“Crime, Travel, Communication, Entertainment
Computer World”
Big tech is fast becoming a buzzword.
The power behind the throne of King Donald.
Their prospects of AI dominate the world of business, and it’s thirst for capital is fast exceeding what global capital markets can fulfil.
Of the top-10 members of Forbes “rich list”, 7 are in tech.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
One of them, Mark Zuckerbeg, ranks 5th, with £222bn.
Last week, his company, Meta, agree to pay $18bn to settle a landmark lawsuit.
On the surface, this looks a great outcome for campaigners. But, when news that Meta had settled with the 29 US states its stock rose, initially by 5%, before levelling out at a gain of C.1.25%.
Unsurprisingly, Meta was the real winner…
$18bn is less than a month’s revenue, and payments are spread over 10-years. Nearly a third of that sum is contingent on Meta’s rivals, YouTube and TikTok, agreeing to the same restrictions.
The financial penalty is less than a tenth of the $200bn the states were seeking, and a tiny fraction of the $1.4tn settlement the company told the court it feared.
Whilst the evidence, including that of former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, showed that children suffered bad or harmful experiences on Instagram, under the settlement, Meta has made no admission of liability.
‘children suffered bad or harmful experiences on Instagram’
The new restrictions on usage are viewed as being easy to navigate around them. If users do so, under the settlement, Meta will not be accountable. Furthermore, Meta can define what constitutes harm.
Their fundamental business model: tracking and surveilling individuals online, and using this data to construct a profile which is sold to advertisers allowing them to target potential consumers with extraordinary precision, remains untouched
To date, big tech has had an easy ride with regulators, avoiding being viewed as publishers, and therefore liable for what appears on their platforms.
Meta is now a monopoly whose users feel tied to because all their friends and contacts are on the same few platforms.
The Trump regime is their dream, whilst that remains, they are untouchable.
‘The Trump regime is their dream, whilst that remains, they are untouchable’
However, a more enlightened administration, might look back to the 1900s when the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, the “trustbuster”, filed 44 antitrust lawsuits to break up major monopolistic corporations that stifled competition. These included Northern Securities Company, a massive railroad monopoly created by J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill.
The power of big tech is nothing new; looking back shows that some involved with its development, understood and feared the impact of computerisation and the digital world.
In 1969, JCR Licklider, the man most appropriately credited with inventing the internet, predicted that by the year 2000 “an international network of digital computer communication networks” – he called it the multinet – would serve “as the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations and individuals”, replacing everything from the telephone and the postal system to shops and banks.
‘some involved with its development, understood and feared the impact of computerisation and the digital world’
Despite this, he feared what the multinet would mean for politics: “interactive politics would function well only to the extent that the citizens were informed” and warned of the possibility of “new vistas for dirty tricks”, including “clandestine artificial intelligence programs, searching through the databases, altering files, fabricating records and erasing their own audit trails”.
The rise of the internet has allowed everyone to have a voice, with Ithiel de Sola Pool, the co-founder of Simulmatics Corporation, predicting that developments such as personalised newspapers would lead to an era of hyperindividualism. “A reader starts by asking for a digest of the news. “He can ask for details on any story that interests him.”
The potential this offered was initially exploited by the American neo-Nazi George Dietz, who was quickly followed by the launch, in 1984, of more bulletin boards, including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, Aryan Nations/Ku Klux Klan Computer Net and White Aryan Resistance. These groups also used discussion groups on America Online and CompuServe.
As the internet became the world wide web in the 1990s, these platforms were replaced by websites and, a decade later, by social media platforms.
One of the key influencers of the denizens of Silicon Valley was the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand and their companies, whose book, “Atlas Shrugged”, was viewed by Steve Jobs as his “guide in life”.
The theme Atlas Shrugged was described by Rand, “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest“. The plot involves a dystopian US in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike and retreating to a hidden valley where they build an independent free economy.
As a result of Rand’s influence, some leading Silicon Valley investors and inventors stopped believing in both democracy and the liberal nation-state, subscribing instead to a hybrid Brandian/Randian vision of a world requiring no controls but a keyboard, a mouse and a stock exchange.
In the 1980s. the political theorist Langdon Winner wrote: “current developments in the information age suggest an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power, an enhanced centralisation of control by those already prepared for control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy.”
Whilst much of this might sound farfetched it is playing out in front of us.
We have an extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number of people; “the 300 billionaires who made 19% of all reported federal political donations in the 2024 election.
“power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In 1887, the British historian Lord Acton wrote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Today, it can be said that absolute wealth corrupts absolutely.
“Sweetly reminiscent, something mother used to bake
Wrecked up and paralyzed, Diamond Dogs are stabilised”
A very different piece today.
As much as I benefit from the internet and AI, like everything it should be consigned to a time and a place, rather than being the be all and end all.
I read an interview with the Italian footballer Mario Bolotelli recently, in which he bemoaned the lack of youngsters out kicking a ball around, preferring to sit playing video games.
Big tech and neoliberalism has led to a concentration of wealth not seen for many, many years.
This wealth has bought, and continues to buy influence.
What this article attempts to say is that people saw all this coming.
What we are yet to see is anyone prepared to do anything about it.
Lyrically, we open with “Computer World” by Kraftwerk and with “Diamond Dogs” which was the 1970s dystopian view expressed by David Bowie.
Enjoy!
Philip.
@coldwarsteve
Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.
Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s
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