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 Piketty observed that the tech oligarchs, like some nineteenth-century industrialists, 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
