The turning point was when democracy realized politics had metastasized online. No one agrees on facts, the truth doesn’t matter, ghosts in the machine, and weaponization of the internet.
May you live in interesting times…
One day we’ll look back on 2019 as the year that the shine came off of the internet. It was the year when the world collectively realized the harm a free and open internet could cause when real-world factionalism goes viral. Deepfakes, fake-news, and misinformation campaigns suddenly became topics of dinner table conversation. Not that these issues hadn’t been percolating for a while, but a global political upheaval suddenly focused attention on alarming trends we’d been ignoring for a while. The honeymoon was over.
The resulting climate was one largely hostile to big tech. On almost any front, tech companies were looked at with suspicion. The sentiment has spilled over into the regulatory and policy world – bigly. Governments in the US and EU drove an almost obsessive agenda with tech in the center. Of course, this had ripple effects into the developer community that depends on the internet for its livelihood. Yet despite it all, business was good in 2019.
2019 saw the rise of privacy regulation (a cause we believe in, even if the implementation is sloppy and a bit misguided so far), increasing inquiries into what bad actors were doing to social media, and some long, hard looks at the market power of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA to my EU friends). It also saw huge economic gains driven largely through online platforms and automation, bold new experiments in the gig and networked economies, and the growing impact of AI-driven research into previously intractable challenges in healthcare, energy and climate systems. At the heart of it, all was the software our community creates.
Developers, more than ever, are the architects of change in an ever more digital world.
For our part, we pushed hard to protect the free-flow of data and to champion rational privacy safeguards. We spoke up on encryption, on the ad economy, and spent some face-time with regulators and elected officials in DC and Brussels. We helped take on an interventionist European Commission in the European Court, defended APIs before SCOTUS, started pushing against restriction-through-ignorance on AI, and generally sought to raise our profile amongst the din of competing voices.
I’ll make my editorial comment short and decidedly self-critical: what was lacking in 2019 was a strong and unified developer voice on all these issues. While the Amazons and Microsofts of the world are well equipped to fight their personal battles, developers lack a strong voice because we’re not an organized whole. Our ability to focus on the job in front of us – something we pride ourselves in – is our biggest weakness when we’re under collective threat. We should be a herd, but we’re less than a gaggle. So while it was big tech weathering the storm in 2019, 2020 is likely to see devs being whipped by the wind. We’re already seeing ecosystem changes – it’s only going to get worse.
My resolution for 2020 is to do more outreach to the developer community, and to find the evangelists out there that also see the urgency in our finding a political voice. If you know one – or are one – please, please put up your hand, send me a note, and join our cause.
