While we weren’t looking, the technology firms of Silicon Valley and Beijing became the mediating mechanisms of our society, our democracy, and our lives. I write “while we weren’t looking,” but I should be more specific: while we weren’t looking at them. What were we looking at? Our phones. Our screens. Our social-media feeds. 

 

We kept our eye on everything but the array of companies that quietly amassed power — political, social, economic — and are now using it. 

 

You’ve all seen the misbehavior of the technology firms in the past weeks, months, and years. “Big Tech,” to borrow a phrase, has rolled out its own agenda. The list is long, but a few of the lowlights suffice:

• Apple, which wouldn’t cooperate with our own FBI in investigating the 2015 San Bernardino, California, terrorist massacre, would cooperate with Chinese Communist authorities in hindering Hong Kong freedom fighters. 
• Facebook and Twitter cooperated in suppressing negative news relating to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, in the final thirty days of the 2020 election.
• Discord, Reddit, Robinhood, and other trading and discussion fora are actively curbing conversation and legal economic activity at the behest of well-connected institutions.
• And of course, the big one: Twitter and Facebook both decided that their platforms wouldn’t allow the now-former President of the United States to communicate with the American people whom he represented. 

All this is just the beginning. Big tech is in crisis now, as it moves steadily toward direct administration of its own market, and disengages from any sense of responsibility toward the American people. Its crisis is our crisis, because we have allowed ourselves to become so dependent upon them: the convenience and connection they facilitated is also revealed to be their stranglehold upon our liberties and way of life. 

 

At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, we’re watching big tech — and formulating ways to reclaim our civic life from its grasp. That’s why, last week, my colleague Chuck DeVore hosted a livestream conversation with writer and thinker James Poulos, plus Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, on the problems with big tech — and what Texas can do about it. I invite you to watch it here: texaspolicy.com/bigtech

 

America has always been the enemy of oligarchy, and the antidote to the elites. The big-tech oligarchy and its constellation of supportive elites are no different. Meeting the challenge of big tech doesn’t mean curtailing material advances, or slowing the engine of industry and innovation that makes America the world’s technology leader. It does, though, mean empowering ordinary Americans against its abuses: and it means grounding the technology sector, from firms to workers, in American values and allegiance. 

 

The stakes are too high to allow any alternative. 

 

This Foundation understands this. That’s why we fight. That’s why we’ll win.

 

For Texas, in 2021 as in 1836 —