Disruptions: No More Innovation for the Fun of It

SAN FRANCISCO –I wouldn’t describe the car industry as  fun. The airline industry isn’t fun either. Phone companies are far from  fun. Yet these industries all started out  fun. They began with tinkerers and innovators, just like, say, the Internet today.

The fun was sucked out when companies grew large and started squashing smaller competitors. In the process, these companies also stopped making products that were in the best interest of their customers. Either customers moved on, or the regulators were forced to move in. And we all know that regulators are far from fun.

The Internet, with companies sniping at one another and blithely ignoring major privacy violations, is on the verge of the same fate as the true-blue American industries before it: losing its sense of fun.

Take Apple. When Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the company, they were just a couple of guys tinkering with technology. Now Apple is a machine that seems unwilling to stop at anything to win.

Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, is a prime example. The company has always contended that it puts a lovely manicured walled garden around iOS to protect customers from nefarious individuals out to take their most personal and private information. Apple has refused to list thousands of applications in the App Store — often ones that competed with Apple’s products — based on this premise.

Yet over the last few weeks it has become apparent that Apple hasn’t necessarily been keeping its customers as safe as it has claimed. Last month it came to light that the company was approving apps that were freely taking people’s address books from their phones without permission. An Apple loophole also allows developers to take someone’s entire photo library. To me, that sounds more like a circus tent than a walled garden.

Last week Apple also refused to allow “Stop Selling Dreams,” a new book by the writer Seth Godin, into the iBookstore. Apple’s reasoning: Mr. Godin’s book contains links in the bibliography, he said, which make it easy for readers to buy books from Amazon. (Imagine if a physical bookstore refused to sell a print book because it referred to Barnes & Noble?)

What does Apple say about all of this? The company declines to comment, of course. When your valuation is nearly half a trillion dollars, why would you need to explain yourself?

Google doesn’t seem to be much fun anymore either. Apps running on its Android software can also snag photos off a phone. The company is so focused on winning that it is force-feeding customers Google Plus, a product that seems slightly unoriginal for a company as original as Google. And of course Google’s privacy policies are about as much fun as leaning back in a dentist’s chair.

“There was a time when people building things on the Internet didn’t have a dream to be one of the biggest companies out there; their goal was not to be the next General Motors,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. “But that is all changing. Now you have a battle of cultures on the Web where fun is being chiseled away.”

It’s not just the big companies either. I’m increasingly wary of downloading an app, or signing up for a new service or Web site, for fear that the creator had an ulterior motive. Does Angry Birds really need to take my address book when I install it on my phone? Will I really want to see constant warnings popping up to tell me an app is taking this or that bit of once-private data?

For many other people, the privacy debate is eroding trust on the Internet.

For example, a message I sent out on Twitter last week telling people how to clear their Google search history before the company’s new privacy policy went into effect was reposted more than 2,000 times. That’s more than four times the number of shares than any Apple announcement, Steve Jobs quote or video of funny cats I’ve ever shared on Twitter has generated. (For the record, videos of cats are still fun.)

This isn’t to say that the Internet is a bad place and that every technology company is out to get us. Silicon Valley and the rewards of technology are the new American dream.

“On one side of the Web, we have fun and transformative technologies,” Mr. Wu said, “and on the flip side we have this corporate American culture that says if you don’t make it big you’re a failure: if you don’t double your revenue every year, then you’re a loser.”

Silicon Valley still has a beautiful audacity to believe it can change anything, that everything is just a little bit broken and can be fixed and improved with software and technology.

Entrepreneurs routinely begin talking about the mission of their company by explaining that something is broken: banking, travel, chores, education —  even fun can be made more fun. More often than not, these entrepreneurs are right and have solutions to make the world a better place.

But for the technology companies that started out with this same goal to innovate and make things better for people, it seems as if the fate that befell the auto, airline and phone industries is destined to happen here, too. And that’s not much fun.