expect the growing influence of technically gifted people to “destroy artificial inequalities” while “highlighting natural inequalities.”15 But the new tech aristocracy also regard themselves as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites or the grubby corporate speculators.16 They believe that they are not just creating value, but building a better world.
While earlier technologies were disruptive of established ways, their purpose was generally to allow people to do things more cheaply and efficiently, to boost productivity and make life easier. Technology was “a traditional action made effective,” as the sociologist Marcel Mauss described it. On the whole, it was evolutionary, not revolutionary.17 But for many in the new elite, technology represents far more than efficiency or convenience. It is both the beginning and the end, the material equivalent of a spiritual journey to nirvana.
Google’s vision for the future is characterized by “immersive computing,” in which the real and virtual worlds blend together.18 Tech leaders like Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at Google, speak about creating a “posthuman” future, dominated by artificial intelligence and controlled by computers and those who program them. They look forward to having the capacity to reverse aging and to download their consciousness into computers. This vision rests on a faith in—or an obsession with—technological determinism, in which new technology is our evolutionary successor.19 But is this what most people want the future to be?
The Cultural Revolution
What the tech oligarchs are already doing to control the culture should raise alarm. The IT revolution once appeared to be launching a more democratic era in communications, with the “de-massified media” that Alvin Toffler optimistically predicted. But what looked like a more diverse and open media world, where anyone could be a reporter or reach an audience, is turning into one where a very few companies control the information pipelines.20 Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults now get their news through Facebook or Google.21 Millennials in both the United States and the UK are almost three times as likely to get their information from these platforms as from print, television, or radio.22
The power of the tech oligarchy has grown at a time when print publishing and the firms that have dominated it are experiencing a secular and probably irreversible decline. Between 2001 and 2017, the publishing industry (books, newspapers, magazines) lost 290,000 jobs—a decrease of 40 percent. Any newspaper or magazine today will have an online presence, but with Facebook and Google dominating the growth in online advertising, it’s exceedingly difficult for new or smaller publications to survive. While Google alone made $4.7 billion from news publishers in 2018, the industry continues to shrink.23 “When you look at what’s evolved, and the amount of revenue that’s going to the Googles and Facebooks of the world,” says Alan Fisco, president of the Seattle Times, “we are getting the crumbs off the table.”24
Even as they devastate the old media, the oligarchs also have the means to purchase some of its most venerable survivors. Since 2010, tech moguls and their relatives have bought the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the long-distressed Time magazine, purchased for $190 million.25 In China, the estimable South China Morning Post was taken over by Alibaba, one of the country’s largest online retailers.26 Owning publications appeals to the vanity of tech oligarchs, giving them enhanced entree to literary and journalistic circles.27 The publications acquired in this way get an extra edge: they can enjoy the luxury of producing content without worrying much about money.28
There are often ritual denials that the new owners of these publications will influence content, but this is in total contradiction with experience. When the equally rapacious moguls of the early twentieth century, like the McCormicks of Chicago or William Randolph Hearst, bought newspapers, they pushed an agenda of imperial expansion, anti-unionism, and resistance to those who would threaten their fortunes.29 Today’s mass media already tend to favor the oligarchy’s progressive views—on gender, race, and environmental issues, for example, but with reservations about the concentration of power.30 Financial dependency is likely to encourage more support for the interests of the tech industry.
News is only one area of the culture being seized by the tech oligarchy. Amazon has achieved enormous influence over the book industry; it is by far the largest seller of books, accounting for upwards of 50 percent of all paper sales and 90 percent of ebook sales, and it possesses the ability to allow knockoffs of published titles.31 Even well-established publishers like Hachette and Macmillan have found themselves held hostage if they don’t adhere to Amazon’s requests.32
The entertainment industry is also being swallowed up by the tech giants. YouTube, acquired by Google in 2006, has become determinative in the music industry, although artists often do not get the compensation they traditionally received. Music streaming and music videos have become yet another way that firms like Google gain access to ever more personal data, which they can sell to advertisers.33 Much the same is occurring in video broadly. Netflix, a company financed by Silicon Valley venture firms, is now estimated to be worth more than any of the film studios, and along with Amazon it produces much of the award-winning television programming. In 2018, Netflix spent more on programming than any of the major studios. Netflix and Amazon each have well over 100 million subscribers, far beyond the clientele achieved by the established cable firms.34
Not satisfied with controlling information pipelines, the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38
With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.
The Right of Surveillance
The medieval church may have exercised enormous sway over what people believed to be true and proper, but it had nothing like today’s tools for monitoring private actions and thoughts. The new technology that allows such erasure of privacy has become central to generating tech wealth: personal data is the raw material of the digital age. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, sees the exploitation of personal data as the “electricity of the 21st century.”40
Alibaba and other “super platforms” like Facebook, Google, and WeChat operate largely as gatekeepers for those who wish to navigate the digital economy, which means they control access to a considerable part of the overall economy.41 This position gives them enormous power to collect personal information on users. When Google and Facebook and other gatekeepers do this collecting, “our behaviour is transformed into a product,” writes one observer.42 This data now accounts for up to 20 percent of Europe’s GDP, and as it becomes more important, we become like serfs living under what the French analyst Gaspard Koenig describes as “digital feudalism.”43 Our daily lives no longer belong to us alone but are relentlessly commodified. This is, of course, the natural goal of all the major tech firms, and as Jaron Lanier suggests, it all serves to “percolate creepiness and inspire justified paranoias.”44
Surveillance might go on with little warning