Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism

The tech giants are menacing democracy, privacy, and competition. Can they be housebroken?

David Dayen

December 26, 2017

This article appears in the Winter 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

“We’re making the world a better place.”

The phrase is thrown around so often in the tech world that it became a punch line on the HBO satire Silicon Valley. Executives controlling the largest tech titans—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—might even believe it. But in a searing presentation at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference in November, New York University professor Scott Galloway explained that technology and progress have stopped traveling together since the days of the Apollo Project, even as scientists and engineers developed the most sophisticated tools known to mankind.

“What has the greatest collection of humanity and IQ and financial capital been brought together to accomplish?” Galloway asked the crowd. “To save world hunger? To create greater comity of man? I don’t think so. … Their singular mission, simply put, it’s to sell another fucking Nissan.”

Today’s technologists work at for-profit businesses, doing what for-profit businesses do in America—maximizing shareholder profits by acquiring functional control of markets, as well as intimate details of our lives. Big Tech makes aspects of daily life more convenient (if more fraught), but that’s not the same as making the world a better place. Mainly, the goal has become making more money, via more monopoly. And their success over the past decade has been so unprecedented and damaging that Galloway—a self-described “full-throated capitalist”—sees no choice but to break these companies up.

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