Sensational media revelations or political slogans such as “Break Them Up” may create headlines and engender fevered discussion, but they are not a substitute for radical regulatory intervention or legislative action. To date, however, we’ve seen little in the way of tangible, effective curbs on tech power. In Europe, the European Commission has filed competition and other charges against Amazon and Google, while a number of other tech companies have been suing Apple over its alleged anti-competitive behaviour in the management of its app store. In the US, for example, nearly 40 states have launched competition lawsuits against Google and the Department of Justice is pursuing one against Facebook. The years since 2016 have seen flurries of activity – antitrust lawsuits Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign congressional hearings a major investigation by the US House of Representatives leaks from inside the companies sensational media revelations (the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook’s role in facilitating genocide in Myanmar, YouTube’s role in radicalising mass shooters etc) probes by competition authorities in the UK, the EU and elsewhere.īy some counts, there are at least 70 such actions under way around the globe at the moment. In fact, blaming tech provides a convenient way of ignoring the deeper causes of the turbulence.ĭespite that, the focus of media and public attention has largely been on the power and role of tech companies in our societies. There’s no doubt that technology played a role in the upheavals of 2016, but anyone who attributes such seismic shifts just to the operations of tech companies hasn’t been paying attention to the recent history of either capitalism or democracy. Although both shocks were indicators of a deep malaise in liberal democracy, they were widely – but wrongly – attributed to social media. They included: the power to transform the public sphere by the algorithmic curation of our information feeds the ability to silence the most powerful politician in the western world by suddenly banning him from company platforms and the power effectively to render people invisible by delisting them from Google searches.ĭemocracy’s long slumber ended in 2016 when two political earthquakes shook the political world – the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US. But future historians will also note that some powers acquired by the tech giants of the early 21st century seemed genuinely novel. Some of the powers the companies wielded were relatively familiar, basically just contemporary manifestations of older kinds of industrial power: monopolistic domination of certain markets.
And while the activities of extractive capitalism came ultimately to threaten the planet, those of its surveillance counterpart have turned into a threat to our democracy.
Whereas the standard form appropriated and plundered the Earth’s natural resources, this new “ surveillance capitalism” appropriated human resources in the shape of comprehensive records of users’ behaviour, which were algorithmically translated into detailed profiles that could be sold to others. Two of these companies even invented a new variant of extractive capitalism. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.Īnd that was just for starters. They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. W hen historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.