take to course-correct in order to make a positive impact on the world.
Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It explores how technology has progressed humanity's most noble pursuits, while also grappling with the origins of the industry's destructive empathy deficit and the practical measures Big Tech can take to self-regulate and make it right again. Author Maëlle Gavet examines the tendency for many of Big Tech's stars to stray from their user-first ideals and make products that actually profoundly damage their customers and ultimately society.
Offering an account of the world of tech startups in the United States and Europefrom Amazon, Google, and Facebook to Twitter, Airbnb, and Uber (to name a few)Trampled by Unicorns argues that the
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Part One Monsters of Scale
Chapter 1 Making the World a Better Place 7
Tech as Driver of Economic and Social Progress 7
Hidden Effects 10
Chapter 2 Culture Bubble 13
“What Do Engineers Know About the World!” 16
“Steve Jobs Didn’t Build Apple by Being Humble and Caring About People” 19
Chapter 3 Emerald Cities 23
“Landlords Pounding on the Door” 25
“We Know Our Responsibility to Help Starts at Home” 28
“Shockingly Poor Value for Taxpayers” 29
Chapter 4 The New Feudalism 35
The Human Impact of Tech Disruption 35
“They Do a Lot More Revenue with a Lot Fewer People” 39
$1.42 per Hour 41
Chapter 5 Anti-Social Networks 43
Undermining Facts and Science 44
Democracy Under Attack 47
Unrelenting Hate 50
“When She Showed Me the Messages, I Just Felt Sick” 53
“#NewZealandmosqueattack” 54
“The Ugly” 57
YouTube Recommended Alex Jones 15 Billion Times 58
Section 230 60
“You’re Arguing About Whether the Baby’s Dead” 61
“I’m Going to Show You More Car Crashes” 65
Chapter 6 Venture Capital and the Holy Grail of Scale 67
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 69
“It’s All About Scale” 70
“You Don’t Scale Fast If You Try to Get Everything Perfect” 72
FOMO 73
Harvard or Stanford? 74
A New Investor Class? 76
Chapter 7 Psychos of the Valley 79
A Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth and Poor Behavioral Controls 81
Shallow Affect (Superficial Emotional Responses) 83
Pathological Lying 85
A Lack of Remorse or Guilt and a Failure to Accept Responsibility for One’s Own Actions 86
Callousness and Lack of Empathy 87
Juvenile Delinquency 88
Chapter 8 Between Scylla and Charybdis: What Happens If We Do Nothing 91
The Orwell Scenario 92
The Huxley Scenario 96
Part Two Fixing the Chaos Factory
Chapter 9 We Should All Be Chief Empathy Officer 105
What Does an Empathetic Company Look Like? 107
1. People 108
2. Decision-Making Processes 114
3. Business Model and Economics 119
Chapter 10 A Multiplayer Game: Corporate Governance in Tech 121
1. Investors 121
2. Boards and Shareholders 122
3. Stock Exchanges 125
4. Investment Bankers and Proxy Advisors 126
5. Industry Bodies 127
Chapter 11 Breaking Up Big Tech? 129
Big Tech’s Anticompetitive Behavior 130
The Anti-Antitrust Cocktail 132
Reinvigorating Antitrust 133
Zuckerberg’s Pushback (And Where He’sWrong) 139
Antitrust Is Not a Universal Tool 143
Chapter 12 Tax, Privacy, and Other Running Sores 145
Implementing Fair and Equitable Taxation 146
Modernizing Employment and Labor Protections 151
Protecting Privacy and Rethinking Data Ownership 153
Fighting for the Preservation of Facts and Civil Discourse 158
Setting Standards for Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Facial Recognition 166
Chapter 13 Big Tech Broke the News Media: What’s Next? 173
“Sign a Big Check, Then Get Out of theWay” 174
Facebook and Google Are New Versions of Media Companies 177
News Organizations Need More Than Ever to Keep Big Tech Accountable 178
Chapter 14 People Power 181
Epilogue: A Manifesto for Change 185
Acknowledgments 191
About the Author 193
Index 195
