Big Techbacco

It's not about the money, it's about the message. With the news that Meta and YouTube were being held liable in a case about the harms of their addictive features just two days after Meta was found liable in a separate case around child safeguards, the writing isn't so much as on the wall as it's on the docket. Big Tech is facing a reckoning.

I would say it's about "social media", but well, YouTube isn't really social media. And actually I think you can tie this into other tangential topics around the broader tech industry at the moment. Most prominently, the simmering backlash against AI as well. Meta may be the poster child, but again, it feels like the entire Big Tech family is going to get wrapped up in this.

Regardless of the merits of the individual cases, it already feels like this movement is spreading beyond that. In part because lawmakers have failed to act, and the companies themselves have failed to adequately self-police, now the people are taking matters into their own hands. Those citizens seem sick of everyone glued to their devices at all times. And they're seemingly terrified about what these very same companies are about to do with AI in their lives.

Nearly every story about this latest verdict draws the comparison to the "Big Tobacco" cases from 30 years ago. It doesn't matter what the parallels are, all that matters is that every story is drawing them. This is an absolute optics disaster for Big Tech. And it feels like it's just getting started.

Again, Meta is low-hanging fruit. YouTube perhaps thought they could get away here because again, they're not actually social media. But they cannot. And while TikTok and Snap opted to settle rather than risk this verdict, they're not going to get away from every case. You have to wonder if and when Apple gets roped in as well since they control the device which enables these services. Perhaps even Microsoft if the contagion spreads to PCs.

When the AI backlash starts in full, certainly OpenAI and Anthropic will be right in the crosshairs. And maybe NVIDIA gets pulled in as well for enabling all of this. Probably even SpaceX, now that they own Xitter and xAI, which are already in the midst of their own shitshow due to deep fakes and other sketchy content. And once Tesla and SpaceX inevitably merge, we'll have basically all the largest companies in the world wrapped up in these cases. Maybe there's a way to bring Amazon in too thanks to AWS. Or maybe Alexa, which seems to want to get more racy at the moment too. Have I mentioned that Oracle is the largest shareholder of TikTok now?¹ Yes, that remains very strange.

In many ways, none of this is surprising. Again, merits aside, these are the largest companies in the world. I mean that both in terms of market cap and reach, but also in terms of numbers of people they employ. Yet every day now seems to bring a headline about mass layoffs while at the same time posting record profits. It has long been a very weird "best of times/worst of times" dichotomy and AI is accelerating it. People must look at the layoffs constantly happening at Meta and wonder what shot they possibly have to make it in this new world.

And as I've written about before with AI in particular, all of these companies seemingly have some very real messenger issues. That is, the public by and large doesn't seem to like the people peddling the future here. And that's undoubtedly in part because they don't trust them from the immediate past when they were peddling social media and then VR and then crypto and then every other thing seemingly purpose-build, at least narratively, to freak people out or piss them off.

And so here we are, at the dawn of yet another "techlash". But this one could be far larger because the fallout from yesterday is running right into the fears for tomorrow.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I'm just saying it's happening. And it's happening in no small part because Big Tech is awful with their positioning and posture. Does Facebook cause cancer? No, but you'd never know it based on the backlash. Before long, it will be considered worse.

These companies will be fined over and over again the equivalent of coins in their couch cushions and they'll shrug it off. All while looking past the real issue. That people increasingly don't want to like these companies. They're too big and too powerful. They're like the government. But one you can sue over and over again.

¹ And at the rate that Snap's stock keeps falling – now just a $6B company – someone is going to end up owning them too. ↩