[[link removed]]

HOW THE TECH WORLD TURNED EVIL  
[[link removed]]


 

Timothy Noah
April 23, 2026
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
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*
*
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_ Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power
to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner
destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and
they have to be stopped. _

Illustration by Deena So’Oteh / The New Republic,

 

I. That Antichrist Nonsense, Explained
Twenty-second-century historians tracing the ascent of American
technocracy from quirky garage tinkerers grooving on the _Whole Earth_
_Catalog_ [[link removed]] to
sinister oligarchs enacting Philip K. Dick prophesies may locate its
apogee in four lectures
[[link removed]] that
Peter Thiel (net worth: $29 billion
[[link removed]]), chairman
[[link removed]] of the
data-mining giant Palantir and a co-founder of PayPal, delivered at
San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in September and October 2025. The
subject was the Antichrist.

“In the seventeenth, eighteenth century,” Thiel explained
[[link removed]],
“the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who
did all this sort of evil crazy science.” As Thiel spoke, dozens of
protesters
[[link removed]]—some
in devil costumes—marched outside bearing signs that said things
like The End Is Near/ Palantir Is The Path/ Thiel Leads The Way. “In
the twenty-first century,” Thiel continued, “the Antichrist is a
Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or
Eliezer.” Greta is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change
activist. Eliezer is Eliezer Yudkowsky [[link removed]], a
Berkeley-based critic
[[link removed]]
of artificial intelligence, or AI.

 

Class warfare doesn’t get more unhinged than this. Say what you will
about the American plutocracy
[[link removed]],
it seldom frames its economic self-interest as a religious imperative.
But even in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward
grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement
in human consciousness. Now a prince of the technocratic elite was
framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against
agents of Satan, with Thunberg and Yudkowsky cast as Gog and Magog.
Suggest Thiel’s dominion could stand a bit more government oversight
and he just might toss you into a lake of fire
[[link removed]].

Thiel’s speeches prompted an appropriately
[[link removed]]
horrified
[[link removed]]
public response. But his was merely the most literal expression of a
millenarian sentiment about the coming of AI that’s now conventional
wisdom among tech barons. Thiel’s tactical error in applying the
Book of Revelation
[[link removed]]
to the digital future was to keep his message explicitly biblical. But
other tech leaders have been secularizing the same narrative.
“Technology is the godhead” is how the Columbia law professor and
tech critic Tim Wu described this view to me, and Artificial General
Intelligence, or AGI—AI that surpasses human intelligence in all
dimensions—“is the Second Coming.”

The story goes like this. A war is coming between good (AI) and evil
(government regulation). If AI wins, a New Jerusalem will dawn where
human intelligence is eclipsed by intellectually superior computers
that represent, figuratively if not literally, Jesus Christ’s
return. Techies call this the Singularity
[[link removed]]. Silicon Valley executives
can prepare for that great gettin’ up day by paying $15,900
[[link removed]] to attend a
five-day seminar
[[link removed]] at an
establishment in Santa Clara County, California
[[link removed]], called—I kid you not—Singularity
University.

 

How glorious will be that dawn to come! “The first ultra-intelligent
machine,” the British mathematician Irving John Good wrote in a 1965
essay [[link removed]]
that’s often credited with introducing the singularity concept,
“is the last invention that man need ever make.” It follows that
any who would impede AGI’s arrival, or attempt to control its
development in any way, must be in league with the seven-headed Beast.
Not a literal beast, mind you, but rather the notional one of
government interference or (in more extreme versions of this tale)
democracy itself. Either way, the meddlers must be stopped at any
cost.

That’s more or less the story told by the Silicon Valley venture
capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen (net worth: $1.9
billion [[link removed]]) in the
“Techno-Optimist Manifesto
[[link removed]]” that he posted
online in October 2023. “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our
alchemy [[link removed]], our
Philosopher’s Stone
[[link removed]],” Andreessen
wrote, invoking a process to turn lead into gold and thence into an
elixir of eternal life that, let me remind you, never existed outside
mythology. Also: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives.
Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from
existing _is a form of murder_” (italics mine). Andreessen declared
war on such commonsense concepts as “sustainability,” “social
responsibility,” “risk management,” and “tech ethics,”
because they were part of “a mass demoralization campaign …
against technology and against life.”

Andreessen may sound like a crackpot parading Sand Hill Road in a
sandwich board, but in the tech world he’s hugely consequential. His
venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is Silicon Valley’s
richest, with $90 billion
[[link removed]]
in assets. Previously a vocal fundraiser
[[link removed]]
for Democratic candidates, in 2024 Andreessen spent $5.5 million
[[link removed]]
to elect Donald Trump and helped Elon Musk recruit
[[link removed]]
staff for his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Bloomberg’s Emily Birnbaum and Oma Seddiq reported
[[link removed]]
in February that Andreessen Horowitz is “the first outside call that
top White House officials and senior Republican congressional aides
make when considering moves that could affect tech companies’ AI
plans.”

 

The talk may be of God, but what’s really at stake—as usual— is
Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference
reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite
literally unprecedented within the private sector.
The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at
stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to
government interference reflects a collective financial investment in
AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector.
In February, _The Wall Street Journal_ reported
[[link removed]]
that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta
(Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1
percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. That’s slightly more
than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s
(2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to
build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on
the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the _Journal_
could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the
Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the
United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million
[[link removed]], not today’s $31 trillion
[[link removed]]. And unlike these earlier
infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI
draws entirely on private-sector funds.

The stakes have pushed Silicon Valley into the arms of the GOP. As
recently as 2020, the tech industry favored
[[link removed]]
Joe Biden overwhelmingly against Trump, with 98 percent
[[link removed].]
of its donations going to Democrats. The biggest tech contributor
[[link removed]]
that year was Netflix chair Reed Hastings, who gave more than $5
million
[[link removed]]
to Democrats. But by late 2025, the nonprofit Public Citizen found
[[link removed]],
nearly three-quarters of tech political spending went to Republicans,
with Musk the biggest tech contributor; he gave $351 million
[[link removed]]
to elect Republicans. Granted, Musk’s impact was outsize; nearly
half of tech’s political spending came from Musk alone. But after
Trump won in 2024, other tech chiefs fell in line, scrambling to
attend Trump’s second inauguration, with four of them (Musk,
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar
Pichai) seated
[[link removed]]
in front of Trump’s Cabinet members, a spot previously reserved for
former presidents and the incoming president’s family
[[link removed]].
This digital Rushmore contributed a combined $26 million to Trump’s
inauguration and planned “Golden Ballroom.” Overall, the tech
industry kicked in $48.6 million
[[link removed]].
To you and me, that’s a lot of money. To tech companies, it’s
pocket change.

 
 
Beneath the towering images of the past— Surrender of General
Burgoyne (left) and a marble sculpture of Ulysses S. Grant—at the
United States Capitol, American power players of the current era
gathered at Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025.
Among them, from left: Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio, Priscilla Chan and
husband Mark Zuckerberg, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Sánchez, Kash
Patel, Jeff Bezos, Howard Lutnick, Pete Hegseth, Sundar Pichai, and
Elon Musk.  (Shawn Thew/White House Pool photo // The New Republic)
 

Until recently, tech showed limited enthusiasm for Washington’s
lobby scene. A decade ago, it ranked fourth among lobbying industries,
spending less than half
[[link removed]]
as much as Big Pharma, which ranked first, according to the campaign
website OpenSecrets. But by late 2025, the last year for which data is
available, tech had moved up to the number two spot, spending nearly
three-quarters as much on lobbying as Big Pharma (which still ranks
first
[[link removed]]).
The reason was AI. “AI didn’t just increase its footprint in
Washington,” noted
[[link removed]] Ashley Gold
in Axios. “It ate tech lobbying whole,” and it added to tech’s
existing lobbying on corporate consolidation, privacy, and free speech
new topics like crypto
[[link removed]],
defense procurement
[[link removed]],
and the insatiable energy needs of data centers. 

 

Even Silicon Valley’s own congressman, Democratic Representative Ro
Khanna, frets about tech’s reach. “We need regulations that
prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater
profits,” Khanna tweeted
[[link removed]] in November.
“There should be a tax on mass displacement.” After Khanna
endorsed
[[link removed]]
California’s proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires,
a partner at Andreessen Horowitz called Khanna
[[link removed]] an
“obnoxious jerk” on X and committed to “voting him the fuck
out.” Never mind that Khanna, who calls himself a “progressive
capitalist
[[link removed]]”—and
who as recently as last year collected $15,000
[[link removed]]
in campaign contributions from Andreessen Horowitz associates—is
nobody’s idea of a radical; in 2024, govtrack.us rated him
[[link removed]]
the sixty-seventh-most left-leaning member of the House. When tech
peers out its window, it sees only enemies.

This was an industry that, a generation ago, came into being promising
to disperse power and information to ordinary people. Now it
fetishizes surveillance, misinformation, monopolization, and lethality
as it races toward a Singularity that occasions, among thinking people
with no financial stake in it, no small worry. How did it get so
monstrous?

II. When Computers Meant Freedom

“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” wrote
[[link removed]]
Stewart Brand in a December 1972 issue of _Rolling Stone._ (Carlos
Santana
[[link removed]]
was on the cover.) “That’s the good news, maybe the best since
psychedelics.” Previously, Brand had been one of the novelist Ken
Kesey’s Merry Pranksters
[[link removed]],
that youthful band of LSD-dropping nonconformists whose travels on a
multicolored school bus Tom Wolfe famously chronicled in _The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test_
[[link removed]{adgroupname}&utm_term=dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41iXDVasK5U8IPCNhhHPSU-O&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqPLOBhCiARIsAKRMPZq4aX2rRv4QDDmEJ3YU4wwSD0HN_351wTENgfQjs4pShwsiFhb-zBEaAvp5EALw_wcB](1968).
Brand had then moved on to create
[[link removed]]
the _Whole Earth Catalog,_ a wildly popular counterculture guide to
living close to the land and far from the Man. Readers could learn
where to buy the best cut beads
[[link removed]],
or how to build a geodesic dome
[[link removed]],
or what the I Ching was
[[link removed]],
or how to repair your Volkswagen Beetle
[[link removed]].
In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Apple founder Steve Jobs
would remember
[[link removed].]
the _Whole Earth Catalog_ as “sort of like Google in paperback form
35 years before Google came along.” Brand also created The WELL
[[link removed]], an early online discussion forum
still in operation.

 

When Brand wrote in 1972 about the coming democratization of
computing, computers were still giant mainframes available only to
governments, large corporations, and universities. Lewis Mumford, in
his 1970 book, _The Pentagon of Power_
[[link removed]]_,_
had called the computer “the omnipresent Executive Eye, he who
exacts absolute conformity to his commands, because no secret can be
hidden from him, and no disobedience can go unpunished.” Popular
culture similarly cast computers as faceless villains in films like
_2001: A Space Odyssey_ [[link removed]]
(“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
[[link removed]]”) and _Colossus: The
Forbin Project_ [[link removed]] (“You will
say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion
[[link removed]]”).

In his _Rolling Stone_ essay
[[link removed]],
Brand was writing about a different kind of computer that was still a
decade off—a personal computer that, as the former _New York Times_
journalist John Markoff put it in his 2005 book _What the Dormouse
Said: How the ’60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer_
[[link removed]]_,
_would stop “being dismissed as a tool of control” and instead be
“embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation.”

The paradox of a computer-industry counterculture was evident from the
start. Brand’s _Rolling Stone_ piece
[[link removed]] was
set in the heart of the Establishment—Stanford’s Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory in the foothills of Palo Alto. But what Brand
described was about 20 “raucous,” long-haired “hackers” (a
term he had to define for his readers) playing a computer game called
Spacewar! It was, Brand wrote
[[link removed]],
“the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry
Prankster Acid Tests.” Yet this boho playground was made possible by
the government-created Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA,
which linked up 20 major computer centers around the country in what
would evolve into the internet. Indeed, ARPA was part of the
government agency the counterculture most hated—the Pentagon, then
drafting young men to fight in Vietnam. And while material gain was
not foremost for the early personal computer innovators, it was hardly
absent. “They didn’t mind being rich,” Walt Mossberg, who wrote
_The Wall Street Journal_’s “Personal Technology” column from
1991 to 2013
[[link removed]],
explained to me, “but that was not their principal thing.”

 

Still, Markoff argues in _What the Dormouse Said,_ it was the more
decentralized and free-spirited nature of West Coast computer culture
that gave Silicon Valley the creative advantage in developing personal
computers over the “more hierarchical and conservative” computer
culture in the Northeast, where IBM, Harvard, and MIT resided. The
historian Theodore Roszak
[[link removed]], who
popularized the term
[[link removed]]
“counterculture,” wrote in 1986
[[link removed]]
that personal computing grew out of “a sort of primitive cottage
industry. The work could be done out of attics and garages and simple
means and lots of brains.” As late as 2009, the journalist Jeff
Jarvis was still able to observe
[[link removed]] that
“small is the new big” and “the Lilliputians have triumphed.”

Brand, who at 87 [[link removed]] remains
a techno-optimist, told me in an interview that much of that reality
remains. “Bear in mind,” he said, “that the world’s
encyclopedia is still Wikipedia [[link removed]], and the
Internet Archive [[link removed]] is doing a free archive of
everything.” Both are nonprofits reliant on volunteer labor. Also,
Brand said, “you have companies like iFixit
[[link removed]] which is pushing right to repair
[[link removed]]” by furnishing repair instructions
free of charge. This last infuriates manufacturers, who want to charge
consumers for repairs. (iFixit makes its money by selling repair kits
and other tools.) “YouTube has completely replaced the _Whole Earth
Catalog,_” Brand said, and “Open-source software [like Unix
[[link removed]] and Linux [[link removed]]] is just as
powerful as it’s ever been…. All of that is a democratization
beyond what people were imagining as we went into the ’70s and
’80s.”

Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1993 made like Jonas Salk with polio and put
his invention—the World Wide Web—into the public domain
[[link removed]], takes a gloomier view. “Over
the past few years,” Berners-Lee writes in his 2025 book_, __This Is
For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web_
[[link removed]]_,_
“I’ve fought to keep the web transparent, open-source, and freely
accessible.” But with the advent of “the addictive forms of social
media,” the majority of web traffic “is now concentrated in a
handful of large platforms which harvest your private data and share
it with commercial brokers or even repressive governments”
(including, he might have added, in the United States). “Worse,
authoritarian governments now use the web to spread disinformation and
surveil their own citizens…. In the age of AI, these threats are
more urgent than ever before.”

 

“Let’s not overstate it,” Kara Swisher, who’s been covering
tech for three decades, told me. “I never thought they were liberal.
You never knew what their politics were. It was a kind of
libertarian-light if they thought about it at all.” Swisher’s 2024
memoir, _Burn Book: A Tech Love Story_
[[link removed]{adgroupname}&utm_term=dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41iXDVasK5U8IPCNhhHPSU-O&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqPLOBhCiARIsAKRMPZpAKkSgsFEk9fK0vzT-MPWE4A76_aadTJ9HR5s4abzY7G2L8xSDfroaAjjNEALw_wcB]_,_
begins with the sentence: “As it turned out, it was capitalism after
all.”

Of course it was. As far back as 1997, Thomas Frank, in his books
_Commodify Your Dissent_
[[link removed]]_
_and _The Conquest of Cool_
[[link removed]]_,_
protested the co-optation of 1960s rebel youth culture by corporate
America (a theme later recycled, minus the disapproval, by David
Brooks in his 2000 bestseller, _Bobos in Paradise_
[[link removed]]).
In Frank’s view, counterculture and corporate culture had forged an
unholy alliance from the start:

The 1967 “summer of love” was as much a product of lascivious
television specials and _Life _magazine stories as it was an
expression of youthful disaffection; Hearst launched a psychedelic
magazine in 1968; and even hostility to co-optation had a desperately
“authentic” shadow, documented by a famous 1968 print ad for
Columbia Records titled “But the Man Can’t Bust Our Music
[[link removed]].”

The maturing tech industry’s posture of rebellion was most fully
expressed, in January 1984, by Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl
ad [[link removed]], directed by Ridley
(_Blade Runner_) Scott
[[link removed]],
wherein a female athlete smashed with a sledgehammer
[[link removed]]
a two-way telescreen on which George Orwell’s Big Brother was
addressing the compliant masses. “On January 24,” the ad
concluded, “Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And
you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like _1984._” The thrust was that
the personal computer would liberate us from the UNIVAC-style
[[link removed]]corporate
and governmental dominance Mumford feared. But its real-world
inspiration was a more prosaic ambition to defeat giant competitors in
the PC market like IBM and AT&T, which were already stumbling.

 

III. The March to Monopolism
As tech firms scaled up, Washington mostly left them alone, in large
part because politicians had a poor grasp of their products; as late
as 2004, President George W. Bush spoke of “the internets
[[link removed]].” A rare exception was
the Clinton Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against
Microsoft, which Microsoft mostly lost
[[link removed]]
in a 2001 settlement. More consequential, though, was Section 230
[[link removed]] of the 1996
Communications Decency Act, which protected computer service providers
from legal liability for third-party comments on their platforms,
making it possible for social media giants like Facebook and X to
flood the public with misinformation and toxic prejudice.

The slow death of journalism and consequent dumbing down of the
electorate are largely the fault of Section 230. Look, I don’t
dispute that giving five billion people
[[link removed]]
a publishing platform was an intriguing social experiment. But 30
years on, the results are in. The experiment failed. If we repealed
Section 230, that would kill off social media, at least in its present
form. I’d be fine with that. But repeal may be a pipe dream, because
it would be fought to the death by at least two social media barons
(Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg) whose combined net worth approaches $1
trillion [[link removed]]. Still, if
asked to choose between Facebook and democracy, which would you pick?

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (net worth: $185 billion
[[link removed]]) made a great show
for a while of curbing offensive comment on Facebook (and to some
extent the company continues to do so
[[link removed]]). But during
Trump’s first presidency, Zuckerberg gave a speech
[[link removed]]
cloaking Meta’s financial self-interest in the free-speech
protections of the First Amendment and spouting what by that late date
(2019) was an obviously phony populism. “I understand the concerns
about how tech platforms have centralized power,” Zuckerberg said,
“but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these
platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into
people’s hands.”

 

That sounds reassuringly egalitarian, but some of these “people”
are minors. According to a 2023 Pew survey
[[link removed]:],
the proportion of American teenagers on Instagram was 45 percent for
those aged 13 and 14, and 68 percent for those aged 15 to 17. In 2019,
Meta’s Instagram briefly banned the use
[[link removed]]
of “beauty filters,” or augmented reality apps that adjust selfies
to make facial features better conform to conventional notions of
beauty. Meta did this while it consulted 18 experts about whether
beauty filters harmed adolescent girls’ self-image
[[link removed]].
The experts all answered: They sure do! Meta then ignored these
findings and reinstated the filters. Zuckerberg later explained
[[link removed]]:
“I think oftentimes telling people that they can’t express
themselves like that is overbearing.”

Another group whose free speech Zuckerberg hesitates to curb is
criminals. Last November, Jeff Horwitz of Reuters reported
[[link removed]]
that an internal Meta document showed 10 percent of the company’s
revenues for Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App came from ads for
scams and banned goods. If Meta was at least 95 percent certain that
the user was committing fraud, it barred that user. But if that
certainty dipped below 95 percent, Meta punished the user by—get
this—charging it a higher rate. “The idea,” Horwitz explained,
“is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.” But if a
fraudulent advertiser consented to pay the penalty, Meta effectively
received a cut of that advertiser’s ill-gotten gains. A Meta
spokesperson told Horwitz the internal document was “rough and
overly inclusive.”

In a December follow-up
[[link removed]],
Horwitz and Reuters’ Engen Tham reported that Meta discovered that
China accounted for about one-quarter of all ads on all its platforms
pitching scams and various types of illegal content. In response, the
company created an anti-fraud team focused on China. But “as a
result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” an
internal 2024 document said, the China team was shut down. A Meta
spokesperson told Horwitz and Tham that the China team was always
meant to be temporary, and that Zuckerberg’s directive to reduce
fraud monitoring applied “all across the globe,” not just to
China.

 

Meanwhile, over at X, Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok
has opened the floodgates to sexualized deepfake images. Three million
such images appeared on X over a recent 11-day period, according to
[[link removed]]
the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, including 23,000
children. This coincided with record-breaking levels
[[link removed]] of audience
engagement with X. Under public pressure, Musk disabled the feature
for X but allowed it to remain
[[link removed]]
for Grok posts elsewhere.

Tech’s enemy here is friction. Any impulse to play the responsible
corporate citizen must be weighed against risk that a fix will make
the product kludgy. Thus Apple, according to a lawsuit
[[link removed]] filed in
February by the state of West Virginia, prioritizes privacy on its
iCloud to so great a degree that it creates a haven for child
pornographers who go undetected by the company. To address this
problem, Apple created a detection tool in 2001. But the company
withdrew it the following year after receiving criticism from privacy
advocates that, according to the lawsuit, were “alarmist and
unfounded.” The result, according to the lawsuit, is “a secure,
frictionless avenue for the possession, protection, and
distribution” of child porn.

In response, Apple said in a written statement
[[link removed]]:
“We are innovating every day to combat ever-evolving threats and
maintain the safest, most trusted platform for kids.” Apple also
said that its Communication Safety feature blurs nude images. To that,
West Virginia’s civil complaint
[[link removed]] answers
that “users can proceed to view that content, and there is no
mechanism to directly report illegal, explicit content, such as [child
pornography] to Apple even with the Communication Safety feature
enabled.” No court date has yet been set.

 

Don’t mistake tech’s hostility to friction for a sincere
conviction that the customer is always right. Once a given tech
company achieves sufficient market share, the quality of the customer
experience tends to diminish in subtle ways. The writer Cory Doctorow
calls this “enshittification.” In his 2025 book of that name
[[link removed]{adgroupname}&utm_term=dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41iXDVasK5U8IPCNhhHPSU-O&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqPLOBhCiARIsAKRMPZoKfrZ0kIOCv3N2hD5Ysyyad9gNi9HRw-yd9pC1aF5JIs2WFfYBqwUaApkvEALw_wcB],
Doctorow explained that successful internet platforms start out being
insanely helpful to customers. Once the customers are locked in,
however, the platforms start to abuse them “to make things better
for their business customers.” In the final stage, these platforms
“abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for
themselves.”

Here’s how Doctorow walks through this process at Amazon, which
commands a stunning 40 percent
[[link removed]]
of all digital retail sales and recently surpassed Walmart
[[link removed]]
as the nation’s biggest retailer of any kind. _Step One:_ Reel in
customers through predatory pricing, i.e., selling below cost and
discounting shipping. _Step Two: _Offer Prime membership. This is a
“soft” lock-in because Prime customers pay shipping fees in
advance. _Step Three:_ Sell customers stuff they can’t use anyplace
else. Audiobooks, movies, and most e-books and e-magazines can be
viewed only on Amazon’s platform. Quit Amazon, and you lose them.

Amazon makes itself irresistible to merchants by initially paying full
price for those items it sells below cost. But as merchants get more
dependent on it, Amazon extracts ever more discounts from them _(Step
Four)._ These discounts attract more customers, giving Amazon even
greater leverage _(Step Five)_ to extract further discounts, and so
on. Other Amazon extractions from merchants include taking a
percentage of merchant sales on Prime and charging merchants for
higher placement in search results.

 

Notice that Amazon does not put the financial squeeze directly on
customers. That’s to conform to the still-predominant “consumer
welfare” antitrust standard. But consumer welfare doesn’t go
entirely unmolested, because in _Step Six_, Amazon’s various fees to
merchants rise so high (45 to 51 percent, per Doctorow) that merchants
adjust product prices upward, not just for Amazon but across the
board. Thus Amazon, indirectly, pushes consumer prices up not just on
Amazon, but also at Target, Walmart, and the corner hardware store.

What began, then, as tech empowering humanity degenerated into tech
empowering predators of various kinds—and finally into corporate
predation by the tech platforms themselves.

IV. From Hating to Being the Government

When did tech firms turn sociopathic? In many ways, the change was
gradual as they, and especially their chief executives, acquired more
money and power. “It just becomes easier and easier,” the veteran
tech analyst Esther Dyson told me, “to kind of think everything good
that happens to you is because you’re so smart.” As early as 2009,
Thiel (who was never a liberal) declared publicly
[[link removed]],
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
And in 2014, he wrote that “monopoly is … not a pathology or an
exception. _Monopoly is the condition of every successful
business._”

 

“I see the 2010s as the turning point,” Wu told me. Initially, Wu
writes [[link removed]]
in his 2025 book, _The Age of Extraction_
[[link removed]{adgroupname}&utm_term=dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41iXDVasK5U8IPCNhhHPSU-O&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqPLOBhCiARIsAKRMPZp3DI0970Xn3YCZqlA-eQEqEZtYyBsZbKTqENxLawKKqYmFfvTFJF8aAkPbEALw_wcB]_,_
the web was built on public platforms equivalent to the town
square—ARPANET, the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, and
private businesses tamed by antitrust actions (the phone companies and
Microsoft). As newer platforms like Amazon and Google moved in, they
initially presented themselves, Wu writes, “almost like corporate
charities.” Amazon posted no profits for most of its first decade,
and Google adopted the motto
[[link removed]],
“Don’t be evil.” But by the 2010s these and other private
platforms were joining the rest of corporate America in prioritizing
shareholder returns. In 2016, Google cut its tax bill
[[link removed]]
by $3.7 billion by shifting most of its international profits to a
Bermuda shell company. In 2018, Amazon paid no taxes at all on $11
billion in profits
[[link removed].].
That same year, “Don’t be evil” quietly moved
[[link removed]] from
the top of Google’s code of conduct to the bottom.

 
The 2021 nomination of antitrust enforcer Lina Khan as Federal Trade
Commission chair provoked furious lobbying by Amazon and Meta against
the nomination and was one of the signal events of tech’s descent
into unambiguous villainy.  (Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse (AFP)
 //  The New Republic)
 

Another change was the extraordinary power a handful of tech firms
acquired. “Amazon determines how people shop,” _The New York
Times_’ David Streitfeld observed
[[link removed]]
back in 2017, “Google how they acquire knowledge, Facebook how they
communicate.” That’s even truer today. In her 2024 book, _The Tech
Coup_
[[link removed]{adgroupname}&utm_term=dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41iXDVasK5U8IPCNhhHPSU-O&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqPLOBhCiARIsAKRMPZqS02YWsO3AHTbQDb7sUI3SPRE62jq0AdYk9zjrBBzG9lRLyGMS2Z0aAp8ZEALw_wcB]_,_
Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament, calls
this “de-facto governing power.” Tech firms have amassed actual
governing power, too. Since 2008, Palantir has received $3.7 billion
[[link removed]]
in government contracts; Microsoft, $5.8 billion
[[link removed]];
and Amazon Web Services (i.e., the cloud), $798 million
[[link removed]]—all
primarily from the Defense Department. While Musk was laying waste to
the federal bureaucracy in the winter of 2025, _The Washington Post_
reported that his business empire was built on government contracts,
loans, subsidies, and tax credits totaling $38 billion
[[link removed]].
Tech libertarians, it turns out, love to suck hard on the government
teat. 

Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most
obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it
supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, which, according to one contract award
[[link removed]], provides
“increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and
resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded
[[link removed]] that
“there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human
rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S.
government.” To this a Palantir representative replied
[[link removed]], “We will
not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.”
But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s
T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely
contain his glee as he said
[[link removed]], “Palantir is
here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very
best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and,
on occasion, _kill them_” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir
was doing just that, picking bombing targets
[[link removed]]
in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

 

Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of
three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s
appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of
ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024.
Amazon and Meta lobbied against
[[link removed]]
Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust
enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought
unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them
[[link removed]].
ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race
[[link removed]]
among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted
in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days
after his second inauguration, issued an executive order
[[link removed]]
reversing what he later called
[[link removed]]
“my predecessor’s attempt to
[[link removed]]
paralyze this industry.” Trump also eased up on antitrust
enforcement and within a year drove away
[[link removed]]
the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long
after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies
[[link removed]]
to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable
terms.

At the moment, the United States has no federal law or regulation that
broadly governs the development or application of AI. That gives the
lead to the European Union, whose Parliament passed a tech-specific
antitrust law [[link removed]]
in 2022 and an AI law in 2024
[[link removed]]
that prohibits, among other things, subliminal or manipulative
distortion of human behavior. Washington’s main focus since
Trump’s election has been to preempt
[[link removed]]
state laws governing AI
[[link removed]].
The House-passed version of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful”
reconciliation bill last year originally contained a 10-year
moratorium on state regulation of AI, but that was dropped in the
final bill
[[link removed]].
Instead, Trump plans to sue states that regulate AI. The rationale for
preemption is that AI would be better governed at the national level,
which is true. But there’s no reason to believe a Republican
Congress will pass any meaningful AI regulation, or that Trump will
sign any while he is in office.

There’s no end to potential AI practices that government should
limit or prohibit. Your privacy should be protected (unless you’re a
pedophile). You should always have access to a human alternative when
a conversation with a chatbot goes blooey. You should always have a
deep pocket to sue when AI harms you physically. Speaking of physical
harm, extreme restrictions should be placed on “hyperwar,” wherein
missile strikes and whatnot occur without human intervention
_(_“_kill them_”). When Anthropic, the rare AI company that’s
making some effort to behave ethically, tried to restrict
[[link removed]]
how the Pentagon used its technology, it got barred from all
government contracts on the dubious grounds that it posed a
“supply-chain risk
[[link removed]],” a
designation it’s now fighting in court
[[link removed]].
The unavoidable lesson is that corporate responsibility is a poor
substitute for government regulation.

 

Then there’s the question of job loss. White-collar America is
waking up to its potential disposability, much as industrial workers
started doing five decades ago. Back then the knowledge class shrugged
and said: “Shit happens. Retrain.” Now brainworkers will take
obsolescence more personally. Indeed, it’s happening already: The
payroll company ADP reports
[[link removed]]
demand for human software developers peaked in 2019; it’s been
declining ever since
[[link removed]].
Financial analysts at Citrini Research call this “the human
intelligence displacement spiral
[[link removed]].”

As that spiral becomes more conspicuous, legal protections limiting
job loss that economists once judged ridiculous will get a second
look. Let’s hope any that we adopt are distributed broadly to jobs
at all salary levels. Apart from the ethical imperative, doing so
might drag the Democrats’ college grads back into a long-overdue
rapprochement with the working class
[[link removed]].

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly
committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian
nutcases who would dispense with government altogether.

But to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of
plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any
in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in
history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed
in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). The tech lords, who
match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at
best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense
with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity,
and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve
invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think
otherwise.

 

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon.
But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to
know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long
and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is
rich—and it’s really, really rich.

_[__TIMOTHY NOAH_ [[link removed]]_ is a
New Republic staff writer and author of __The Great Divergence:
America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It_
[[link removed]]_.] _

 

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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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