"I don't think a Silicon Valley would be possible in Europe"

Sascha Lobo is an astute and sometimes sharp-tongued observer of the digital world. Weekly he publishes in the column "S.P.O.N. - The Man-Machine" on Spiegel Online. There, he regularly comments on the blessing or curse of the Internet.

When is the Internet a blessing for you?

I made this clear in my book: The Internet is at all times both a blessing and a curse. And we as a society have the task of first identifying those parts that constitute the curse, which is not at all easy, and then pushing them in the direction of the "blessing. So we as a society - the culture, the citizens, the economy - have the task to actively increase the blessing part. Experience shows that the curse portion comes upon us quickly enough.

If I understand you correctly: Then many things that are now blessings were initially a curse? Or does the other direction also go?

One cannot say, as with the hen and the egg, that any technology was either a curse or a blessing at the very beginning. Except, perhaps, for the atomic bomb; there it is agreed that it has, to put it mildly, hardly any beneficial elements. In fact, it's like this: into whose hands does the technology fall? What are the goals that are being pursued with it? And it was precisely with these "uber-technologies" such as printing, radio and television, with media production as a whole, that it was with the Internet: They were charged with the greatest hopes from the very beginning. There are a number of quotes, such as, "The machine gun will bring eternal peace." "The railroad will make people communicate and never make war with each other again" - words from people who should be taken seriously. And every time it was wrong. I see no reason why it shouldn't be exactly the same with the Internet. It depends on the time: With which intention it is used, by whom and how. Whether this becomes a blessing or a curse in the end is up to us.

And there are now enough examples where the Internet has become more of a curse, for example in connection with the NSA affair or blogs by groups with extreme views. We're already talking about Web 2.0, so what's next?

Web 2.0 was the claim of a conference in 2004, when the term was coined. Then we had "social media" in between and now a whole flood of terms like "Internet of Things," "big data," or "business intelligence" and "cloud computing. So there's an insane amount coming our way. I believe that the next period will be the period of data flows. I believe that the whole economy is going to be transformed by the effects of the Internet, and that's what I called "platform capitalism." What has been seen as a small part of Web 2.0 now relates to the whole economic world. I see the power of platforms today as being as great as the power that globalization was thought to have in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is ultimately what happened.

Platform capitalism, like all "isms," probably implies a critique. Which one?

All "isms" must be criticized. But I always understand criticism in a constructive way. In this respect, platform capitalism per se is not something negative. On the contrary. We are heading for the era of platform capitalism. Platforms dominate the Internet. And they obey certain rules, which I'm in the process of figuring out. That's what my new book will be about. Classic platforms are, for example, Google or Facebook. What do they have in common? For example, that they tend to develop monopoly-like structures. Facebook is the platform for social relationships on the net. And whenever a competitor appears somewhere, it is immediately bought away for billions. Which is very clever. For me, platforms - that's why it's so important that they produce their own economic form - are a mixture of the operating system of a market and the marketplace of speed. Which of these predominates will vary from industry to industry.

Who are the winners, who are the losers in platform capitalism?

Striving to be among the winners and not the losers. That's the essence of competition, and I think it's perfectly legitimate. But of course you have to make sure that no one else suffers as a result and that the social, constitutional and human rights standards that we have worked hard to achieve are not thrown overboard. Secondly, we also need a certain regional anchoring. That means: I don't think it's particularly great that 80 percent of the Internet companies that dominate the world come from a small valley in California. That's not entirely unjustified, because their services are far better than those that come from Europe. I think Europe needs to think about how to shape the economic transformation so that we benefit from it as well. All the more so because it all has a strong impact on communication and culture.

You're always critical of the "tech caste in Silicon Valley. What are your main criticisms?

One point is that Silicon Valley companies are actually doing a creditable job of making everything possible that somehow makes sense in the marketplace. My criticism is that they completely lack the filter to do this. There are mainly financially and technologically powerful people sitting there, rulers over platforms, who do whatever they think is right. Democracy, which is supposed to shape society, doesn't seem to have grasped yet how deeply the essence of a society is being interfered with here. So I think that these people who are there providing new services and showing us absolutely have their justification. But they lack a corrective. At the moment, it even seems that they are working very aggressively against it so that, if possible, such a corrective never takes place. That's what I'm criticizing, not the existence of such companies. I am glad that there is something like Google, by far the best search engine. But on the other hand, in certain areas, control is practically excluded.

Isn't that also related to the fact that in the U.S. there is a different, an "anything goes" mentality, not like in Europe? Would a kind of Silicon Valley even be possible in Europe because of the stronger regulations?

I don't think a Silicon Valley would be possible in Europe. And it's a good thing too. I think it's nonsense to strive for that, along the lines of "We have to have a Silicon Valley, too." It's nonsense because the emergence of a Silicon Valley has a lot to do with culture and mentality. The Californian mentality comes from hippiedom with its libertarian idea of freedom. The "we-can-do-anything" mentality is linked to a strong belief in technology, i.e. the view that all problems can be solved with some technical solution. This very successful ideology is then also the unifying element of these people: social, political and economic problems - everything can be solved with technology. I don't think that's been the case in Europe for many hundreds of years. Here, people are not convinced that technology can solve everything. It's interesting to note that the more technological a country in Europe is, the less convinced its inhabitants are that technology can solve all their problems. Switzerland and Germany are among the world's leading nations in terms of engineering performance. However, there is a certain amount of technology skepticism in both countries, even though the best watches come from Switzerland and the best cars from Germany. In this respect, I see a different approach in Europe, one that works more slowly, but which - from my perspective - is necessary and needs to be made bigger. You need a support of European digital technologies. I don't believe in "techno-nationalism," that's nonsense.

Let's return to the term "platform capitalism. Start-ups are constantly emerging in the share economy sector. Are we in a pioneering phase at the moment, and in which direction will the whole thing develop, if I take the example of the uber.com think?

Uber is a flagship startup of platform capitalism that has masterfully managed to build the platform for itself. Uber is really trying to become the operating system of the transportation system. They really want every transportation to be through Uber. That's exactly this Marketplace of Speed. You can see perfectly what that means with Uber, which is that digital networking and the mobile Internet make it extremely easy to participate in the market. If I used to drive my car from A to B, I only drove my car. Today, I can become a transport service provider at the touch of a button, namely via Uber. So I drive from Bern to Zurich and give someone a ride. Whether they pay me 25 francs or hand me a jar of their homemade honey is not that important. An armada of people with no economic pressure is now competing with the established entrepreneurs. This can lead to a dramatic drop in prices or to a differentiation of business models. But it can also lead to thinking about what to do besides reacting protectionist: How can I develop the market so that it remains interesting for real entrepreneurship? I think you have to think about that. Global thoughts like "ban everything" are nonsense. You can't prevent progress, history shows that. But you have to try to determine the direction of progress. That is extremely difficult.

What is happening to the analog world? Does it still have a future at all, or even more so?

I believe that the digital world and the non-digital, material world are merging. We have various developments here, such as augmented reality, i.e. digitally enriched reality, where at a certain point it is no longer clear what is digital and what exactly is not. This doesn't just happen via some kind of glasses that superimpose information on me, but also very concretely and tangibly through the fact that I carry my smartphone with me all the time, new effects arise, such as the light that comes on when I enter a room because my smartphone communicates with the light bulb. Ten years ago, you'd think, "dorky." But today it's included in the Google Home package. And you can ask yourself: Is that digital now or still thingy? The light comes on up there, but it's digitally controlled. Where the digital ends and the analog begins is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp. I believe that at some point, only experts will be able to tell the difference. And that's why I don't think you can escape the whole development. The lesson is: We can't pretend that the Internet is an isolated place, a weird network of isolated cables that takes place somewhere underground or is connected to some servers in California. No, the Internet is everywhere. When we talk about a digital society, that's the only society that's going to exist in the future. And because everything from tax data to patient data to payment transactions, to almost all the data we encounter in everyday life, is already on the Internet, you can no longer avoid the digital world. You are part of it, whether you like it or not. That means we have to deal with it and influence the development.

Sascha Lobo https://saschalobo.com/

Fear of algorithms? Sascha Lobo on digitalization and supposed evil