“When I see something that I consider an injustice, I just don’t buy the product,” says Buck, sitting behind his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building. He wore a dark, lightly checked suit, his gray hair cropped close; he dipped into his oatmeal breakfast from the House carryout, a “Make America Great Again” hat on the shelf behind him.
For the past nearly two years, Buck has been staging, or trying to stage, a one-person Capitol Hill boycott of a set of companies most of Washington would find it nearly impossible to give up: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those corporations, he argues, use their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse users’ privacy for profit, indulge the Chinese government with impunity and censor conservatives. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of those things.)
Buck has called on his Republican colleagues to swear off taking campaign contributions from those companies. But Buck is personally taking things a bit further. He doesn’t search the web with Google, he says. He directs his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn’t use Facebook, even to communicate with family. “If they want to talk to me, they call,” he says. It is, says Buck, a “conscience thing.”
Where that all changes from “quirky member of Congress” to meaningful is that Buck also happens to be one of the people in Washington most responsible for overseeing Silicon Valley.
Ten months ago, Buck took over the Republican Party’s highest-ranking spot on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. The subcommittee was more than a year and a half into an investigation into competition in digital markets, and as he’d dug into that work, he had, he says, grown appalled. He came to believe that Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook bullied competitors, tracked their users and generally abused their considerable power over the lives of Americans. “As a prosecutor, it was really offensive to me. Those are criminal offenses,” he says. “Those are people that belong behind bars.”
(The companies, of course, reject the idea that their executives belong behind bars.)
Joe Biden’s Washington is right now grappling with what to do about the American tech industry, and this summer Buck’s own subcommittee approved a sweeping set of bipartisan bills aimed at reining in the big four, as they’re known. (Twitter, a much smaller company than the others, largely escapes antitrust scrutiny.) Buck is optimistic that at least some of them will become law, but in the meantime, he’s waging what he calls “my little personal protest.”
Liberals don’t have a monopoly on mindful consumption, he says. He intertwines his fingers. “AOC and Ken Buck, just like that,” he says, and laughs.
What does it actually look like for a member of Congress to swear off some of modern life’s most popular, most ubiquitous technology?
His policy can make things awkward. In mid-September, Buck was a featured speaker at a nearly day-long TheTeCHyWorLD virtual event on the relationship between Washington and the American tech industry. But the session was hosted on a platform optimized for Google’s Chrome browser, which Buck had sworn off. For 18 long minutes, jaunty hold music looped as his staff worked to get him logged in.
Says Buck: If his staff had told him in advance “and said, ‘Well this is going to use Google, I would have, you know, [said] ‘red flag.’”
On a recent Tuesday, Buck let a reporter follow along as he attempted to navigate day-to-day life on Capitol Hill without the benefit of big tech’s tools.
“I don’t mean any offense to the congressman, but I’m not sure I believe him,” says Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, when presented with the idea that Buck avoids Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.
Gillmor, like Buck, worries about the control tech tools give corporations over people’s daily lives. He doesn’t use most social networks, either, but says he’s struggled with giving up the big four up completely: “You can’t be pure and still be engaged in the modern world.”
People who abstain completely from social media and other big-tech products are sometimes called ‘digital vegans.’ Buck, by necessity, turns out to be more of a digital flexitarian. Shortly after lunch he has a meeting with a fellow Republican member in the neighboring Longworth Building. Making his way down the marble hallways, he pulls out his phone, clad in an American flag case. It’s how, he says, he knows where he needs to be and what he needs to be doing.
It is, also, an iPhone. As in, an Apple iPhone. Buck gets it. The House’s IT unit gives offices the option of two types of officially sanctioned phones: iPhones and Samsung phones running the Android operating system. But Android is backed by Google, so Buck had to make a choice between two of Silicon Valley’s giants. (Buck is hardly alone in his decision: According to House Information Resources, of the more than 10,000 mobile devices in the House, about 99 percent are iPhones.)
Buck opens his color-coded calendar on his iPhone. If this were the late 1990s, Buck might be in trouble: It’s Microsoft Outlook, and back then, Microsoft was Washington’s poster child for bad tech-industry behavior. The Justice Department settled its antitrust case with the company in 2001, and today Buck sees Microsoft as less a part of the oligarchy than a useful alternative. Its Bing search engine competes with Google’s, and it owns LinkedIn, a challenger to Facebook.
“I don’t have a problem with big tech,” says Buck. “I have a problem with monopolies and how they use their monopoly power.”
“If he swore off Microsoft, he’d be screwed,” says Bradford Fitch, president of the non-partisan Congressional Management Foundation. That’s because Microsoft is baked into the House’s operations — it’s the default for everything from email to calendaring to web conferencing.