Future Timeline

Megacorporation, mega-corporation, or megacorp, a term popularized by William Gibson, derives from the combination of the prefix mega- with the word corporation. It has become widespread in cyberpunk literature. It refers to a corporation (normally fictional) that is a massive conglomerate (usually private), holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly). Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily armed (often military-sized) private armies, be the operator of a privatized police force, hold "sovereign" territory, and even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of "corporate culture" to an extreme. Such organizations as a staple of science fiction long predate cyberpunk, appearing in the works of writers such as Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968), Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, 1927), Robert A. Heinlein (Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957), Robert Asprin (The Cold Cash War, 1977), and Andre Norton (the Solar Queen novels). The explicit use of the term in the Traveller science fiction roleplaying game from 1977 predates Gibson's use of it.

Microsoft shares rose today intraday to $265.79, temporarily putting its market cap at slightly over $2 trillion.

But the software giant's stock closed lower, at $265.51, narrowly missing the threshold of $265.55 needed to cement its $2 trillion market cap.

Apple Inc. is the only company to close with $2 trillion market cap, a milestone first surpassed last August.

Microsoft's peak market cap during the dot com bubble was $614.7 billion on Dec. 27, 1999.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s big investment banks are sending a message to their employees this summer: Get back into the office and bring your vaccination card.

New York-based Morgan Stanley said this week that all employees will be required to attest to their vaccination status. Those who are not vaccinated will be required to work remotely, which could potentially put their jobs at risk, since the bank’s top executives have said they want everyone back in the office by September.

“If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office,” said Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman at a industry conference earlier this month. Morgan Stanley is one of several big banks requiring employees to return to the office and also provide documentation of having received a coronavirus vaccine or making a formal declaration confirming vaccination.

Goldman Sachs required most of its employees to return to the office on June 14, with some exceptions extending that deadline to Sept. 30. It requires every employee to state their vaccine status, but does not require proof. JPMorgan is asking employees to submit their vaccination records as well, in the form of an internal portal. The return-to-office push has its roots in banking-industry culture...

A few years ago, attending a tech conference that catered to an industry-friendly audience, I listened as a venture capitalist praised the upcoming possibilities for growth in the U.S. health care market. This V.C., who invested mostly in bioscience companies, was exultant at the possibility that personalized genetic mapping and other innovations would allow people to spend even more money on health care, purchasing everything from customized nutritional supplements to advanced targeted cancer treatments. The result would be great profits for people like him and the companies in which he invested, as health care would become as personalized and consumer-driven as shopping for clothes online.

Consumer choice and bespoke vitamin packets with your name printed on them are not solutions to much of anything in American health care; fancy artificial intelligence diagnostic tools and online pharmacies have not solved the essential problem of provisioning and accessing care. Yet Silicon Valley acts as if it is an innovation or two away from solving the problem—made glaring and overwhelming during the Covid-19 pandemic—of furnishing something like universal health care.

(The Verge) Microsoft can add ending the day as a $2 trillion company to the list of things it’s accomplished today, alongside announcing Windows 11. That makes it the second American publicly traded company ever to have a market capitalization of over $2 trillion (the other member of the club being Apple, which achieved it in August 2020), according to CNN Business.

It’s easy to see how 2020 contributed to Microsoft’s success: the PC market grew by over 10 percent in 2020, according to estimates from IDC and Canalys, and seems to have kept some of that momentum this year. Microsoft also saw success with with its Surface devices, Xbox content, and cloud services — the company says its Intelligent Cloud segment brought in $48 billion alone in its 2020 fiscal year.

There’s also, of course, the aforementioned announcement of Windows 11, which could drive upgrades for people whose computers don’t meet the minimum requirements.

The company’s market cap briefly rose above $2 trillion earlier this week, but it had fallen ever so slightly below the mark by the time markets closed. Today, Microsoft was able to make it to market closing with a cap of $2.009 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.

Locked gates, inclement weather, and bad selfies—all reasons drivers report that they were fired by the bots that apparently run human resources for Amazon’s Flex delivery program.

Millions of independent contractors are at the whim of a system that Amazon knows is problematic, according to a new report by Bloomberg. While serious early glitches have been worked out, significant issues remain, according to the article. Amazon is reportedly unconcerned about the hiccups and bad press that result so long as sufficient numbers of drivers are available to replace those whose accounts are mistakenly terminated.

“Executives knew this was gonna shit the bed,” a former engineer who designed the system told Bloomberg. “That’s actually how they put it in meetings. The only question was how much poo we wanted there to be.”

Stephen Normandin spent almost four years racing around Phoenix delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon.com Inc. Then one day, he received an automated email. The algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn’t doing his job properly.

The 63-year-old Army veteran was stunned. He’d been fired by a machine.

Wall Street wrapped up the first half of the year at record highs, defying pessimistic projections of a broader pullback and pushing past concerns of rising inflation and future rate hikes from the Federal Reserve.

The Dow Jones industrial average advanced more than 210 points, or 0.6 percent, to close at 34,502.38 on Wednesday. The S&P 500 edged up 5.68 points, or 0.1 percent, to 4,297.48 and chalked up its 34th record close of the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 24.38 points, or 0.2 percent, to end the session at 14,503.95.

Even with such mixed results, U.S. markets have swelled during the first half of the year, a period that saw a new president move into the White House, a shift in power on Capitol Hill, and the continuing shocks of the coronavirus pandemic.

We were initially anxious about the introduction of robots into our workforce because of the potential disappearance of manual labor jobs. Robots would take over factories, we were told, they’d drive our cars and trucks, and they would do all of the cleaning that janitorial and domestic workers are currently hired to do. But it turns out auto-pilots drive cars about as well as my cat when he’s drunk, and the way my friend’s Roomba always gets lost under the kitchen table, spinning uselessly, unable to find his way out, suggests we’ll still need people with brooms for a while now.

Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us. Amazon has recently replaced its middle management and human resources workers with artificial intelligence to determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go. There is no human to appeal to, no negotiating with a bot. This is the most boring possible Terminator sequel, where the robots aren’t here to murder or enslave you but rather to text you snidely that you won’t need to come into work tomorrow or, for that matter, ever again.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Flex drivers, who are Amazon contract workers and not granted the protections reserved for full-time employees, are being hired and fired via an app. A software program monitors each worker to determine whether they are working quickly enough, whether they are driving safely enough, and whether they are efficiently meeting their delivery quotas. That this program is rife with errors and punishes workers for things that are not their fault, from traffic problems to incorrect delivery directions, does not seem to concern Amazon. Workers have often complained about the unfair monitoring and lack of human oversight, but Amazon has maintained its system.

It’s not even difficult to figure out why. Jeff Bezos, who keeps promising us he is going to leave Earth and go to space but here he still is, seems to believe all workers are inherently lazy. And look, it’s always very helpful when our billionaire overlords just say the evil thing out loud so we don’t have to speculate. The man who designed Amazon’s warehouses has pretty much said that Amazon’s systems are set up to promote high employee turnover, because longer-term workers are more comfortable and less desperate to please.

Many of Amazon's policies were designed to prevent workers from becoming lazy, a former vice president told The New York Times.

David Niekerk, who helped design the company's warehouse-management system, told the publication that founder Jeff Bezos' belief that people are inherently lazy helped shape the company's policies.

Bezos believed that workers' desire to perform well decreased over time and that an entrenched workforce was a "march to mediocrity," Niekerk told The Times.

"What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need," Niekerk told The Times.

He pointed to a short-term employment model that doesn't provide employees many opportunities for advancement and to the way Amazon used technology to keep workers on task. Amazon doesn't guarantee wage increases after a worker's first three years, the report said, as a way to oust employees who might become too comfortable at Amazon or turn "disgruntled."

The practices that Niekerk described are some of the company's most contentious — like firing employees for a single day of low productivity and continually keeping workers on task with limited break time and high productivity goals.

The practices have left many workers feeling as if Amazon treats them more like machines than people, The Times reported.

(CNN via MSN) The US Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is selling hazardous products to its customers. The federal safety watchdog is suing Amazon to stop.

Among the products cited in the suit are carbon monoxide detectors that fail to alarm, numerous children's pajamas that could catch fire and nearly 400,000 hair dryers that could electrocute people if dropped in water.

The action is another sign of a far more aggressive stance by the CPSC this year. In the past the agency has often pulled its punches rather than push a court fight with companies it believes sell dangerous products.

The products cited are not sold directly by Amazon — they're sold by third parties using Amazon's platform. Many of those companies that sold the dangerous products cited by CPSC are foreign, and the CPSC has limited ability to force a recall of their products if they are found to be hazardous.

The CPSC said cracking down on Amazon is the only way to keep consumers safe from these products.

Three tech companies -- Apple, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet -- reported combined profits of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live.

Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as another reminder of the clout they wield and why government regulators are growing increasingly concerned about whether they have become too powerful.

The massive profits pouring into each company also illustrated why they have a combined market value of $6.4 trillion -- more than double their collective value when the COVID-19 pandemic started 16 months ago.

(Bloomberg via Al Jazeera) Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has dismissed 10 staffers for publicizing an employee’s account of sexual assault allegations against a former manager, people familiar with the matter said, as the e-commerce giant moves to resolve a case that’s rocked China’s tech establishment.

Alibaba announced internally last week it fired the group for sharing a harrowing account posted on an internal forum by a colleague surnamed Zhou, who accused a former manager of rape. Their offenses include sharing screenshots of the woman’s post in the public domain after removing watermarks that bore their IDs, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing an internal matter. Another three people have been reprimanded for making inappropriate comments in public forums, they added.

Zhou’s account went viral this month and turned China’s No. 2 company into the highest-profile symbol of abuses regarded as prevalent throughout Chinese businesses and tech firms, the by-product of an environment that often prioritizes achievement over culture. Alibaba has dismissed the accused manager and accepted the resignations of two senior executives, acting after the case sparked debate about sexism in corporate circles.

Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang has acknowledged his company’s handling of the complaint was a “humiliation.” Zhou’s account of being forced to drink excessively and getting harassed during and after a dinner with clients has aroused widespread sympathy for her plight, including internally.

But Alibaba had little choice but to fire the 10 employees in question because they violated very strict policies against exposing content carried on employee forums, the people said. The internal platform — which is open to Alibaba’s 250,000 employees as well as many at fintech giant Ant Group Co. — is considered off-limits and the company has fired others for leaking information in the past, they added. Alibaba representatives didn’t immediately respond to a written request for comment.

(TechCrunch) Google is appealing the more than half a billion dollar fine it got slapped with by France’s competition authority in July.

The penalty relates to the adtech giant’s approach toward paying news publishers for content reuse.

In a statement today, Sebastien Missoffe, a Google France VP and country manager, characterized the fine as “disproportionate” — claiming that the $592M penalty is not justified in light of Google’s “efforts” to cut a deal with news publishers and comply with updated copyright rules. Which reads like fairly weak sauce, as defence statements go.

“We are appealing the French Competition Authority’s decision which relates to our negotiations between April and August 2020. We disagree with a number of legal elements, and believe that the fine is disproportionate to our efforts to reach an agreement and comply with the new law,” wrote Missoffe, adding: “Irrespective of this, we recognize neighboring rights and we continue to work hard to resolve this case and put deals in place. This includes expanding offers to 1,200 publishers, clarifying aspects of our contracts, and we are sharing more data as requested by the French Competition Authority in their July Decision.”

Back in 2019, the European Union agreed on an update to digital copyright rules which extended cover to the ledes of news stories — snippets of which aggregators such as Google News had for years routinely scraped and displayed.

(Common Dreams) Government watchdog Public Citizen led dozens of organizations on Thursday in calling on Congress to pass several pieces of legislation to rein in the power of powerful tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google—bills that represent the interests of a majority of Americans, polls show.

The groups—which also included Jobs With Justice, the Center for Popular Democracy, and New York Communities for Change—said congressional leaders should pass six bills that were "carefully crafted to address the abusive practices of the Big Tech companies" following a two-year investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.

After conducting 10 hearings and 240 interviews and pouring over 1.3 million documents, the committee compiled a 450-page report concluding that "Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy" and "that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy."

"America has a monopoly problem," the groups said Thursday in their letter (pdf). "Reining in these companies is an essential first step to reverse the damage of concentrated corporate power throughout our economy."

The groups cited research (pdf) showing how Amazon now controls over 35% of e-commerce in the U.S.—forcing other sellers to rely on Amazon to reach their own customers and "laying waste to a once diverse marketplace"—and detailing Facebook and Google's attacks on the free press by diverting "ad revenue away from publishers and into their own pockets."

(Other Words) The collective wealth of the seven wealthiest Americans has now reached nearly $1 trillion. And these seven pay virtually nothing in income tax.

According to Forbes, the collective wealth of these seven men — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Larry Ellison — stood at $996 billion at the end of the day on August 25.

That’s a group small enough to fit an SUV.

Think about that. Just seven guys now control about $1 trillion in wealth — that’s about one-third the $3.5-trillion package now before Congress for desperately needed programs that range from dental and vision care for seniors to child tax credits for rescuing millions of families from poverty and measures that can save our burning planet from climate change.

Some vilify that social spending as “unaffordable.” But it turns out that one third of the tab could be covered by the wealth of just 0.0000022 percent of the U.S. population — seven guys in one SUV.

(TechCrunch) In the past month, Apple did something it generally has done an exceptional job avoiding — the company made what seemed to be an entirely unforced error.

In early August — seemingly out of nowhere** — the company announced that by the end of the year they would be rolling out a technology called NeuralHash that actively scanned the libraries of all iCloud Photos users, seeking out image hashes that matched known images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). For obvious reasons, the on-device scanning could not be opted out of.

This announcement was not coordinated with other major consumer tech giants, Apple pushed forward on the announcement alone.

Researchers and advocacy groups had almost unilaterally negative feedback for the effort, raising concerns that this could create new abuse channels for actors like governments to detect on-device information that they regarded as objectionable. As my colleague Zack noted in a recent story, “The Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week it had amassed more than 25,000 signatures from consumers. On top of that, close to 100 policy and rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, also called on Apple to abandon plans to roll out the technology.”

(Axios) Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan signaled changes are on the way in how the agency scrutinizes acquisitions after revealing the results of a study of a decade's worth of Big Tech company deals that weren't reported to the agency.

Why it matters: Tech's business ecosystem is built on giant companies buying up small startups, but the message from the antitrust agency this week could chill mergers and acquisitions in the sector.

What they found: The FTC reviewed 616 transactions valued at $1 million or more between 2010 and 2019 that were not reported to antitrust authorities by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

• 94 of the transactions actually exceeded the dollar size threshold that would require companies to report a deal. The deals may have qualified for other regulatory exemptions.

• 79% of transactions used deferred or contingent compensation to founders and key employees, and nearly 77% involved non-compete clauses.

• 36% of the transactions involved assuming some amount of debt or liabilities.

What they're saying: In a statement, Khan said the report shows that loopholes may be "unjustifiably enabling deals to fly under the radar."

• Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, said the high percentage of non-compete clauses was especially troubling.

• "If nothing else, it's a clear anticompetitive intent to just take talent and prevent them from competing with you," Stoller said. "And there is a limited amount of tech talent."