Every major tech leader got their chance to do just that at the 2016 Code Conference last week. But, unfortunately, it looks like they failed. Ticket prices for the conference are $6,500 a pop, a number that ensures all attendees are leaders in their field. Yet as Buzzfeed reporter Nitasha Tiku reported in a fascinating article, those tech leaders often downplay their power: Despite the mounting antitrust cases against Google, CEO Sundar Pichai faced only one question about about investigations in the European Union. She went on to say that, “Sheryl Sandberg (a friend of Swisher’s) argued that Peter Thiel’s revenge plot on the media won’t get him kicked off the board because it was “independent” of his role at the world’s most influential media distribution platform. Sandberg made it all sound like a well-established, accepted practice, and nobody batted an eye.” Tiku ties the industry’s poor response at the Code Conference to their safety from any consequences, a “tech cocoon” of sorts. Facebook’s attitude in particular is upsetting. The network platform is a titan compared to its competition, and social media news goers turn to it far more often. A recent Pew study revealed that, out of all respondents who gain their news via social network, 44% use Facebook compared to just 10% for the second most popular source of news, YouTube. Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Centre for Digital Journalism, wrote a foreword to a research paper on the matter earlier this year. The paper explored the civic power baked into tech giants’ services — a power that demands a huge responsibility. As Bell put it: Given the varied responses from tech leaders at Code Conference in response to these facts, concerns about the tech world’s power and the tech cocoon will continue to mount. And until founders and CEOs are able to admit that their industry is changing the world around them, these worries will only get worse.
