Terms of Disservice - Dipayan Ghosh

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as an academic, Kuhn suggests, one must not stray from the community’s unwritten rules—at least not too far.

      At a minimum, Kuhn’s argument makes a great deal of sense in American academic societies and in the scientific and technological fields. Young American scholars are educated through a grade system that is based on a clear hierarchy. They enter as inexperienced high school graduates and might choose to attend college to major in neurobiology or computer science—all to land a job at a technology company or bank. Some of us might decide that a bachelor’s degree is not enough and choose to enroll in a graduate degree program. This might lead to doctoral research roles and teaching. Those who choose to extend their time in academia could later opt to engage in postdoctoral study, deepening their subscription to the academic hierarchy. And those successful in finding an opportunity to start a tenure-track academic role might ultimately choose that route, climbing the difficult rungs from assistant to associate to full professor and perhaps even department chair. To successfully navigate the field, particularly in engineering and the hard sciences, scholars must typically publish in the journals and conferences deemed by the relevant academic establishment to be adequately rigorous and competitive for the sharing of new research findings. Instilled in the academic practice, particularly in technical fields, lies an intense publish-or-perish culture.

      But herein lies the real question that Kuhn asks us all to ponder: Do such academic contributions and the academic hierarchy they buttress really constitute the ideas that are of greatest novelty and greatest value to society? Possibly. But it is a process that remains opaque, with purview kept exclusively to the wisdom of the academic line of succession. To Kuhn, this setup represents a regime of power not particularly different from any other, but one that carries a fundamental flaw: complacency. What if the carefully combed and curated academic representatives of engineering and science, who over time had consistently subscribed to the idea that the traditional academic way is the only path to knowledge development, were fundamentally wrong about their theories of the world? What if they were missing entirely novel ways of thinking because they could not see past traditional, accepted frameworks? And, most critically, could there be other competing paradigms that deserve attention and analysis?

      At the center of Kuhn’s analysis is the story of the Copernican revolution, in which Nicolaus Copernicus posited a bold new idea: the Earth was not at the center of the universe, as the ecclesiastical order and Renaissance society had contended for many centuries. His ideas were accordingly shunned by the church and academic order, which persisted with the Ptolemaic model featuring a stationary Earth at the center of the skies. Copernicus’s theory only started to gain sway when it became increasingly difficult to explain away discrepancies between Ptolemy’s paradigm and new instances of real observations, particularly those of Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Only after these scientists’ ideas started to come together and force a divergence from the original path through hard science could the conversation around the physics of the solar system begin to move in the direction of truth. This was the Copernican paradigm shift.

      In that instance, the development of astronomical knowledge was hindered by an academic hierarchy that had previously adopted Ptolemy’s description as truth. Kuhn contends this was a theme of the academic field, to such a degree that it systematically obstructed understanding of the reality of nature. The result of his analysis is the idea that the academic world—and the people who subscribed to it—was unknowingly party to a cultural paradigm that might have been slowing humanity’s quest for real knowledge; that because of the learning pathway moderated by the academic community, revolutionarily new knowledge that could change the world would seldom be shared. Academia had subscribed to a paradigm that favored conservative alignment over groundbreaking inquiry and truth, leaving the vast majority of people unable or unwilling to break from the present paradigm. We were minions living in an intellectual prison.

      With this strange new theory, Kuhn sent shockwaves around the world.

      The Internet’s Intellectual Free Riders

      As we approach the fourth decade of the consumer internet, I believe our society has adopted a new paradigm—one that could slowly constrain our intellectual future.

      Since the dawn of the internet, we have revered it. Through the years we have thought of it as the technology that would revolutionize global commerce, democratize all communication, and topple political backwardness throughout the world. It was the enabler of vast economic opportunity in the developing world and the facilitator that would unlock the mass commercialization of industry around the world—starting with the United States. Indeed, our written history suggests it has been just that.

      The problem is that while corporate evangelists highlighted the shining veneer of the internet to project its virtues and values to the industrial world, entrepreneurs discovered new opportunities to exploit consumers and tackle markets worldwide. They rode the coattails of the image of the internet—they were the new kids on the block, the college bros, the Wall Street bankers and venture capitalists who exclusively possessed the know-how to make something of this new media platform and its underlying power. We revered them all, including Bill Gates, Brian Chesky, Eric Schmidt, Evan Spiegel, Jeff Bezos, Jerry Yang, Larry Page, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Travis Kalanick, as well as those in the investment community, such as Mary Meeker and John Doerr. While they consolidated markets, hoovered personal data, and leapt over the consumer interest, they inaccurately projected that they and their companies were what we knew as the internet—that their businesses represented the novelty and wonder of the public domain that is the internet. It was the perfect way to brand the global conquest of the century.

      The reality that has since emerged in place of that imagined magnanimity and ingenuity of the internet entrepreneurs is now clear: they were just opportunists operating in an open greenfield of unregulated space, just like any Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt of the past. There was nothing special here. The new robber barons of the web projected the commercial propaganda that their earth-shattering products were good for everyone in society, just like the underlying free infrastructure that enabled their conquest in the first place: the internet. And that is the viewpoint that has largely prevailed over the past three decades: Facebook connects everyone, Google indexes all knowledge, and Amazon enables new markets. And all for free. That is the paradigm we are living in: consumer internet firms have done amazing things for the world, giving us the tremendous gift of connectivity. And even if this aura is diminishing in elitist circles, for the vast majority of internet users, it is not.

      At first, the corporate evangelists offering these perspectives may have been sincere, even benevolent. They may even have thought they were true. The consistently earnest Tim Berners-Lee—who invented the World Wide Web, the technical protocol that we as consumers typically use to access our favorite websites—had grand ideas for what the internet could, and still can, accomplish. The internet in his view is the most sophisticated communications medium the world has ever seen, a system that enables the digitized communication between two terminals anywhere in the world. Berners-Lee envisioned the internet as an open space of limited governance, a decentralized forum for new ideas and protected communication, and he knew that if humankind could effectively organize it as such, it possessed truly remarkable capabilities for the benefit of us all.

      This inspirational view was eventually subsumed by the businesspeople of the internet. What started out as a crude college dating service became for Mark Zuckerberg a new way to connect people around the world and allow friends to communicate with one another in the most seamless way imaginable—Facebook. For Eric Schmidt, the longtime head of Google, his company was the world’s literal answer to collecting, analyzing, and presenting all of humanity’s knowledge. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon had tremendous potential impact in its creator’s view: it could and should become a meeting place for all of the world’s merchants and customers looking for deals on anything from jumper cables to luxury cars. In each of these cases of corporations that over time have overtaken large segments of the global economy through cutthroat enterprise, the chief executive projected and perhaps even believed that he was creating something that was morally desirable and would benefit and uplift the consumer masses—all fundamentally incapable of stumbling on the exploitative business model at the core of the consumer internet.

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