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Keywords

oligarch; oligarchy; technology; technology oligarchs; night watchman; venture; venture capitalist; decentralized finance; DeFi; crypto; cryptocurrencies; compute; rinse cycle; utopia; libertarian; wealth offense; wealth defense; DOGE; neoliberalism; sultanistic; AI; artificial intelligence; AGI; tech platform; space colonization; government contracting; separatist colonies; transhumanism; longtermism; Silicon Valley; futurist projects; dual-class system; Google; Amazon; Facebook; Microsoft; Oracle; Apple; SpaceX; Palantir; Elon Musk; Sam Altman; Jeff Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg; Peter Thiel; Marc Andressen

Abstract

Theoretical accounts of power in networked digital environments typically do not give systematic attention to the phenomenon of oligarchy—to extreme concentrations of material wealth deployed to obtain and protect durable personal advantage. The biggest technology platform companies are dominated to a singular extent by a small group of very powerful and extremely wealthy men who have played uniquely influential roles in structuring technological development in particular ways that align with their personal beliefs and who now wield unprecedented informational, sociotechnical, and political power. Developing an account of oligarchy and, more specifically, of tech oligarchy within contemporary political economy therefore has become a project of considerable urgency. This Article undertakes that project.

As I will show, tech oligarchs’ power derives partly from legal entrepreneurship related to corporate governance and partly from the infrastructural character of the functions the largest technology platform firms now perform. It is transnational and multidimensional, producing a wide range of consequences that are impossible for millions (and sometimes billions) around the globe to avoid. And it is personal; tech oligarchs have never been required to trade increased scale for increased accountability.

This account of tech oligarchy has important implications for three large categories of hotly debated issues. First, it sheds new light on the much remarked inability of nation states to govern giant global technology platform firms effectively using the traditional tools of economic regulation. Tech oligarchs’ power is—by design—largely impervious to such tools. Second, it illuminates an important difference between the way capitalists approach projects for regulatory capture and the way tech oligarchs approach them. The ordinary capture projects of most interest to oligarchs revolve around protecting their ongoing personal enrichment activities. In the extraordinary experiment that the United States is now witnessing, however, tech oligarchs are working to reconfigure institutions for finance and public administration in ways more directly amenable to oligarchic control. Third, it counsels more careful attention to an array of other oligarchic projects—including especially dreams of space colonization and the quest to develop artificial general intelligence—that have struck many observers as fantastical. Through such projects, tech oligarchs are working to dismantle existing forms of social, economic, and political organization and define a human future that they alone determine.

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