The tech oligarchy has been here for years

What really drove the rise of Biden's 'tech industrial complex', and how to stop it

Greetings all — we’re back home after ditching the fires for a bit, dealing with some air quality weirdness but otherwise very fortunate to be entirely unscathed. I did a little volunteering at a donation center earlier this week, and it was great to see so many folks pitching in to try to ease the immense tragedy here, even if, I kid you not, a delivery robot wandered in front of the driveway and gummed up the works for a while. Thanks again for all your words of support, to readers, and especially those who financially support this newsletter — you make this work possible. If you’re a regular reader, and can spare a cup of coffee a month, I promise I’ll dismantle a bit of machinery (literal or figurative) just for you. Cheers, and onwards!

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In Biden’s long, weary, and largely perfunctory farewell speech, one section has stood out:

I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people… Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead…

President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

In the context of American political norms, it was a fairly remarkable term for a president to use—enough of a surprise that the Associated Press ran an entire article explaining to readers what the term meant. And it’s not exactly a mystery why Biden felt moved to deploy it. As a professor of political science the BBC interviewed about the speech put it, “I think certainly Biden was talking about Elon Musk specifically.”

Musk has, of course, become a force, pursuing an explicit political project, plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, noisily forming the sub-government agency DOGE, and now using his perch on X, the social media platform he owns, to tank legislation and otherwise influence public policy. And he’s not alone, of course, among tech titans more openly wielding political power, and nakedly paying fealty to Trump—Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and more have all swung by Mar-a-Lago and donated $1 million to his inauguration fund, and Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong killed op-eds critical of Trump at the newspapers they own.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Flickr. CC BY 2.0.

But there are two things worth noting here though, I think:

1. Democrats, even Biden himself, have in some key ways helped expedite the formation of the very oligarchy they are now decrying, and

2. We must understand that the tech oligarchy is already here. It has been for years. It’s only now more openly and aggressively expressing itself as such.

The first point is crucial to understand if we are to, as Biden exhorted us, “stand guard” against such forces. Because that requires Democrats, progressives, the labor movement, and left-liberal orgs across the board taking a much harder tack against them. As it stands, Democrats, with a few exceptions, have generally declined to meaningfully contest the tech giants’ rise to power—and in many cases, they’ve helped hit the gas.

Elon Musk and his companies have been showered with subsidies, tax breaks, and incentives since at least the first Obama term, when Tesla received $465 million in DOE loans as part of the 2009 stimulus package. (In an argument redolent of the ones made by OpenAI and others today, Musk appealed to Obama by claiming that Tesla simply needed more capital than the enormous amount already sunk into the company to be successful, and would go under without it.) Obama declined to have his FTC investigate whether Google was violating antitrust laws, and was a strong supporter of Airbnb and gig work companies like Uber. Speaking of Uber, city government after city government, many Democrat-led, rolled over when the gig app giant broke local taxi laws in a bid to shore up market share, impoverishing taxi and livery cab drivers in the process.

The Democratic schmoozing of big tech is still going strong today: When Chuck Schumer convened a closed door Senate hearing on AI policy in 2023, he invited Silicon Valley CEOs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to take the lead. Biden’s Treasury bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after it collapsed in the wake of deeply irresponsible risk management practices and VCs demanded cash to save it. Last year, star Democrat Gavin Newsom sided with Google over working journalists and threatened a veto that doomed a bill that would have required tech giants to pay newspapers a small share of the ad revenue for hosting news on their platforms. The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued on CNN that Democrats have simply been *too hard* on Elon Musk, not showering him with enough praise and thus driving him into Republicans’ arms. He has also offered to work with Musk’s DOGE to eliminate federal jobs.

The list goes on and on and on; for most of the 21st century, Democrats have helped ready the launchpad for the tech oligarchy’s ascendancy.

In fact, most recently, perhaps while he was between sessions practicing his speech bemoaning the rise of this tech industrial complex, on January 14th, Biden signed an executive order turning over federal lands for new data centers to be used by tech companies who want more compute for their AI systems. “The order calls for leasing federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments to host gigawatt-scale AI data centers and new clean power facilities,” Reuters reported, “to address enormous power needs on a short time frame.” Sam Altman had called on the White House to do nearly exactly this last September. If history is any guide, a decade or so from now, Altman will be first buddy to JD Vance, running a meme office bent on dismantling the federal government of his very own.

Which brings us to #2. The tech oligarchy has been here for longer than Biden is letting on. There are of course numerous ways that titans like Bezos and Musk, who are also the richest men in the world, have long wielded their power in the overt manner of oligarchs past—demanding favorable conditions for their businesses, dodging taxes, evading regulations, pushing to render laws that protect workers unconstitutional, and so on. (Remember when Bezos held a ‘contest’ to see where he would establish Amazon’s HQ2, seeing which city would offer him the sweetest deal in terms of investment and tax breaks?)

But the tech oligarchy is best understood on its own novel terms. The technological infrastructure the public relies upon for modern life, crucial platforms for communicating, finding information, and building community; our shared digital commons; has already been operated by what is essentially an oligarchy for the last decade or so. Google commands 90% of the search market. Seven in ten of all Americans use Facebook. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control two-thirds of the internet’s cloud architecture—if any of it goes down, so does the web. Amazon owns 40% of the American e-commerce market. And these companies wield nearly absolute power over their domains, with little interference from lawmakers or the public.

The handful of CEOs who run those companies occasionally are hauled before Congress to testify about what goes on on their platforms, but, through a mix of lobbying, campaign donations, PR, and self-mythologizing, have maintained what can be understood as authoritarian control over our digital life. At the Times, I wrote a column about how Facebook, with its unique corporate governance structure that makes it impossible for the board to fire Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter/X, run privately by Musk with an iron first, are essentially run like dictatorships. There is no democracy here: If Elon Musk wants to allow white nationalists and sexual harassers back into the public sphere on X, no one can stop him, regardless of what users want. If Mark Zuckerberg decides that it is okay to harass LGBTQ people on his platforms, where 3 billion users reside, he can snap his finger and force the change, regardless of what users want. If Google wants to shovel bad AI-generated information about toxic mushrooms being safe to eat in front of its search results, it can do that, regardless of what users want.

What’s happening now, in one sense, is that the tech titans who have secured such large swaths of power over the digital world, are increasingly comfortable wielding that power, openly, in the ‘real’ world too; the tech oligarchs are becoming the American oligarchs, period, often using leverage from their digital platforms in tandem with their war chests of old fashioned cash. Musk again most bluntly leads the way; he can both dump $270 million into Trump’s campaign at the bat of an eye, *and* turn to the social media platform he owns (and has algorithmically rigged to ensure his posts always get maximum visibility) to criticize a spending bill he doesn’t like, target vulnerable political opponents, and get a new one passed in its stead.

And yes, we are as a result crossing some new rubicons here: Elon Musk will apparently have an office adjacent to the White House. The Trump-supporting venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is evidently involved in the hiring process for new administration officials. Mar-a-Lago is like the new Sand Hill Road, with tech CEOs making their pitches to the Trump administration instead of VCs.

There is a public face on all this now, it has become undeniable. But it’s not like the tech oligarchy is sprouting just now—its root system has been developing, hardening, growing robust for many long years. And sure, to carry on the botanical metaphor I have stumbled into, now it is in full bloom. But Democrats cannot begin to cut out the rot Biden is warning against without understanding how we got here, without changing some of their key assumptions and practices.

It’s pretty simple really. Failing to intervene when the tech giants tipped into monopolies, kowtowing to VCs and execs who demand federal support for their enterprises, and granting tech companies the leeway to squeeze workers at will has accelerated inequality and lead to oligarchic formation. We should not be handing over massive tax breaks, favorable loans, preferential treatment, expedited and discounted land use rates, and so on to unaccountable tech companies if we want to limit the power of ultra-wealthy corporations and executives. Notably, one of the very good things the Biden admin did was have its FTC, SEC, and DoJ become more aggressive in going after scammy crypto companies and the tech giants; but it was, alas, largely too little late. Yet it’s the right approach, especially now that there are public faces of this extreme overreach of power. And it must go further.

And look, it’s not hard to see how we got here. Silicon Valley has built some of the most undeniably transformative (for better and worse) consumer technologies in the world. It’s an immense economic engine. The temptation to associate oneself with the future-generation industry, and to benefit from its spoils, is significant. But if anyone is interested in curtailing the tech-industrial complex led by new wave oligarchs, they absolutely have to look beyond the mythology, beyond the manufactured hype, and see these companies, these titans, for what they really are. (And I promise you, you can have innovation—even more of it!—without propping up the giants.)

Because on that, Biden is right! These are old school robber barons dressed up in new school clothes, using their massive platforms and incredible wealth to further consolidate and protect their own interests, at any cost. They have access to new tools—I shudder to think about the ways that X will be used to promulgate propaganda to support the mass deportation programs, which Musk enthusiastically supports—and have assembled in a new formation.

But Biden is also right that we have curbed these excesses before; we know the formula. Antitrust, worker power, solidarity, higher taxes, to start. It’s likely going to be even harder this go round, seeing as how the new American oligarchs have access to the largest platforms in the world, as well as technologies capable of undermining the very perception of truth, not to mention world-historic hoards of wealth. But it can be done. With Trump taking power next week, Democrats need to decide they actually want to stop the tech oligarchy in practice, not just in rhetoric. We’ve all got to start dismantling the launchpad that enabled its rise.