A happy day for Big Tech
The results are in, and the winners are not primarily the various Republican candidates – president, senators, and others – who won their respective tickets. Whatever the majority of voters hoped to gain from this, it’s actually Big Tech that won the election.
I’ll grant that we’re in for some major policy transformations, like new tax plans and budget cuts and realignments in foreign policy, and a lot more. All of these will be seismic changes. But look beyond this purely political dimension and we can see a more fundamental shift. We’ve crossed a line that confirms and cements the unassailable power of Big Tech.
Examples? Where should I start:
Lina Khan won’t be FTC chair much longer. The very real progress her team made in antitrust will be halted. Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft were under investigation for self-dealing, killing competition, stifling innovation, and abusing customers and their data. Big Tech leaders can breathe easier today. The guardrails are coming off.
The billionaires are already showing where their loyalty lies. Jeff Bezos, days after unilaterally squashing a Harris endorsement by the Washington Post, has posted a congratulations to the incoming president. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has done the same.
Billionaire Peter Thiel can celebrate his investment in JD Vance, who had won his Senate seat with Thiel’s help before becoming the VP pick. Now Thiel’s mentee will be, as the saying goes, a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Elon Musk might be the biggest winner of all, having so publicly aligned himself with the campaign before the win. His companies – Tesla, SpaceX/Starlink, X/Twitter, and now xAI – will face less scrutiny, and fewer obstacles, in their pursuit of growth and government contracts.
Meantime, it recently came to light that Elon Musk is aligned with Vladimir Putin – see the WSJ article (gift link, Oct 25, 2024) detailing calls between Musk and Putin over the past two years. This is unfortunate, given Musk’s intimate access to our defense operations. The Pentagon and NASA are both dependent on Musk’s SpaceX for rocket launches.
But Musk can laugh off the Putin connection. The incoming president can, if he chooses, put a stop to any investigation of Musk – or, if necessary, issue a pardon.
The guardrails are coming off. Consider the Big Tech companies that are already growing at astonishing rates: Google’s cloud business just reported a 35% increase in revenue year over year, Amazon’s AWS saw a 19% increase, and Facebook/Meta’s profit is up 35%. What happens when these companies operate with even less regulation?
Mark Zuckerberg gave a clue in a recent investor call: Facebook will soon be promoting even more AI slop.
A third of American adults get their news – their news! – from Facebook, every day. Read the Pew report. For years now, the Facebook algorithm has amplified whatever content gets the most engagement – a design that, of course, has helped create the polarized, lunatic politics we see today. And now Zuck wants to add more AI slop to the mix.
Don’t look to responsible print journalism to fill the gap; the entire industry is hollowed out, thanks in large part to Facebook’s sludge-amplification algorithm. Citizens have fewer and fewer choices to learn the truth about what's happening, while Facebook keeps getting richer and richer.
The internet is going to change. Big Tech, the multi-trillion-dollar surveillance-capitalist cartel, will concentrate its power to new levels.
I know the internet feels corporate already, but this election signals that we’ve crossed a line. The internet is going to become a fully surveilled space, entirely captured by Big Tech. Everything you say, type, click, swipe, tap, like, rate, or otherwise do on or in range of any networked camera, microphone, touch screen, keyboard, sensor, or other device – all of it you should assume is going to be sent to one or more Big Tech companies, and their government partners, and any third party with a dollar and enough interest in you, or people like you – all to be stored, analyzed, rendered, and turned back on you in the form of manipulating nudges – indefinitely.
Now consider how valuable Big Tech’s surveillance infrastructure will become to any authoritarian leaders, either in the US or elsewhere, who have the money or power to gain access to your data.
Outside the US, spare a thought for the citizens of Ukraine, who have been fighting off the Russian invasion for over two years, trying to prevent a full-scale dismantling of their democracy, their identity, their history. The incoming American president has stated his desire to stop assisting the Ukrainians and cut a deal with Putin. This, too, will open the door toward more power for those invested in surveillance and authoritarianism. (See my recent column on Ukraine.)
Big Tech, as the engine powering surveillance capitalism and the center of American economic power, is devouring every industry. Listen to my dystopia update on Techtonic this week, covering how the automotive, retail, and healthcare sectors are following Big Tech’s lead in installing surveillance tech to exploit citizens and customers.
This isn’t just an economic story. Political power, cultural power, and military power are naturally accompanying Big Tech’s rise. Yesterday’s election is just going to make Silicon Valley stronger in all respects. The guardrails are coming off, and we’re headed into some strange and disturbing times.
What to do in response? I’m going to continue to run the Creative Good community, one place online that’s not captured by Big Tech or the billionaires. It’s funded by members, and our gathering point – the Creative Good Forum – is behind a login wall, beyond the reach of the AI slop that will increasingly overwhelm the Big Tech feeds. If you’d like to support what I’m doing, and be a part of our community, join Creative Good.
I do hope you’ll join me at Creative Good. Whatever happens next, we’ll do better by sticking together.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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