One of Karl Marx’s great feats was to demonstrate that under the dominant rule of capital, social vitality becomes separated from human necessity and is engulfed by the universe of the quantifiable. The subordination of social metabolism to the insatiable craving for increased profit turns the life of the entire planet into an endless array of elements brought to the circus of the measurable and appropriable. When human labor ceased to depend intrinsically on human needs and became a quantified and exchangeable value, the theft of time became the fuel driving all aspects of social reproduction. The implementation of the capitalist mode of production required dispossessing the subjective character of human life and turning it into a number, the sound of the ticking clock, a stripped-down data point.
Today, in the era of information technologies, the despotism of the quantifiable takes on a new dimension that one could feasibly call “bit despotism.” Over a century and a half after Marx wrote Capital, showing how the human body becomes a timed data point and an appendix to the grinding of the Great Machinery through the workday, we find ourselves in the midst of a profound technoscientific revolution overseen by the unstoppable greed of major technology monopolies that extend their tentacles to every corner of the planet, engulfing the subjectivity of human life and processing it in the form of data, probability, and statistics—bits. “Intelligence” no longer refers to human social creativity, but to the accelerated processing of data that passes through filters and algorithms, ultimately becoming a primary resource for the enormous capitalist monopolies standing on the stage before public applause, billed as great engines of science and technology—the future.
Rob Larson’s book Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley places us behind the curtain of this circus and takes us to the dressing rooms of the great barons of technology established and rooted in Silicon Valley, who now boast of driving the progress of the twenty-first century. Following the brilliant lessons inherited from Charles Wright Mills, who exposed the power elite of the mid-twentieth century, Rob Larson reveals the interwoven interests that today connect the Bit Tech monopolies with the U.S. political and military apparatus, which extends throughout the world through force and coercion.
From a critical and well-documented perspective, Larson takes us through the roots of the “Monopoly Quintet” (Microsoft, Google [Alphabet], Facebook [Meta], Amazon, and Apple) in order to challenge the “popular tech fairy tale” based on the supposed cunning of its prominent figures—always white and male—showing that through network effect mechanisms, this monopolistic group has generated tightly chained control over different areas of the communications and information technology industries. The “invisible” chaining of millions of people to the use of a few platforms creates a monopolistic lock-in effect that erects monumentally high protective barriers, making competition in this field practically impossible.
This level of monopoly bears similarities to the economic power that control of railroad lines granted to robber barons like the Vanderbilts and Jay Gould during the Gilded Age. In those years, “railroads were the circulatory system of the industrial revolution,” and their control guaranteed supervision over natural resources, the labor force, and the circulation of commodities (6). During those years, profits were assured for these major capitalists through the monopolization of the transportation system, thus gaining these industrialists access to the sine qua non condition of capitalism: the flow and movement of capital through commodities.
The techno-informational robber barons of our era sustain their monopolistic control by maintaining closed and impenetrable access to information via network effects and the ownership of intangible assets through patents. These large corporations in the information and communications sectors emerge as leeches attached to people “connected to the network,” sucking in every nanometer of information in order to fuel algorithms. This immense quantity of appropriated information feeds the artificial intelligence that now stands out as unprecedented, the largest mechanism of knowledge theft in the history of humankind. The artificial intelligence celebrated today with great fanfare by the narratives of the powerful would be inconceivable without the monumental plunder of knowledge appropriated by Bit Tyrants around the globe.
As Larson eloquently describes, following the lessons of Mariana Mazzucato, this monopolistic tyranny in the realm of bits did not consolidate on its own. While the mainstream discourse anchored in personal achievement ideologies portrays Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page as exemplary, creative men who now own the wealthiest conglomerates in the world due to their tremendous personal efforts, Larson is remarkably clear in demonstrating the deeply intertwined connections these corporations have with the military apparatus and the belligerent projection of U.S. imperialism worldwide, from the Cold War to the present day. As Bit Tyrants clearly reveals, the names and smiles of the fortunate few walking red carpets carry the shadow and breath of the Pentagon behind them. Thus, in this quest to understand the origins of the Bit Tyrants, Larsen explains that not only are private monopolies exercised by these corporations over these technologies socially untenable, but the technological breakthroughs did not originate with these companies in the first place. The interweaving of political, military, and data-led corporate power makes these tyrants an unstoppable force in the legal realm. Antitrust laws seem laughable in the face of the increasingly ruthless appropriation of extraordinary profits and monopolistic control over all information deposited on the network. Submerged in what Thorstein Veblen would call “predatory barbarism,” this twenty-first-century leisure class bases its wealth on enormous global chains of exploitation and private appropriation of data, operating on the stage of laws, with huge troops of sinister lawyers and lobbyists employed to evade any threats to their wealth. Both conservatives and liberals in the United States bow down to their reign, kissing their hands and ensuring in each electoral contest the best conditions to perpetuate capitalist accumulation. Instead of pursuing a policy of social welfare, every candidate—regardless of being Republican or Democrat—makes monumental efforts to win a most delightful smile from these capitalist barons of the twenty-first century, as this defines who gets to enjoy the White House Rose Garden.
The monopolistic vocation of these great tyrants is evident in various corners of the world, where they have operated in the shadows of political lobbying. In the periphery, they operate shamelessly and without limits. In Europe, they have managed to evade strict antimonopoly policies, while in China, they seek to hinder the exponential growth of Chinese technology corporations through trade wars that aim to limit its entry into the global market at all costs. The world is contested among the bit magnates in the pursuit of control over time, information, and data.
In the face of this prevailing world controlled by the Bit Tyrants, Larson calls for the urgent need to reverse and overturn this hierarchy. The possibility of even conceiving a postcapitalist socialist metamorphosis, as he suggests, requires breaking down the walls of private control over information and knowledge. It requires contemplating the socialization of human needs as the core foundation for governing the collection and use of information. It requires liberating people from the chains of predatory and monopolistic control that these technology giants maintain and reinforce around the globe (251–53). Therefore, Larson urges us to “recognize an online socialism as a major priority for radical change, replacing the power wielded by the tech sector with democratic control over the internet platforms…where the workers maintaining them and the users making them fun decide how they will operate.” (I would also argue that this statement applies to offline socialism.)
As long as change does not happen, creativity continues to submit to the quantifiable and commodifiable imperative of accumulation, algorithms are guided under the tutelage of monopolies, and science and technology remain subjected and subsumed to the logic of profit while technological rents for control over bits dictate the movement and insatiable greed of monopolies in the global economy, we will continue living in what Marx conceived of as “prehistory.” Larson calls on us to free ourselves from the imperative of exchange value and to place human subjectivity and use value at the center of technological development. This must not be done through faint and pragmatic legal disguises that have only legitimized and fueled the dominance of monopolistic capital, but through a profound social subversion that places the vitality of the human condition at the core, against capitalist Thanatos.
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