During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what I describe and are working on solutions.
I can imagine telling Arendt that Silicon Valley has become the capital of a certain kind of power, explaining how it reaches through Elon Musk to control the US government and the US military and through Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to dominate the global public sphere. I imagine showing her Sand Hill Road, the completely prosaic—although nicely landscaped—suburban highway where venture capitalists meet in undistinguished office parks to decide the flow of billions. This is Arendt’s nightmare.
For her, there should be a public domain in which diverse people convene for the “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that constitutes politics (OR 24).
Politics enables a particular kind of equality: the equal standing to debate and influence collective decisions. Politics also enables a specific kind of freedom, because a person who decides with others what to do together is neither a boss nor a subordinate but a free actor.
Politics allows us to be–and to be recognized–as genuine individuals, having our own perspectives on topics that also matter to others (HC 41). And politics defeats death because it is where we concern ourselves with making a common world that can outlast us. “It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (HC 55).
Politics excludes force against fellow citizens. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (HC 26). Speech is not persuasive unless the recipient is free to accept or reject it, and force destroys that freedom. By the same token, force prevents the one who uses it from being genuinely persuasive, which is a sign of rationality.
Musk’s DOGE efforts are clear examples of force. But I also think about when Zuckerberg decided to try to improve the schools of Newark, NJ. He had derived his vast wealth from developing a platform on which people live their private lives in the view of algorithms that nudge them to buy goods. He allocated some of this wealth to a reform project in Newark, discovered that people were ungrateful and that his plan didn’t work, and retreated in a huff because he didn’t receive the praise or impact that he expected to buy.
From Arendt’s perspective, each teenager in Newark was exactly Zuckerberg’s equal, worthy to look him in the eye and say what they they should do together. This would constitute what she calls “action.” However, Zuckerberg showed himself incapable of such equality and therefore devoid of genuine freedom.
Musk, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires understand themselves as deservedly powerful and receive adulation from millions. But, says Arendt, “The popular belief in ‘strong men’ … is either sheer superstition … or is a conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material'” (HC 188).
There is no public space on Sand Hill Road. Palo Alto has a city hall, but it is not where Silicon Valley is governed. And the laborers “who with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life” (Aristotle) are carefully hidden away (HC 72).
Arendt describes how economic activity has eclipsed politics in modern times. Descriptions of private life in the form of lyric poetry and novels have flourished–today, thousands of fine novels are available on the Kindle store–a development “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (HC 39). In her day, corporations still built quite impressive urban headquarters, like Rockefeller Center, which continued the tradition of the Medici Palace or a Rothschild estate. But Sand Hill Road is a perfect example of wealth refusing to create anything of public value. Unless you are invited to a meeting there, you just drive by.
Arendt acknowledges that people need private property to afford political participation and to develop individual perspectives. We each need a dwelling and objects (such as, perhaps, books or mementos) that are protected from outsiders: “a tangible. worldly place of one’s own” (HC 70). But we do not need wealth. Arendt decries the “present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole” (HC 61). For example, to own a great deal of stock is not to have property (the basis of individuality) but to be part of a mass society that renders your behavior statistically predictable, like a natural phenomenon (HC43). All those Teslas that cruise silently around Palo Alto are metaphors for wealth that is not truly private property.
Much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from digital media through which we live our private lives in the view of algorithms that assess us statistically and influence our behavior. For Arendt, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (HC 71). She is against socialist and communist efforts to expropriate property, but she also believes that privacy can be invaded by society in other ways (HC72). She expresses this concern vaguely, but nothing epitomizes it better than a corporate social media platform that becomes the space for ostensibly private life.
Artificial Intelligence represents the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley, producing software that appears to speak in the first-person singular but actually aggregates billions of people’s previous thought. Arendt’s words are eerie: “Without the accompaniment of speech .., action would not only lose its revelatory power, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would be incomprehensible” (HC 178).
The result is a kind of death: “A life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (HC 176).
See also: Arendt, freedom, Trump (2017); the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human; Victorians warn us about AI; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt etc.
