Tiny touches, collectively colossal

I've long puzzled over why powerful organizations aren’t more salient to me as threats or blessings (e.g., Significant but hard to discern). In part it’s because their impact is individually light, but collectively vast; being conduits for content may also play a role.

Companies and government agencies not seen as threats

People worry about being mugged and murdered—the threat is another person, easily imagined. 60% of Americans are afraid or very afraid of “corrupt government officials,” according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears—still humans, though more generic. Some people worry about losing their jobs to vague forces like “AI” or “financial collapse.” Many fear other countries like Russia, China or North Korea. [1] In addition to generic threats (the top two in 2023 were “Corrupt government officials” and “Economic/financial collapse”) the Chapman researchers chose two kinds of social institutions: country threats (Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran) and political organizations (Proud Boys, Antifa, Black Lives Matter). The four countries came in at #3, 12, 14, and 14. 

I'm more interested, though, to what extent people see organizations like Big Tech companies as threats. They are certainly large and powerful entities with, I would contend a collective group agency. However, they don’t seem to be a salient part of people's threat landscape. Personally, I see the threat intellectually, but not emotionally. Pew research in 2020 suggested that the American public was skeptical about tech companies. For example, 72% said that social media companies have too much power and influence in politics today (2024 research).  A 2022 Hoover Institution survey of public perceptions of technology companies indicated that Facebook and Walmart (among the choices offered) had the largest number of respondents with a negative impression; Facebook was the company least trusted to protect user data. A 2021 Investor's Business Daily survey of how much U.S. consumers trust tech companies with their personal information gave Amazon the highest marks, and four social media companies (TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook) the lowest (summary, data table). 

If one takes favorable or unfavorable opinion of government agencies as measures of perceived threat/refuge, then a 2023 Pew survey of opinions about US federal agencies indicates that the CDC and EPA are perceived as threats (in the surveyed list) by those on the Right and shields by those on the Left. 

I couldn’t find data directly comparing trust in specific companies and government agencies. However, the Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 reported that globally, government is seen as far less competent and ethical than business; however, this doesn’t provide information about their perceived threats.

Big but light touch

Big tech ogregores are clearly visible for example big brands like Google, Facebook, and TikTok. However they are not perceived as agentive. Perhaps that is because their size comes from a vast number of individually light touch points. 

Facebook generated $227 per year for each North American user in 2023 from advertising (sum of quarterly ARPU from fourweekmba); the marketers paying Facebook think they’re having an influence on us. Similarly, Google Search’s $256 annual ARPU (average revenue per user) in the United States indicates that advertisers think it’s a way to affect purchasing behavior (askwonder). And it’s not just advertising. A 2020 systematic literature review found that social media has far-reaching effects on an individual's self-perception, mood, social relationships, and even psychiatric illnesses (Sharma, John & Sahu).

Perhaps it doesn’t feel that the Big Tech ogregores are affecting us because they’re platforms. That is, they’re conduits through which like marketers and influencers affect us. While I don’t doubt that they have an influence, it’s unclear to me, and perhaps to others, how to assign responsibility for harms (or benefits) to the platforms versus those who use the platforms.

There are other similarly distributed and invisible forces that have significant and easily-overlooked impacts, like suicide by gun deaths and cats as bird killers.

Deaths in school shootings are prominent in the public mind, but the number is tiny in comparison to other causes of gun deaths. Most people think of murder as the main cause of death by guns, but in fact there are more gun suicides (26,328 in 2021) than gun homicides (20,958). There are no more than a few dozen school shooting deaths per year (Pew).

Similarly, most people don’t think of their darling kitty as a killer. However, predation by domestic and feral cats is the leading human-caused threat to birds, killing 1.3 to 4 billion birds annually in the US (USFWS via Sibley, 2023). Cats kill four times as many birds as flying into buildings, ten times as many as vehicles. 

• 2.4 bn bird mortalities to cats; assume 40 million households own cats => 60 bird deaths per cat household per year
• 234 k bird mortalities to wind turbines: approx. as 4,000 cat households.

In summary, seemingly safe institutions have an outsized influence. Their influence on us are individually inconsequential but collectively colossal.

Endnote

[1] A methodological challenge is that opinion surveys offer a menu of threats defined by the researchers rather than seeking unprompted answers. For example, a typical question in the Chapman Survey of Fears is “How afraid are you of the following? - Air pollution” (methodology). Users essentially rank fears provided to them, rather than being able to describe their own experience. The World Economic Forum survey of global risks has the same methodological problem as the Chapman survey – the survey constructors defined the items and respondents merely chose among them. The offered risks were, again, generic; the top three were extreme weather, AI-generated misinformation/disinformation, and societal and/or political polarization (chart, report).