How the Big Tech oligarchy came to power
It took decades for Big Tech to rise and become the oligarchy it is today. Is it too late to prevent it from destroying democracy?

As the dead come to call
The Stupendium & Dan Bull, We Told You So
And the darkness descends
At the end of it all’s
Where the party begins
Yes, it’s awful to gloat
Even so, we just hope that you know
We told you so
We told you so
We’re witnessing a change of power. The Big Tech oligarchy is finally taking over. Democracy will look different after the fact.
But the process that culminated in the Trump-Musk bromance didn’t happen overnight. The generous regulation of the early web paved the way for the meteoric rise of Big Tech to the top of the world economy. Over three decades, they became the biggest empires in the history of humankind.
In hindsight, 2016 turns out to have been a pivotal year. In June, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. And in November, Donald Trump won, as we now know, his first term as president of the United States. Both votes were probably tipped by the use of what we still call social media, heavily influenced by bots and foreign – i.e. Russian – agencies. Disinformation became a thing.
Social media is mainstream media
Not that there hadn’t been disinformation and propaganda before. But after World War II and the devastating experience of totalitarian propaganda, Germany and many Western countries had at least set up a decent framework for media regulation to keep disinformation and media tycoons at bay, while limiting governmental influence on the media sphere. All of this still exists today, but it’s almost irrelevant in the new era:
Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.
Soon after the 2016 US election, it became clear that social media had departed from its social roots. It had slowly turned into another branch of professional, commercial media, governed by algorithms under the sole control of the tech platform owner oligarchy. The platforms, while still claiming immunity for the third-party content generated by its users, had taken over control. Regulators enforced moderation, and algorithms took care of the rest. In 2017, we wrote:
Twitter, like the internet, does not in itself lead to freedom of thought and expression. While it can empower users to raise their voices, it can also amplify the voices of those who already own a huge mindshare. Donald Trump has proven that Twitter can be highly effective in addressing vast crowds of followers, bypassing traditional media. The same applies to other platforms like Facebook. While the digital field is indeed different, it is not completely dissimilar from the incumbent media sphere. The attention economy works in favour of those who understand how to capture the most attention.
Early warnings
The clever use of algorithms had turned social media into drugs, addicting users. Those were the years when we learned about ludic loops. Not that there weren’t some early warnings. Jonathan Franzen, for example, wrote the following in a piece for The Atlantic (2013):
In the mid-’90s, when I started to feel worried about what was happening to literature with the introduction of the third screen, and with the increasingly materialistic view of human nature that psychopharmacology was producing, I was looking for some way to describe how technology and consumerism feed on each other and take over our lives. How seductive and invasive but also unsatisfying they are. How we go back to them more and more, because they’re unsatisfying, and become ever more dependent on them. The groupthink of the Internet and the constant electronic stimulation of the devices start to erode the very notion of an individual who is capable of, say, producing a novel. The phrase I reached for to describe all this was “an infernal machine.” Something definitionally consumerist, something totalitarian in its exclusion of other ways of being, something that appears in the world and manufactures our desires through its own developmental logic, something that does damage but just seems to keep perpetuating itself.
Quoting Franzen, this was our take in 2018:
In short, technology married consumerism and transformed itself into an infernal machine. This techno-consumerism now eats up our lives. We live in a world where technology is worshipped as a solution to each and every problem. Silicon Valley has already started to institutionalise its religious beliefs. For lack of a better term, Swiss entrepreneur Wolfram Klingler calls this newfangled religion Digitalism. Author and academic John Naughton speaks of the Church of Tech(nopoly).
At that time, around the middle of Trump’s first term in office, tech looked like a hot mess that needed to be fixed more and more urgently. It was the time when the call for regulation grew louder, when the EU upped its game in the fight against the growing dominance of the tech oligopoly, and GDPR came into force. The Californian Ideology on which Big Tech is based began to reveal its flipside:
The libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley has a dark, authoritarian side. It can perhaps be described as a new high modernism without strong state authority, while retaining the unfaltering confidence in science and technology as a means to reorder the social and natural world.
An epic battle
A pattern had emerged: weakening the democratic state and its authority while shifting power to the tech oligarchy. Fixing this would require taking responsibility for our society and the greater good, not surrendering to the supposedly superior forces of technology, which increasingly defined, controlled and governed the world:
Tech companies take human experience and turn it into a raw material that can be bought and sold. In her book on Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how companies like Google and Facebook, by reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
They’ve effectively closed the loop of behaviour control. Our human behaviour is turned into data, which is processed into information and then manipulated and fed back into our information diet to control our behaviour.
An epic battle between authoritarianism and democracy began to loom on the horizon, with tech going over to the dark side. Half a decade ago, in 2019, the stakes were already high:
We can read the ongoing political struggles, be it in the US, the UK or elsewhere, as a fight about these four pillars of Western liberal societies: a fight for power, freedom, democracy, and justice. Tech plays an important rule in that fight, since software engineers are hardcoding the rules others must follow.
Politics and democracy were under pressure, but we still expected this would lead to regulation:
Tech has become a threat to democracy. To the extent it undermines our democratic institutions, it needs to be and will be regulated. The biggest empires in history – Google and Facebook – are clashing with nation states and multinational institutions.
In 2019, this meant, and perhaps still means, that the battle would shape up as a fight to democratise tech:
The digital is political. This is probably anathema to the diehard digerati. They don’t want to acknowledge that the digital sphere increasingly defines, controls and governs the analogue world. But there is no real democracy in the digital sphere. Big Tech creates the rules others have to follow, with little or no democratic checks and balances.
But instead, the oligopoly continued to gain power and influence. And vice versa, technology didn’t help democracy either:
So far, technology spectacularly failed to create the electronic direct democracy promised by the Californian Ideology. Increasingly, it looks as if we’re about to fall back to authoritarian dictatorship as governance model. Trump and Zuckerberg are closer to each other than they appear.
Back then, it was evident that nothing less than a real digital revolution would be necessary, with the key issue being the ownership right of personal data. More than five years later, not much has changed. Did we let our last chance to avoid digital dystopia slip? Again, from 2019:
Modern, liberal politics is in an existential threat for its very existence. Besieged on two fronts — the authoritarian regimes happen to sow chaos, and the digital companies willing to acquire power without responsibility — it must act now, or risk passing into history, as we descend into a digital dystopia, wearing a disguise of democracy.
We had a pretty clear picture of the situation. Little did we know what would happen next. The 2020 pandemic was a huge boost for digital disruption and a stress test for democracy. The same year, Trump lost the election, and US democracy survived his first term, despite the storming of the Capitol in early 2021. In the early days of the Biden presidency, it felt as if US authoritarianism had taken a nap.
Our new era
That year, we learned that our crises are interconnected. Again, we heard calls to regulate Big Tech before it’s too late. The aftermath of the pandemic turned out to be the prelude to our new era of polycrisis and permacrisis that began roughly with Putin’s escalation of the war in Ukraine.
In October 2022, Elon Musk took control of Twitter.
Back in 2013, another tech tycoon had bought the Washington Post: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. And in 2018, Marc Benioff had acquired Time magazine. While intentions may have differed, the result is the same: the tech oligarchy takes control of media companies. With Twitter, now X, Elon Musk owned the tool to tip the 2024 US election. And that’s what he did.
At the onset of 2024, the outlook for democracy was bleak. In June, we once again called for Big Tech regulation:
And then, there are the big digital platforms which must address the spread of misinformation, propaganda, and hatred. This is long overdue. Russian propaganda is spreading freely through the so-called social media. TikTok, a Chinese company, massively influences voters, especially the young. Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a hatred-driven outlet called X.
This space needs a change in the regulatory framework.
The rest is history. The battle was lost before it even took place. Big Tech now owns US politics. It’s not that the tech oligarchy is a monolith; quite the contrary. Elon Musk may play an important role in the upcoming administration, but he is one tech oligarch among others. The tech oligarchy as a whole is now in power, with a strong tendency towards autocracy, and democracy is at its mercy.
We used to be optimistic about the survival of democracy. Here’s a quote from 2018:
Western democracies are inclined to be quite robust. Take the US as an example. Since 1776, the US democracy has survived a civil war, two world wars, several other wars, and four sitting presidents who have been assassinated while in office.
Chances are that the US democracy will also survive Facebook and Trump.
At the beginning of 2025, this remains to be seen.
Image by Dhaval Parmar (Unsplash)