some familiar ones may go out of existence or be acquired by others. But the top firms tend to exist as properties of a small number of financiers and technologists who operate within a narrow, self-referential universe.22
This concentration of technological power portends a far less democratic future.23 With their huge cash reserves, the tech oligarchs have plans to dominate older industries like entertainment, finance, education, and retail, as well as industries of the future: autonomous cars, drones, space exploration, and most critically artificial intelligence. Firms like Google, Amazon, and Apple have invested billions to gain post position in both traditional and emerging industries.24
Izabella Kaminska, a technology analyst, compares the giant tech firms to the Soviet planners who operated Gosplan, the economic planning agency that allocated state resources across the USSR.25 Some may consider it preferable to cede such power to private capital rather than party hacks, but it still amounts to a great deal of power in a few hands, with little accountability.26
The China Syndrome
China, with its lack of legal restraints, may prove to be the cutting edge of a new technocratic despotism. Its tech sector is second only to that of the United States and increasingly sees itself as Silicon Valley’s successor. In certain sectors, including ecommerce and mobile payments, China has already established a powerful lead.27 Much of China’s technology boom results from massive investments by both state-sponsored and private firms in leading-edge technologies. In 2016 this investment was greater than that of Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined, and it produced ten times as many new graduates in engineering, technology, science, and medicine as the United States.28
China has spawned its own plutocratic elite, too: the number of Chinese billionaires in 2017 was just behind the number of billionaires in the United States, and growing much faster.29 Since 2000, many billionaires from tech and other sectors have entered the Communist Party in a seamless manner that Mao Tse-tung would never have countenanced.30 China thus has two intertwined elites—one political, the other economic. The rise of a technocratic elite might be said to fit neatly into the Marxist notion of “scientific socialism,” mobilizing scientists, technicians, and engineers for the common good.31 But it has demolished the basic egalitarian ethos of socialism. Marx envisioned the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie, but did not anticipate that technically skilled people could become yet another class, with their own capabilities and worldview. The merger of a wealthy tech elite with the political ruling class has created an aristocracy of intellect that replicates the historical role of the Mandarin class in Chinese culture and governance.32
Perhaps the most disturbing part of China’s technological growth is in the government’s use of artificial intelligence to regulate society and public opinion. Sophisticated algorithms are employed to control everything from legal proceedings to permission for marriage.33 The Communist Party is putting artificial intelligence to work monitoring businesses, in part to make sure their activities are congruent with Party priorities.34 The regime also uses facial recognition technology and “social credit” scoring, which includes everything from credit worthiness and work performance to political reliability. Surveillance of citizens is sometimes done with the unconscionable connivance of major American tech firms, some of which are also experimenting with bringing similar tools to the private marketplace.35
In the future, the Chinese use of surveillance technology could be a model 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
