and environmental issues, for example, but with reservations about the concentration of power.30 Financial dependency is likely to encourage more support for the interests of the tech industry.
News is only one area of the culture being seized by the tech oligarchy. Amazon has achieved enormous influence over the book industry; it is by far the largest seller of books, accounting for upwards of 50 percent of all paper sales and 90 percent of ebook sales, and it possesses the ability to allow knockoffs of published titles.31 Even well-established publishers like Hachette and Macmillan have found themselves held hostage if they don’t adhere to Amazon’s requests.32
The entertainment industry is also being swallowed up by the tech giants. YouTube, acquired by Google in 2006, has become determinative in the music industry, although artists often do not get the compensation they traditionally received. Music streaming and music videos have become yet another way that firms like Google gain access to ever more personal data, which they can sell to advertisers.33 Much the same is occurring in video broadly. Netflix, a company financed by Silicon Valley venture firms, is now estimated to be worth more than any of the film studios, and along with Amazon it produces much of the award-winning television programming. In 2018, Netflix spent more on programming than any of the major studios. Netflix and Amazon each have well over 100 million subscribers, far beyond the clientele achieved by the established cable firms.34
Not satisfied with controlling information pipelines, the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38
With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.
The Right of Surveillance
The medieval church may have exercised enormous sway over what people believed to be true and proper, but it had nothing like today’s tools for monitoring private actions and thoughts. The new technology that allows such erasure of privacy has become central to generating tech wealth: personal data is the raw material of the digital age. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, sees the exploitation of personal data as the “electricity of the 21st century.”40
Alibaba and other “super platforms” like Facebook, Google, and WeChat operate largely as gatekeepers for those who wish to navigate the digital economy, which means they control access to a considerable part of the overall economy.41 This position gives them enormous power to collect personal information on users. When Google and Facebook and other gatekeepers do this collecting, “our behaviour is transformed into a product,” writes one observer.42 This data now accounts for up to 20 percent of Europe’s GDP, and as it becomes more important, we become like serfs living under what the French analyst Gaspard Koenig describes as “digital feudalism.”43 Our daily lives no longer belong to us alone but are relentlessly commodified. This is, of course, the natural goal of all the major tech firms, and as Jaron Lanier suggests, it all serves to “percolate creepiness and inspire justified paranoias.”44
Surveillance might go on with little warning to customers. Facebook already admits to having patented technology that would enable snooping on their users by remotely turning on a smartphone’s microphone to start recording, although they deny using it.45 In 2018, Amazon’s in-home device Alexa was found to be eavesdropping on people’s conversations.46 Once exposed, such intrusions are often ended, at least temporarily, but there is reason to believe that privacy ranks low in tech company priorities.47 Google’s former executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, once told CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”48
The prospect of life under surveillance by technocratic oligarchs is a terrifying one. “If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this,” writes Ellie Mae O’Hagan in the Guardian, “there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.”49 Irrespective of personal politics, we must begin to recognize the threats to our freedom posed by today’s “benign plutocracy.”
CHAPTER 6
Feudalism in California, Harbinger of the Future
Perhaps the best way to picture the future contours of hightech feudalism is to examine the present conditions in its fountainhead, California. Many progressives see Golden the State, and especially Silicon Valley, as the harbinger of a better, greener, more egalitarian future.1 Yet the reality could not be more diff erent. Rather than a model of upward mobility, California is a place now dominated by a small class of exceedingly wealthy and well-connected people, resembling the nobility of the Middle Ages or the elites of the Gilded Age.
California has changed dramatically from the opportunity-rich environment that lured so many millions to the state. From the beginning, California promised much, wrote Kevin Starr, the premier chronicler of the state’s history: “While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”2 Since its entrance to the Union in the mid-nineteenth century, the Golden State was known as a place where ambitious outsiders from diverse backgrounds could prosper and realize their dreams. But today more Californians feel the state is headed in the wrong direction than the right, according to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, and the proportion reaches above 55 percent in the inland areas.3 Voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike President Trump.4 Consumer confidence hit a three-year low in 2019, even as some other states, such as Texas and Michigan, saw small upswings.5 There is also anger over the growing problem of homelessness.6
Number One in Wealth, and in Poverty
Social stratification rather than upward mobility now characterizes the social order of California. The state has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios—which measures the inequality of wealth distribution between the richest and poorest residents—and the disparity is growing faster than in almost any other state outside the Northeast, according to James Galbraith, a liberal economist.7 The gap between middle and upper wages has become the widest in the nation, and while midrange wages are around the same as those in the rest of the nation, they buy less because of much higher taxes as well as energy and housing costs.8 California’s level of inequality is greater than that of Mexico, and closer to that of Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than to what is common in developed counties like Canada and Norway.9
With adjustment for cost of living, California now has the highest overall poverty rate in the United States, according to the Census
