Arguably a 250th birthday is a time for gift giving – and I do wish the citizens of the USA a happy birthday. I am a fan; I lived in New York for five years, made films in LA and Nebraska – and my first child was born there. The US is a tremendous, terrifying and extraordinary place.
But there will be no gift from me. Because they have already taken far more than I have been willing to give. For the last 25 years a handful of US companies have been stealing the most valuable resource generated by modern societies. Not oil. Not land. Not minerals. Human behaviour.
First came our children. Their attention, friendships, interests, fears and aspirations became the raw material of a new economy. An economy built on surveillance, prediction and advertising claimed childhood as simply another market to disrupt. One in three internet users is a child. Their attention was too valuable to protect and too valuable to ignore. They were exposed to pressures, algorithms and commercial incentives that demanded too much time, too much maturity and too much of themselves.
Then came our commerce. High streets, retailers and local businesses found themselves increasingly dependent on platforms that stood between them and their customers. The hidden costs of convenience was the inconvenience of our empty high streets. Global tech companies took a cut of every transaction while avoiding many of the obligations borne by physical retailers. They could sell a knife alongside a schoolbag and think nothing of why they were ‘frequently bought together’.
Then came our creativity. Every song, article, photograph, film, book and illustration uploaded to the internet scraped to train AI models – without permission or payment – by companies that will this year be sold for eyewatering sums – measured in billions maybe even trillions – but with no plan to pay the creators for the work upon which their products are built.
Buy the USA 250 Big Issue magazine from the Big Issue Shop now
We were told that what was good for Big Tech would be good for Britain. That growth for technology companies would inevitably translate into growth for the countries that hosted them. That falsehood can be measured in the difference of their wealth and our struggling public services, as our health records, transport systems, education platforms and public infrastructure are rapidly becoming sources of data (for them) and dependency (for us). We have been sold short by a naive government who believed – without precedent or real prospect – that growth for Big Tech would magically translate into growth for the UK.
