Money, access, and power in the Big Tech aristocracy

I did not expect this book, The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley, to affect me in the way it did. I expected a boring rant about censorship. I chose to read it because last year I witnessed many voices on Facebook and Twitter being silenced, YouTube accounts suddenly demonetized or deleted, social networks deplatformed, escalating as time went on, and continuing today. I’ve always taken the First Amendment for granted, always assumed our rights, in the land of the free, home of the brave, were sacrosanct. Then books under contract lost publishers, and others were not getting forums for exposure. Even now I hear about a book that sounds interesting in an interview, and learn it was published months ago with little to no fanfare. As a lifelong reader, it was frightening to witness such severe shifts in a matter of months. 

Hawley’s unassuming book with its muted gray cover, is a staggering indictment of Big Tech, its rise to power, and incestuous relationship with politicians and those charged with its oversight. The information presented is unexpectedly mind blowing and horrifying, particularly the corporate machinations of the past decade, how American’s privacy was co-opted for lucrative returns, and how antitrust probes were nipped in the bud behind closed doors at the highest levels of our government. If you don’t want to spend money on a partisan politician’s book, I urge you to find it in a library or on their digital platform to borrow and read. If you’re pressed for time, the second half is the most critical. I borrowed my library’s digital audiobook. It is a clarion’s call in the fashion of Peter Schweizer’s Secret Empires, Harvey Silverglate’s Conviction Machine, and Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice by Sidney Powell. 

Hawley states, “The story of Big Tech begins in the Gilded Age with a class of corporate titans who paved the way for our own.” He starts with J. P. Morgan, advancing through subsequent giants of industry, and details the interface between corporate wealth and political influence from the late 19th century to the seemingly unregulated Big Tech corporations of today.

Particularly sobering is how the benign patina of Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook belies a vast insidious network of surveillance and data mining over the past 20 years, a highly profitable commodity that grew both Big Tech fortunes and global influence with unchecked power so vast, the likes of it heretofore unseen throughout all of human history. Users of exponentially growing Big Tech platforms were subjects of data mining without the kind of consent based upon any real understanding of the massive degree to which they were surveilled. Generated profits enabled Big Tech CEOs to amass great wealth: Facebook Mark Zuckerberg 37, net worth $122.3 billion; Alphabet and subsidiary Google Sundar Pichai 48, net worth $1.39 billion; Twitter Jack Dorsey 44, net worth $15 billion; YouTube Susan Wojcicki 52, net worth $580 million; and Amazon Jeff Bezos 57, net worth $187.6 billion. 

Stunning in its breadth and secrecy, Big Tech’s fortunes rest upon a vast mountain of user data files, continuously accumulating and perpetually stored for billions of users, anywhere on the planet, every time they participated on the various platforms. This data fed algorithms manipulating users into more time spent sharing online. Users are seduced to engage in accordance with their mined data, which included linking and suggesting photos/videos of young children posted online to those whose data may have indicated prurient interests in such subjects. The personal content was monetized through targeted ads, incessantly bombarding billions of users simultaneously at any given moment, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. 

The power of Big Tech as controllers of global search engines and the largest sources of digital information dissemination, gives these platforms the kind of command over information and influence in worldwide governments, corporations, and populations unrivaled in any stage of human evolution, reaching its pinnacle within the last two decades. Hawley argues, “In practice the Big Tech age of globalism has weakened democracy rather than strengthened it, by eroding the standing of those Americans once thought central to the republic, working and middle class Americans. It exported many of their jobs, limited their future prospects, and left their towns and neighborhoods to wither, and all the while it entrenched the power of Big Tech.” In terms of demographics, the disenfranchised lower and middle income level adults represent 82% of Americans, while the remaining 18% are upper income adults (using 2019 data compiled in 2021/Statista.com).

The two agencies responsible for oversight of Big Tech are the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Hawley states, “While the FTC is nominally an independent agency, it is not, it turns out, independent of Big Tech. A recent study by a watchdog group found that two thirds of top FTC officials either were affiliated with Big Tech before they arrived, or became lawyers or lobbyists for top tech companies after they left the agency, including six FTC chairs and nine directors of the FTC Bureau of Competition.” 

In 2011 the FTC initiated an antitrust probe against Google after concerns were raised about whether Google altered its search results to disfavor rivals. Google made a beeline to the White House. Hawley states, “Google was the second largest source of donations for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. White House logs revealed Google executives were frequent visitors to the President’s mansion. Google was on the inside of the inside.” Politico recently released an in depth investigation, “The Google Files,” based upon hundreds of pages of internal memos during the settlement negotiations. Hawley notes, “Big Tech had a line all the way to the top, to the very apex of American government and now they used it.” He describes the negotiations, and names the players who hammered out Google’s golden ticket deal in late 2012, ending the antitrust litigation. Hawley cautions, “In a word, government of, by, and for the elite. This was the power of access. Tech bought it, built it, marshaled it, and deployed it at every level of government, in every corridor of power in Washington DC...Like the robber barons before them, the Tech Class was willing to take no chances with its suzerainty.”

Hawley notes, “The tech giants sink tens of millions into professional lobbyists with Google’s parent company Alphabet spending nearly $22 million on lobbying in just one calendar year, 2018, and $90 million since 2015. Not to be left behind Facebook has shelled out about $75 million in the same timeframe. Amazon nearly $79 million, and Apple $36 million.” Ironically, these numbers pale ($280 million over 6 years) in comparison with the $350 million Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan devoted to their private funding and staffing for polling sites of America’s November 2020 election.

Hawley states, “Big Tech works relentlessly to force individuals into its ecosystem of addiction, exhibitionism, and fear of missing out. It seeks to create its own social universe, and draw all of life into its orbit. But the real social world, the life of family and neighborhood, the communities that sustain authentic togetherness, can act as a counterweight to Big Tech’s ambitions, they can act as what they always have been, havens for individuals, and training grounds for citizens.”

Whether or not the Big Tech black hole consumes America as we know it in its entirety, depends in large part upon calling out monopolistic patterns and remedying them in a court of law. The battle will be vicious, but failing this, a dark winter descends as our future global community will serve only at the behest of Big Tech’s aristocratic ruling elite.