for other countries seeking to employ technology to regulate the lives of citizens. In fact, this kind of surveillance capacity is already being sold to other countries, particularly in Africa, as a tool for regimes to control their populations and spy on political opponents.
“Clean Rich” or High-Tech Monopolists?
To a remarkable extent, the tech elites have presented themselves as dynamic, entrepreneurial outsiders who want to make the world better. In the early days of the tech revolution, some imagined an almost utopian, communitarian society on the horizon. The California author Stewart Brand, writing in Rolling Stone in 1972, predicted that when computers became widely available, we would all become “computer bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators.” It would be a new era of enhanced “spontaneous creation and of human interaction.”36 The “early digital idealists” envisioned a “sharing” web that functioned “free from the constraints of the commercial order.”37
Instead, a technocratic economy is engendering a new kind of hierarchy, favoring highly skilled technicians and engineers. Their dominance will grow as technology plays an ever greater role in the economy, while the value of labor further declines. Americans, long enamored of the entrepreneurial spirit and technological progress, have been slow to see the tech oligarchy as a threat.38 Leftist historians, alert to the dangers of aristocracy, have tended to focus their ire on financial companies that may be large and powerful but aren’t nearly as wealthy or as influential in shaping the economy as the tech sector, which seeks to capture virtually every other industry, including finance.39
At the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, anticapitalist demonstrators held moments of silence and prayer for the memory of Steve Jobs, a particularly aggressive capitalist.40 Some people still see Bill Gates, a clear monopolist, as one of the “meritorious entrepreneurs,” notes Thomas Piketty.41 One progressive writer, David Callahan, portrays the tech oligarchs, along with their allies in the financial sector, as a kind of “benign plutocracy” in contrast to those who built their fortunes on resource extraction, manufacturing, and material consumption.42
Yet America’s tech titans have attained oligopolistic sway over markets comparable to that of moguls like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Cornelius Vanderbilt.43 They may wear baseball caps rather than top hats, but their economic and cultural power is vast, and likely to become far more so.
CHAPTER 5
The Belief System of the New Oligarchy
In important ways, the tech moguls are quite different from both the industrialists of the late nineteenth century and the managerial elite of the twentieth. They are neither ambitious parvenus nor carefully bred products of the corporate organization. It is not raw ambition or managerial acumen but technical talent that has defined them and made them fabulously wealthy and influential.
As a group, they are far less diverse than the tinkerers and artisans who propelled the industrial revolution. Most come from the upper end of the middle class. Many have at least one parent, sometimes two, with a scientific background. They generally went to elite colleges (although not all of them graduated). Some were technical prodigies even in high school. Not for them the tedium of a newspaper route or a part-time job in a pizza joint or the mail room. The tech elites, wrote one observer, are typically “long on brilliance, but short on hardship.”1
Despite their sheltered origins, the tech oligarchs tend to regard themselves as more enlightened and progressive than their industrial-era predecessors. In the 1970s and 1980s, the image they projected was the latest incarnation of the American hippie, a kind of “high-tech bandit” having “more in common with artists than with the inhabitants of the corridors of corporate power.”2 The early tech executives—such as those running Hewlett-Packard and Intel—also tended to be paternalistic in their management practices and to consider themselves more forward-thinking than the corporate managers of an earlier time.3
The Meritocratic Ideology
The people running today’s IT firms do not see middle managers—much less assembly-line workers or skilled artisans—as peers. Their worldview is aligned with the upper echelon of the educated workforce. High numbers of science PhDs are found in their ranks, including CEOs, and a survey of forty-five tech executives found that the vast majority had degrees from elite universities in engineering, computer science, or business. Some of those with no degrees were dropouts from elite institutions.4 “Software is an IQ business,” said Bill Gates, himself a Harvard dropout. “Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future.”5
The tech oligarchs are creating something similar to what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system.”6 It is unlike the industrial era, when corporations depended on people with a wide range of skills: managers and marketers, engineers and technicians, warehouse workers and salespeople. These jobs were often unionized, at least in the manufacturing and energy sectors, so that upper management was compelled at least to consider diverse views on how the business should operate. In contrast, tech firms are rarely unionized, and none of the largest internet-based firms are.7
Crucially, the tech giants employ relatively few people in proportion to their revenues. IT firms like Google and Facebook generate up to three hundred times the market value per employee as the likes of GM, Home Depot, and Kroger.8 (Only the energy sector, whose wealth is based on natural resources, is higher.) In addition, IT companies and the specialized contractors that service them depend heavily on thousands of lower-paid foreign workers, some of whom are close to being indentured servants.9
What Do Today’s Oligarchs Want?
The tech oligarchs have not produced a coherent political manifesto laying out their vision for the future. Yet it’s clear that the IT elite—in firms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—share some ideas that add up to a common agenda.
In the developing technocratic worldview, there’s little place for upward mobility, except within the charmed circle at the top. The middle and working classes are expected to become marginal. While the oligarchs might speak of a commitment to building what Mark Zuckerberg calls “meaningful community,” they rarely mention upward mobility.10 Having interviewed 147 digital company founders, Gregory Ferenstein notes that they generally don’t expect their workers or consumers to achieve more independence by starting their own companies or even owning houses. Most, Ferenstein adds, believe that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.”11
Ferenstein says that many tech titans, in contrast to business leaders of the past, favor a radically expanded welfare state.12 Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and Sam Altman (founder of Y Combinator) all favor a guaranteed annual income, in part to allay fears of insurrection by a vulnerable and struggling workforce. Yet unlike the “Penthouse Bolsheviks” of the 1930s, they have no intention of allowing their own fortunes to be squeezed. Instead, the middle class would likely foot much of the bill for guaranteed wages, health care, free college, and housing assistance, along with subsidies for gig workers, who do not receive benefits from their employers.13
This model could best be described as oligarchical socialism. The redistribution of resources would meet the material needs of the working class and the declining middle class, but it would not promote upward mobility or threaten the dominance of the oligarchs. This represents a sea change from the old industrial economy. Rather than acquiring property and gaining a modicum of self-sufficiency, workers can now expect a serflike future of rented apartments and frozen prospects.14 Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will depend on subsidies to meet their basic needs.
Thomas