From the moment it opened, in 1881, Beales was at the vibrant heart of my hometown. Called the “Fancy Fair and Oriental House”, it was more palace than department store — feeding the then appetite for Japanese wares, as well as selling photo albums for beach-going visitors. And back then, the Hampshire beach resort wasn’t about vulgar postcards. It was in vogue. The same year Beales opened its fancy doors, John Galsworthy had his protagonist, Soames, meet Irene in Bournemouth in the Forsyte Saga. Not long after, Robert Louis Stevenson moved to the town to enjoy the sea air. Bournemouth had arrived.

Christmas was always central to the Beales appeal. Some declare that the Bournemouth flagship welcomed the world’s first ever real-life Father Christmas: a now all-pervasive yuletide tradition that it allegedly started in 1885, five years before Edgar’s department store in Massachusetts claims to have invented it. And not content with a solo Santa, the company even devised a massive annual Christmas parade which entertained the town for decades.

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Christmas at Beales is stitched into my childhood memories. My mother and I lived in a flat a few hundred meters away, right in the thick of things, and I was five or six when I was first taken to meet Father Christmas. Bournemouth was only a modest seaside town back then, and the parade long gone, but between Hollywood films and these sparkling halls of consumption, it still felt like you had been granted access to a larger, almost cosmopolitan culture of shared affluence. When I watched a VHS of Kevin in Home Alone 2, as he wandered around Macy’s, it wasn’t completely incongruous with what activists would now refer to as my “lived experience”. The wealthy and the poor might have bought different things, but they did so in broadly the same spaces.

Not anymore.

Today, almost all this is gone. Beales finally shuttered its Bournemouth store in 2020, a fate shared by all but one of the town’s department stores. Earlier this year, Cas Paton, the CEO of OnBuy, chose to relocate his business to London citing Bournemouth’s “deserted high streets”, and high drug use. While John Betjeman may have once described the place as a “garden with houses in it”, these days, you wonder what he would make of the empty shops and rough sleepers. Behind the boarded-up Beales site is the grave of Mary Shelley; in front are “Trident casino slots” housed in a building that used to be a bank.

None of this is new, of course. Britain’s department stores began to shutter up in 2008, hit by the twin hurricane of the global financial crisis and a collapse in consumer spending, as well as the widespread adoption of online shopping. The role of the latter, though, with Big Tech playing an ultimately decisive role, is hard to exaggerate.

And as it devastated offline retail, Silicon Valley didn’t just kill the high street. It also did its best to ruin Christmas too. Before 2008, business reporters would gleefully assert how, with each passing December, record amounts were being spent by frenzied shoppers. For some, the increasingly commercial nature of the season was an outrage — but looking back, with people actually sharing space and time, those days feel almost wholesome. Bournemouth clung on for longer than most, but those scenes from my childhood, watching crowds of people coming together — even if it was to buy Buzz Lightyear toys and laugh at Santa’s fake belly — are now only memories. If our grandparents made gifts, and our parents bought them down Beales, today, we simply press “buy now” in a frictionless act of real time logistics.

The general response to the escalation in rough sleeping, empty shop fronts and shattered sense of place is to say that this is the price of progress. Convenience has trumped ritual and community because people prefer it that way. But I’m not convinced. Why do some places feel just as convivial as they did 30 years ago? Why does somewhere like Winchester, or Godalming, boast so few empty shopfronts compared with Bournemouth? And if people don’t care about the experience of Christmas shopping, then why is Liberty fit to bursting, and why does Regent Street’s LED extravaganza burn brighter than 10,000 Lumie SAD lamps? We clearly still yearn for spectacle and congregation. It’s just that now, with our economic model, only the more affluent can enjoy such a luxury.

These might sound like the whining ruminations of a man who refuses to accept the inevitable. Perhaps. But it’s also true that the rules today are rigged to suit Big Tech. We are gleefully, in the words of Cory Doctorow, enshittifying our culture, Christmas included. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George, the film’s protagonist, is rescued by his local community, including a panoply of small businesses he had previously championed. Yes, it’s a somewhat confected vision of an idealized America, but let’s imagine the analog today: the staff at the local William Hill? Deliveroo drivers and the lads behind the till at the vape shop? For many places, that’s all that survives.

All of this is built by design. Consider Amazon’s “most favored nation” policy. This means that merchants who sell products on the platform must offer their lowest price there. Failure to comply results in sanctions ranging from being demoted in search rankings, to being completely unlisted. In other words, it is impossible for the likes of Tesco or Asda — let alone a local shop — to sell the same product at a lower price than the $2-trillion online giant. The official line is that the company’s bargain prices are a result of its hyper-efficient logistics. But if that is the case, then why are such anti-competition policies necessary? Not only does this kill competition and shutter beloved shops, but the survivors end up increasing their prices. Only the wealthy can afford to visit the stores that remain.

Amazon’s search rankings are similarly sinister. When you look for an item on the site, the products it displays aren’t there because they are the highest quality, the most purchased, or even the best reviewed. No, the results you see are the consequence of sellers paying to skew them. De-optimizing customer search is a lucrative side hustle, making around $38 billion dollars for Amazon last year — a figure which has now reputedly risen to over $58 billion. That is more than the total revenue of British corporate giants such as AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, something to remember the next time you see a string of empty shopfronts.

Not content with decimating our high streets, though, big tech is also eviscerating our cultural rituals. Once, Christmas blockbusters were released to take advantage of holiday audiences. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Home Alone was not only set during the festive season, but released then as well. Elf, Love, Actually, Die Hard…they were the definition of holiday viewing. I remember when we queued every year to watch the latest Lord of the Rings — not particularly Christmassy, but still a seasonal ritual.

Of course, some people still visit the cinema in December. But the shift to online streaming means that we’ll be watching this year’s big release, the finale of Stranger Things, on our smaller screens. It’s quite the cultural statement that Netflix is releasing three episodes of this story about interdimensional demonic creatures on Christmas Day. Where British audiences once indulged in homemade comedy after the annual belly-buster, from Only Fools and Horses to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, today we tap into a globalized, increasingly Americanized media culture.

It’s ironic that this same culture seeks to channel a sense of nostalgia for the recent past — Stranger Things, after all, is set in the Eighties, Perhaps the explanation is all too simple. For whatever reason — a near-infinite archive of digital images; fewer young people; lower economic growth — our culture is simply much less vital than before. The rise of streaming isn’t just an expression of that paucity, it’s a contributing factor, and the same applies to the demise of your local high street.

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Cassandras have long warned that we are losing the true meaning of Christmas. But my point here isn’t theological or moral, it’s something profoundly prosaic. In his 2006 novel Spook Country, William Gibson writes how “cyberspace is everting”. No longer is it a distinct, separate reality which we plug into. Rather, it is colonizing the physical world. The collapsed high streets of countless towns and cities are the result of digitally coordinated logistics. Christmas is just one more victim of that: the magic of the season replaced by the distraction economy and next-day delivery.

Is this trajectory fixed? Could we tame the beast of multi-trillion-dollar US companies swallowing our country? Could we edge towards a post-American internet? Shifting direction won’t be quick, or easy. After all, our payments systems, business tools, means of communication — and even the web servers of the country’s security services — run on American software. It is impossible to disentangle that reality, and our shriveled industrial and technological base, from our wider, deeper cultural malaise.

Perhaps the starting point, then, is to simply agree that what went before was better than what we have now. That busy streets, with colorful shops, and children running amok, is good in itself. An intellectually honest Left might concede that while many things have improved, something far more important has been lost. And faced with technological and cultural vassalage to the United States, a politics animated by nostalgia need not necessarily be conservative.

Who knows, maybe Bournemouth could set things in motion by bringing that parade back.

At its very beginning, capitalism was underpinned by faith in competitive markets. In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers labored within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running. This in turn provided us with our daily bread, ale and meat.

Then came the second industrial revolution and the conglomerates whose market power would make Smith weep with joy. This was the era of Big Business and the “robber barons”. And so another — neoliberal — fantasy was created, to justify the new big beasts that were now monopolizing almost every market that mattered. Joseph Schumpeter, a former Austrian finance minister who made America his home, was the new creed’s most effective advocate. Progress, he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development, for new machines, new product lines and all the paraphernalia that helps innovation take root? To monopolize markets, conglomerates need to dazzle us with remarkable new products that kill off the competition, like Henry Ford’s Model-T or Apple’s iPhone. Should we worry about all that concentrated power? No, Schumpeter reassured us. Once they reach their pinnacle, these monopolies get flabby and complacent and, eventually, they’re brought down by some upstart: one example being Toyota’s toppling of General Motors.

More recently, Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, said something that many thought was a restatement of Schumpeter’s dictum: “Competition is for losers!” While the pioneers of Big Business like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford would have agreed wholeheartedly, what Thiel was implying went beyond their wildest imagination. It went much further even than Schumpeter’s pseudo-Darwinian idea that progress comes through the rise and fall of monopolists in an endless struggle for existence.

What Thiel was saying is that today, winners do not just kill off the competition to monopolize a market. No, they keep going until they kill the market itself and replace it with something quite different: a kind of cloud fief that lacks all of the ingredients of a proper market — indeed that lacks all of the advantages that liberals and neoliberals alike recognize in the machinery of decentralized markets. In fact, today’s winners —the Magnificent Seven, plus Thiel’s own Palantir — are reviving an economic model that all of us thought dead and buried after the fall of the Soviet Union: economic planning systems that match buyers and sellers outside anything that can be usefully described as a market. 

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Gosplan was the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee, the engine room of its command economy. Its remit was to match the supply and demand of critical resources (oil, steel, cement) but also consumption goods (food, clothes, appliances), without using market prices. Once buyers and sellers were matched, prices were assigned with a view to achieving political and social objectives (such as to ensure basic affordability, or subsidize certain industries) — not to balance markets. 

Gosplan was disbanded immediately after the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin on Boxing Day of 1991, but it is now back. Where? In the algorithms powering Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and the rest of Big Tech’s digital platforms that pretend to be, but are not, markets.

Before you protest the audacity of my claim, think of what happens when you visit Amazon. Unlike when you visit a shopping mall, either with friends or mingling with strangers, the moment you follow the link to amazon.com, you exit the marketplace and enter a space of pristine isolation. It’s just you and Jeff Bezos’s algorithm. You type, say, “espresso machines” into the search box and the algorithm matches you with a number of vendors. However, to achieve what it was coded for, the algorithm had started working months, even years, earlier. 

Over that period, you will have revealed to it many of your whims and desires through your searches, purchases, clicks and reviews. Using these cues, as well as data from other sources, the algorithm has trained you to train it to know you even better, enabling it to advise you on what books, music and films to buy. It has already won your trust. So, now that you are in a hurry to replace your broken espresso machine, the chances are that you will choose one of the top search results it has given you. 

The algorithm knows your spending pattern. It knows how to guide you to the espresso machine with the highest price you are prepared to pay, all in order that Amazon can collect up to 40% of it the moment you click the purchase button. It is an extortionate cut, but the espresso machine’s makers tolerate it, because they know that if they don’t, their company will never appear in the top search results of anyone prepared to pay for their product. As AI improves, this power to manipulate your behavior increases — and this is why Big Tech’s valuations are going through the roof.

This is nothing less than a capitalist, privately-owned, super high-tech reincarnation of the USSR’s Gosplan. Amazon’s software matches you with particular vendors and bans you from talking to any seller or even from observing what other buyers are doing — unless of course it calculates that it serves its own purposes to let you see a small selection of them. As for the price you pay, this follows (rather than precipitates) your being matched with a seller. Rather than being the variable that equilibrates demand with supply, prices in Amazon fulfill another role: that of maximizing Jeff Bezos’s cloud rents.

In this sense, prices in Amazon and other Big Tech platforms function in a manner far closer to Gosplan than to any farmers’ market, money market or shopping mall you have ever experienced. In fact, had the Soviet leaders lived to witness the workings of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech, they would be kicking themselves, lamenting that it was American capitalists who perfected their Gosplan model, complete with a surveillance system that would make their KGB henchmen green with envy. 

Gosplan failed to turn into a success story as it lacked Big Tech’s greatest weapon: cloud capital, that is, the algorithms, data centers and optic fiber cables working as an integrated network to train you to train it. As you impart your data, cloud capital learns how to input desires into your mind and then satiate these desires by selling you stuff within its privately owned version of Gosplan. 

But, is there really a difference — I hear many of you ask loudly — between Thomas Edison and Jeff Bezos? Are they not cut from the same cloth of megalomaniac monopolists seeking to dominate markets and our imagination? Yes, despite their similarities, there is a difference — and it is gigantic. Edison’s and Ford’s capital was productive. It produced cars, electricity, turbines. Bezos’s cloud capital produces nothing, except the enormous power to encase us in his cloud fief where traditional capitalist producers are squeezed for cloud rents and we, the users, provide our free labor. With every click, like and review, we enhance the power of cloud capital. 

Once upon a time, an old Trotskyite told me that the Soviet Union, in the name of socialism, had created a form of industrial feudalism. Independent of whether he was right or not, his comment is pertinent today in relation to Big Tech. Come to think of it, while the trading process on platforms like Amazon is reminiscent of the USSR’s Gosplan mechanism, it is also the case that the enormous sums that Amazon, Uber, Airbnb etc, charge the actual producers of the goods and services peddled on their sites are akin to the ground rents that the landed gentry used to charge their vassals — except that, here, they are cloud rents that accrue to the owners of cloud capital. So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets. 

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The parallel extends to the state. The USSR was meant to be a workers’ paradise in contrast to the USA whose raison d’être was to be a haven for capitalist producers. It turns out that both promises were false. As Big Tech’s cloud capital accumulates and concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, states are becoming dependent on corporate techlords. By outsourcing core functions — archives, health data, even military software — to rented cloud infrastructure, governments lease back their own operational capacity from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google. This dependency enables a new dimension of technofeudal power.

From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state, with repercussions that extend to every realm of state activity, including health services, education, the tax office, our borders and faraway battlefields. 

In Ukraine and Gaza, and along our militarized borders, cloud capital is trained to extend its reach. Amazon’s AI tool Rekognition is used by law enforcement, including ICE, while Palantir’s vast surveillance software runs on Amazon’s cloud. Through Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google provide the Israeli military with advanced cloud and AI capabilities, reportedly enabling rapid, AI-driven targeting in Gaza with minimal human oversight. 

Let us briefly return to the comparison with the early 20th century’s original monopolist capitalists. Whether we admire or abhor the Magnificent Seven’s stock market valuations, it is helpful to keep this in mind: the old capitalist giants, the “robber barons”, actually produced things. The new technofeudal lords produce a new social order. They have replaced the invisible hand of the market with the visible, algorithmic fist of the cloudalist. 

Free-market enthusiasts have nothing to celebrate and much to regret. But it will take a brave soul amongst them to stare reality in the face. Just like pro-Soviet Marxists remained in denial that the Soviet experiment had failed for many years after 1991, so  free-market ideologues refuse to see that capitalism begat a form of capital — cloud capital — that replaced markets with something out of the Soviet past. In the process, it has killed capitalism. 

In 2021, PayPal blocked GiveSendGo, an evangelical crowdfunding site, after it helped raise money for January 6 defendants. In Canada, truckers resisting Covid vaccine mandates faced similar bans. Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage was debanked. As Chopra told me, “just because someone disagrees with corporate executives, that’s no grounds for losing their fundamental rights”.

Chopra also spearheaded Team Biden’s crusade against corporate “junk fees” (ordering a concert ticket online? That’ll be a $5 service fee, plus a $15 processing fee and a $3 convenience fee). He also sought to wipe medical debt from credit records and to protect veterans’ privacy against data brokers. Trumpian America would have been the chief beneficiary of these measures: lower-income consumers with little to no bargaining power against Big Finance and Big Tech.

Yet in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, powerful tech barons vented rage at Chopra’s agency. Most notably, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg — who previously oversaw the censorship of pro-Trump content on Facebook but is now making nice — complained about CFPB oversight on Joe Rogan’s show: “We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up.”

Elon Musk was more forthright: “Delete CFPB”, he posted on X on 27 November. That seems to have done the trick. As of last week, visitors to the CFPB website encountered a “404: page not found” error. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is dramatically remaking the federal government, gloated about the agency’s apparent demise with a tombstone emoji, adding: “CFPB RIP”.

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By Saturday, Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he would be taking over as acting head of the CFPB. Given Musk’s “RIP” message, however, and the sheer power he wields in the new administration, the future of the agency is far from certain. CFPB lawyers have been ordered to stand down in all lawsuits, including one challenging financial institutions’ right to debank Americans. “Oh, and Musk now has access to all this confidential CFPB info about his competitors”, a current CFPB staffer told me.

Less than a mile away, in Washington, the National Labor Relations Board, another agency tasked with leveling the economic playing field, is in similar disarray. Last month, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the board, and Jennifer Abruzzo, its general counsel. While Abruzzo’s dismissal was no surprise — Biden did the same thing to Trump’s NLRB general counsel upon taking office — Wilcox’s firing is a different matter.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the president can only remove a member of a bipartisan board like the NLRB for good cause, such as neglect or malfeasance. The National Labor Relations Act, the law that created the NLRB, likewise requires notice and good cause for removing board members. Wilcox received no notice, and by all accounts, she has a sterling record (whether Team Trump disagrees with her views on labor law is irrelevant).

Wilcox’s removal might be a first step toward overturning the high-court precedent that limits presidential power over bipartisan, multimember boards, a question over which reasonable people can disagree. But it also deprives the board of the quorum needed to uphold collective-bargaining rights. That has the effect of “creating chaos and disruption and making this agency inoperative”, said Wilma Liebman, who served 14 years as a member of the board under presidents of both parties, the final two as chairwoman.

Rendering the NLRB inoperative in this manner serves the interests of pro-Trump tycoons, Musk foremost: even before the election, he filed a lawsuit attacking the constitutionality of the New Deal-era board. Now, it seems, Musk the efficiency czar has achieved what Musk the employer had long desired. Said Liebman, “The fact that it is Musk is glaring”.

Unless Team Trump changes course, the plutocratic, self-dealing policy choices will become impossible to ignore. And the Trumpians will end up betraying the millions of working-class and union households who pulled for them in last year’s election seeking immigration sanity and economic protection — not to make it easier for Big Finance to surveil and debank them, or for Musk to use his new government job to stymie organizing efforts at his firms.

So far, the GOP’s activist base feels no danger, only joy. (This, even as Musk’s influence on Trump has already become much less popular, even among normie Republicans.) Among Right-wing activists and intellectuals, the mood is retribution, and TrumpElon the avenging dagger. As one Right-of-center operative told me, describing an attitude he himself disavows, the thinking is: “Now it’s our dicks that are hard, and we’re gonna f–k you in the ass.”

It’s understandable. Who on the Right could have lived through the political and cultural turmoil of the recent past, and not feel some version of the same sentiment, even if expressed in less vulgar terms?

From the #Russiagate hoax to Trump’s first impeachment on the flimsiest grounds; the Big Tech suppression of the lab-leak theory to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop; the pandemic-era banning of Catholic masses and Jewish funerals (even as George Floyd protests were encouraged) to the unlawful altering of election rules in Pennsylvania in 2020; the winking permission granted to Left-wing rioters setting fire to a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., compared to the hammer dropped on Right-wing rioters who stormed the Capitol; and so much more besides — Democrats and their allies in the media, Silicon Valley, and the security forces subjected the other half of the country to a lot of mishigas over the past decade.

As I say, who on the Right — or even the non-woke Left — could have lived through all that and not feel a jonesing to burn down all their works?

Then again, politics isn’t only about enmity and payback, even if it would be foolish to deny a place altogether to these primordial urges in the affairs of fallen human beings. Politics is also the art of prudence, especially when dealing with a state apparatus as large and complex as the federal government, overseeing an even larger and more complex society and economy.

It shouldn’t require the insights of Aristotle or Weber to know that the state isn’t a tech startup. The danger in unleashing Musk and his team of Groyper whizz kids is that, in slashing and burning, they might bring about not just efficiency and an end to DEI nonsense, but careless enshittification.

If some drug-approval process is short-circuited, and lots of people end up being harmed; if critical entitlements payments are withheld from senior citizens needing medical care; or if some official unit gets axed whose job it was to alert decision-makers to this or that natural or manmade hazard, and something somewhere goes boom; or if… In any of these scenarios, it won’t be Musk left holding the bag, but the politically accountable men who empowered him. Musk insists he is the soul of caution, of course, and so far nothing of that sort has taken place. But these things take time to ramify through a delicate system.

Then, too, the slash-and-burn mentality represents a reversion to the neoliberal model that Trumpism promised to counter. Recall that Trump won the first time around by rejecting the GOP’s Reagan-Bush-Romney orthodoxies. He pledged to protect social insurance, and he even hinted at a public option in health care. The 2024 Republican platform reiterated his entitlements pledge.

Musk, meanwhile, has vowed to trim as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of total outlays. There simply aren’t enough silly expenditures — programs funding research into transgender monkeys or musicals about Ireland’s black roots — to get him to that amount. If Musk really means it, and if Trump isn’t prepared to restrain him, then entitlements will end up on the chopping block. An eccentric billionaire cutting Grandpa’s Social Security payments: the 2026 and 2028 electoral kill shot Democrats are rubbing their hands for.

And what about state capacity? Trump won in 2016 and then again in 2024 by promising to restore the battered manufacturing sector. Tariffs are one important tool for doing so, with origins in the American tradition going back to Alexander Hamilton. But a manufacturing revival also requires a competent workforce and long-term research and development on a massive scale — tasks that have proved too big for any entity but the state.

None of this is to defend waste or entrenched bureaucrats who’ve grown accustomed to defying the president’s will, especially when the president happens to belong to the Republican Party. But de-Baathification is unlikely to work any better for the US state than it did for Iraq, and the Right, especially, should be wary of Year Zero delusions: the utopian dream of starting totally anew, unencumbered by the past — heedless of why our institutions took the shape they did.

Which brings us back to those crippled agencies, the CFBP and the NLRB. Both emerged in the wake of market emergencies: one fairly recent, the 2008-2009 financial crisis precipitated, in part, by banks’ risky home lending and the securitization of those loans; and the other much older, the Depression, brought about by a demand crisis in the economy resulting in turn from a brutally lopsided distribution of the social income (low-paid workers unable to afford the goods they produced).

Trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the imbalances. A regulation such as the CFPB’s anti-debanking rule is the best defense against people being arbitrarily cast out of the financial system, whether it’s over a belief that there are only two sexes or 107 genders. Likewise, collective bargaining, upheld by the NLRB, gave rise to the American middle class and such blessings as paid vacation time, health insurance, disposable income, and, yes, a measure of protection for what workers think and say off the job.

Is it not telling that, say, Jeff Bezos — who, three years ago, marched at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter column — has now joined the anti-woke ranks? Is it not obvious why the Amazon boss, notwithstanding his ownership of an anti-Trump #Resistance newspaper, The Washington Post, has teamed up with Musk in challenging the existence of America’s basic labor law? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg has undergone a profound change of heart about online censorship, now that a new administration is prepared to remove barriers against his power in the name of owning the woke?

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There is no denying that parts of the federal government fell in thrall to the same wacky and unpopular ideologies taken up by professional classes in the private sector. But abuse doesn’t negate the proper use of something. And as time goes on, it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.

The cynic might respond that the American state has always sought the favor of the rich: better to get rid of the meddling institutions of the New Deal and have the class antagonism out in the open. The successor state is here. Get with the times.

Maybe that’s right. But the populist Right should be clear that this could entail enormous pain for the working and lower middle classes and galling self-dealing by Musk & Co., the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late 19th century. Once the dust settles, and the next reforms take hold, the political rewards will redound not to the neo-Gilded Age party and politician — there is a reason Trump had to drag William McKinley out of obscurity — but to the transformative reformer.

If Trump himself wants to earn that mantle, it behooves him to apply his signature motto to Elon Musk: You’re fired.

And while many in Webster came specifically to see Jamison, they also used his post office to visit each other. So, as their postmaster, he installed benches, a community bulletin board, and a library. I ask him to explain himself; Jamison aw-shucked. “I figure if folks are talking to each other, it is hard to hate each other.” In truth, though, the Webster postmaster was merely fulfilling Title 39 of the US Code: “The United States Postal Service’s (USPS) purpose is to bind the nation together”. Lord knows that, in the aftermath of a brutal election, America needs some neighbourly ties. And Lord knows that few organisations do that as well as the Post Office, even if its triumphs hint at state failure elsewhere.

By sheer numbers alone, USPS is an American giant. With 33,904 post offices, it’s burrowed into every nook and cranny of the nation, from Kaktovik in Alaska to Ochopee in the Florida swamps. The country’s single biggest non-military institution, every day its army of 525,469 employees delivers mail to 167 million unique addresses. That’s even as USPS retains the so-called “Postal Principle” — meaning users pay the same fee no matter how far their package travels. No wonder Americans love the Post Office, with an eye-popping 91% of us viewing it favourably. By comparison, 29% of Americans support public schools, which is about equal to the 32% of citizens who have a positive opinion of God. “The Post Office is the last bastion,” says Erica Etelson, co-founder of the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative. “It is still something everyone loves”.

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For Professor Richard John, this isn’t incidental. As the Columbia professor and post office expert has written, the Founders always “intended the Postal Service to be a pillar of the republic, squeezing together millions of Americans, urban and rural, for the common good”. Created by Ben Franklin and the Continental Congress, the US Constitution explicitly calls for “Post Offices and Post Roads”. But, more than that, John says it’s the Post Office Act of 1792 that matters most. Because Congress deemed access to newspapers central to an informed public, the legislation kept postal rates low. This, John explains, ensured political parties wouldn’t dominate the news — while, as an apolitical institution, the Post Office could “follow the nation and stay close to the people”.

The Postal Service most certainly stayed close to the expanding republic. Between 1790 and 1840, the number of post offices exploded from just 75 to over 13,000. A few years after the Civil War, the service was operating over 76,000 offices. That, says Cameron Blevins, made it the largest “communication network” on earth. As the associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver explains, this was basically a function of 19th century expansionism. As the pioneers forced their way west, and Manifest Destiny rushed Americans from sea to shining sea, post connected the “whole nation together”. And so it proved in practice too. Consider Arizona’s Supai post office as an example. Established in 1896, it connected the Grand Canyon’s miners and the Havasupai nation of Native Americans to the wider world. 128 years later, mules still haul the outgoing mail three hours up steep, sandy passes to the next post at Peach Springs. Ten years after Supai’s founding, in 1906, free rural delivery integrated even more Americans. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Post Office started delivering parcels, further connecting people to the bounties of American life.

Public respect for the Postal Service reached further heights during the Great Depression, when FDR expanded its footprint still further. In truth, though, its acclaim during the first half of the last century isn’t really about numbers. In the Thirties, three-quarters of all Americans believed the federal government would “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. Far from being naïve dupes, this civic faith was fired by depression and war, together creating remarkable social solidarity. At the core of this social trust were institutions, like the Post Office, that for Blevins represent the veritable cartilage and guts of the nation. “The US Post,” he says, “is a model of what an effective government could be.”

That, in turn, made Americans have more faith not just in far-off bureaucrats — but also in each other. For Americans born in the first half of the last century, neighbourliness and social trust flourished. Buttressing this sensibility was New Deal liberalism. More than a pastiche of programmes, the New Deal was grounded in a principle that Americans look beyond narrow self-interest and towards the common good. FDR, for his part, understood the Post Office was the one federal entity Americans most used, leveraging it as a tool of social solidarity.

During the Second World War, for instance, the Post Office offered “Victory Mail” to soldiers deployed overseas. Through the so-called V-Mail scheme, the Army Postal Service connected millions of troops to their families and loved ones — all free of charge. At home, the Post Office served as a hub for wartime information. Community boards posted draft posters, air raid instructions, and information about federal schemes. Postal workers added the sale of war bonds and war stamps to their duties.

It’s little surprise that public regard for the Postal Service reached its zenith in the early post-war era. As Richard John notes, the humble post office commanded so much respect that it’s used as a major plot device in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Santa Claus exists because the Post Office says so,” John explains. “It had unassailable credentials”.

In 1970, the Post Office’s golden age came to a screeching halt. A confluence of forces — postal worker strikes; delivery inefficiencies; Richard Nixon — resulted in the Postal Reorganisation Act. This transformed the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service (USPS). The Postmaster General was moved out of the cabinet and into a boardroom, even though the new “postal corporation” remains a public service. Blevins calls this new creature a Frankenstein monster. “It is expected to provide a universal service,” he says, “but it is not funded to do so”.

In 1975, Americans encountered Frankenstein. A deep recession spurred massive postal deficits. To cover costs, bureaucrats planned to close 12,000 post offices — mostly in rural areas. Popular uproar forced them to scrap the plan. But the situation has hardly remained stable. With the profit motive now king, postage stamp prices have typically been raised three or four times a decade since 1970. From the turn of the millennium, meanwhile, the cost of sending a first-class letter has increased 18 times, even as the number of USPS employees has been cut almost in half. That’s unsurprisingly led to shuttered branches, shortened opening hours, and a delivery window for First Class letters that’s almost doubled.

Not, of course, that post offices have suffered alone here. On the contrary, the squeeze on USPS has been witnessed across the public sector and beyond. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was merely a symptom of a sharp collapse in social solidarity. While Reagan’s neoliberals cut budgets aimed at the collective good, the proportion of unionised jobs had already fallen from a third in the Fifties to a quarter by 1980. Membership in civic clubs, from the Red Cross to the PTA, collapsed too. Unsurprisingly, time devoted to informal socialising spiralled downward. The ties that bind, from the Post Office to the coffee klatsch, withered.

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This collapse in unifying institutions has affected Americans psychologically. These days, and in a far cry from the halcyon days of the New Deal, just 2% of Americans believe the federal government does the right thing “just about always”. That, of course, begs the question: amid so much cynicism, so much disdain for the powers-that-be, how is it that USPS has retained its place in the hearts of the nation? Ironically, and especially in rural areas, the answer might have something to do with the decline of public institutions generally.

For while, in 1940, Americans in the hills of Appalachia or the flat lands of Nebraska would have counted on the Rural Electrification Administration for power, or the Farm Home Administration for loans, to say nothing of churches and social clubs — for thousands of isolated communities the post office is all that’s left. It hardly helps, Jacobs says, that rural Americans rely on USPS far more than their urban peers. “There is material dependency,” he says, not least when even Amazon upon the USPS for unprofitable “last mile” deliveries right across rural America.

Certainly all this — the way post offices tie Americans both to their rulers and each other — helps explain the abiding power of folks like Mark Jamison. But so too, surely, does their individual hard work. As postmaster, after all, Jamison lived next door to his office. At night, he sat on the front porch strumming his guitar, his five dogs all there at his side. Neighbours would stop and seek his counsel. “I drew the line at getting packages at 10pm,” Jamison says. But anyone in Webster who needed a neighbour had one in their postmaster.

It’s something that’s becoming rarer every year. Social solidarity begins with civic society and ends with private friendships. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was gobsmacked by Americans and their unerring sociability. But since 2000, the time Americans devote to socialising has collapsed by 30%. In 1990, nearly half of all Americans reported having five or more close friends. Today, slightly less than a quarter can say the same, even as 12% have no close pals at all.

That reality is surely true in Webster, North Carolina, a place that may yet lose even more. The town still has a building called a post office — but budget cuts mean it no longer has a postmaster. Now that Jamison has retired, there are no plans to replace him. Ultimately, then, the story of the post office speaks to a wider human disconnect. Those ties that bind, from postmasters up, are tattered and frayed. And without common places to meet, and chat, and get their jars opened, Americans have simply quit being neighbours. “I wish more neighbours trusted more,” Jamison says. “But they have good reason not to.”

Thinkers such as von Hayek dismiss vulgar, mainstream economists who celebrate the market as merely an efficient mechanism for finding the right price of things; they see it as something grander, a liberator of our imagination, the co-creator of our preferences and tastes. They argue that interfering with markets, let alone replacing them, is a terrible idea because centralised systems are inimical to not only efficiency but also to the free development of our proclivities.

But what if our preferences are no longer formed by the market, as they were in Hayek’s day? The year after he died, I was struggling to connect my father’s computer to the fledgling internet when he asked me a killer question: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles’ heel?” It was a couple of years after the collapse of Soviet communism but also the beginning of the centre-left’s decline. The threat to capitalism posed by an organised working class had entered a recession that has never ended. Could the internet do to capitalism what the proletariat had failed to do?

It has taken me years to answer my father’s question — in the form of my new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. In it, I argue that our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

Humanity’s fear of its technological creations is ancient: films such as The Terminator and The Matrix are driven by the same anxiety that animated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hesiod’s tale of Pandora, in which she is a robot made by Hephaestus to punish us for Prometheus’s crime. All such stories have a point of singularity: the moment a machine, or a network of machines, achieves consciousness. Generally, the machine then takes one look at us, its creators, and decides we are not fit for purpose, before proceeding to eradicate or enslave us — or merely make us miserable.

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But while we lap up such stories, we ignore a very real danger. Machines such as Alexa and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are nowhere near the feared point of singularity. They can pretend to be sentient but are not. Nevertheless, it matters not one iota that they are mindless appendages of a data-crunching network that only simulates intelligence. Nor that their creators might have been motivated by curiosity and rent-seeking, rather than some fiendish plan to subjugate humanity. What matters is that they exercise unimaginable power over what we do — on behalf of a tiny band of flesh-and-blood humans.

This is a version of singularity, albeit in a simpler form, in that it is the moment when something invented by “us” becomes independent of and more powerful than us, subjecting us to its control. Indeed, from the original industrial revolution to this day, we have endowed machines with “a life of their own”; from steam engines to search engines, our glorious artefacts make us feel, in Marx’s words, like “the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

At the heart of my thesis is an irony: the thing that has killed capitalism is capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that, like an overzealous virus, it has killed off its host. This mutation — cloud capital — has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits.

Of course, these two things remain ubiquitous — they were ubiquitous under feudalism, too — but they have been evicted from the centre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been supplanted by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly: cloud rent.

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital — machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge, as they once were. Indeed, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour — in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.

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In a technofeudal world, the liberal individual is now an impossible role to play. Humans are tangled up in a network of digital capital that trains us to train it to control us. Social democracy is unimaginable in a world where cloud-proles are reduced to automata, while almost everybody else works for free as cloud-serfs, without even realising that their labour replenishes the dominant form of capital. Does this mean that we can never recover our autonomy, our freedom? Of course not. We are not doomed. What is a given, however, is that, for the same reason we cannot un-invent AI, or smash cloud capital in a neo-Luddite rage, there is no going back to capitalism. So, what next?

While privatisation and private equity asset-strip all the material wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. If each of us is to reclaim ownership of our individual minds, we need to collectively take ownership of cloud capital, instead of submitting to a few feudal overlords. It will be damn hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a means of behaviour modification to a means of emancipation.

True enough, it is as hard to associate Doncaster with the continuing glamour of Flying Scotsman as it is to believe that Diana Rigg — svelte star of The Avengers — came from there. Michael Parkinson said Rigg “radiated a lustrous beauty”; the same cannot be said of modern-day Doncaster, so close to prosperous and pretty York, one stop north on the East Coast Main Line. When it comes to the North-South divide, the latter, cosseted by tourism, doesn’t really have a dog in the fight, whereas Doncaster seems emblematic of all that has gone wrong in recent decades.

The Flying Scotsman symbolises happier times for Doncaster. It owes its existence to what a recent Doncaster Council document described as “the most significant example of levelling up in Doncaster’s history”. In 1849, the town’s Tory MP, Edmund Beckett Denison, persuaded the Great Northern Railway to extend its line north to Doncaster, and to move its works there. By the turn of the century, those works — known as “the Plant” — occupied 200 acres and involved 60 miles of sidings, some tangled with the mineral lines serving nearby pits. The GNR was not exactly philanthropic, as Rowntree’s in York was, but it did reach out to the town. It built two schools for its workers. It helped pay for the construction of Station Road, a handsome thoroughfare along which arrivals by train might saunter into town, past the Oriental Chambers and the Grand Theatre.

In those days, London needed the North. Coal trains left Doncaster hourly for the capital. And the town was a destination, not just a resource. Tourists came for the races, and ambitious young men came from all over Britain to take up apprenticeships at the Plant, including W.O. Bentley, who would use the skills he learnt building fast trains to build fast cars. In 1911, a large, intimidating Scottish aristocrat called Nigel Gresley arrived at Doncaster as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern. He designed the star product a new class of unprecedentedly big express passenger locomotives, built to haul heavy, luxury trains at speed along the East Coast Main Line. It was named Flying Scotsman.

The engine is often described as symbolising all that was best in British engineering, but it also represented an early flowering of the nation’s Public Relations industry, becoming a pin-up in many beautiful posters. There would be Flying Scotsman paperweights, jigsaws, ash trays. The loco regularly hauled the train named The Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh, and anyone who turned up to find a different engine at the front would feel short-changed, as when an understudy takes the star’s part in a play. The Flying Scotsman had luxury carriages, including the Louis XIV-style first-class restaurant car, a cinema carriage and a barber’s shop, in which shaves with a cutthroat razor were offered and accepted — a tribute to the train’s smooth riding. All these trappings were created in the Plant.

Why all this manufactured glamour? Mainly because of competition for the lucrative London-Scotland rail market, but also because of automobile competition. In the Thirties, people would be unlikely to drive from London to Scotland, but they might take a charabanc from York to Scarborough, and the LNER hoped its mainline publicity would add lustre to its local services, for which it adopted the tell-tale slogan, “It’s Quicker by Rail”.

While they were nationalised, in the second half of the 20th century, our railways were increasingly menaced by the rise of the automobile. Investment would be followed by retrenchment, indulgence by hangover, and in 1958 British Railways fell into the hands of a Transport Secretary succinctly described by Christian Wolmar, in his history of BR, as “a car man”. Ernest (‘Ernie’) Marples drove a Jag. He co-owned a company that built roads. He appointed Dr Richard Beeching, a physicist, to take a “scientific” approach to BR, which, not very surprisingly, turned out to mean cutting the network by a third.

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Diesel and electric locomotives would be outshopped from Doncaster over the next 30 years, but trains had lost their primacy. The propaganda surrounding the Beeching cuts characterised railways as a second-class mode. They lost their sheen and so, therefore, did Doncaster. Marples was a Conservative, but Labour was half-hearted in opposition to his policies. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Doncaster’s Labour Council capitulated to the motor car, just as similarly-hued councils did in Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. If you emerge from Doncaster station today, you see an artwork celebrating the town’s locomotive-building history, but all you can hear is the traffic of the town’s inner ring road, constructed in 1970, which creates a barrier between the station and the town.

Doncaster, like most Northern towns, is uglier than it used to be. Elegant Station Road was obliterated by the construction of a huge shopping centre with five levels of parking above it. The only survivor is the Grand Theatre, which stands derelict opposite the station, a great white haunted house. Along the pedestrianised High Street, formerly the Great North Road, attractive premises that once housed grand banks and coaching inns are occupied by fast-food outlets, charity shops, barbers’ shops offering “Haircut £6”. In Doncaster’s most beautiful building, the Minster, I spoke to a local man in his eighties.

“There aren’t more than a couple of really good shops left on the High Street. Fifty years ago, they were all good, and you had some railway first class menswear shops and tailors.” (He was very well-dressed.) When asked how long times had been hard, he said: “I’d date it back to the pit closures.”

Unlike many other places that started to lose their mines in the late Eighties, Doncaster had railways to fall back on. But it suffered a more complete loss of machismo after it made its last loco in 1987. Today, the town retains what the council calls its “diverse railway cluster”, which employs 7000 people, 2000 more than the old Plant. But whereas everyone knew what went on in the Plant, the cluster is mysterious. No one person seems to have the complete list of its tenants. There’s the iPort, for example: an “intermodal rail terminal” signified by a mass of containers visible a couple of miles south of Doncaster on your right from northbound trains. Some containers are brought from abroad including, it is rumoured, by a train that comes via the Chunnel from China. Near the iPort are giant, blank-faced warehouses: Amazon distribution hubs. Doncaster has the dubious honour of being the only place in the UK to have three of these. A woman who works in a Doncaster café said to me: “Today, Donny is a distribution hub — don’t ask me what’s being distributed.”

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Admittedly, there is a good deal of railway-related activity within the cluster. But this being modern “British industry”, many of the names are foreign. Wabtec Rail, an American-owned firm, refurbishes rolling stock at Doncaster. And there’s Volker Rail, a Dutch railway infrastructure company. The foreignness of the cluster is typical: of the 30 or so train operators in Britain today, only half a dozen have British owners. Professor Paul Salveson, a railway expert, says the Doncaster scene exemplifies “the willingness of British governments over the last fifty years to relinquish engineering — the idea that we don’t need to make things”.

Was this an ingredient in the overwhelming support for Brexit? All the towns in Yorkshire except the three most prosperous — York, Leeds, Harrogate — voted to leave the European Union, Doncaster by 69%. In a pub in the city centre, a local explained that people supported Brexit “because they thought something might change”. When asked what had changed, he said: “Nowt.”

But Doncaster’s economy was actually growing faster than the regional average pre-pandemic. Construction — some undertaken on the territory of the Plant — played a part: Doncaster is being regenerated. And it remains an important railway centre, both for passengers — six lines radiate from the town — and the industry. But the glamour is gone. As for the Scotsman, it pursues its whimsical afterlife. Having been saved from scrapping in 1962, it was owned by a succession of rail enthusiast-millionaires — two of whom it bankrupted. They ran it all over Britain until 2004, when it was acquired by the National Rail Museum — located, of course, in lucky old York.

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In his book, Parallel Lines, Ian Marchant wrote that there are two railways in Britain: the railway of romance and the railway of reality. The latter, he added, was “largely shit”, and here might lie an opportunity for Doncaster. Our privatised railway is fragmented, with its separation of track and train operators, its multiplicity of ever-changing brands and liveries. Unlike The Flying Scotsman or the LNER, it is unknowable, and this is reflected in the anonymity of the Doncaster railway lands.

Great British Railways, the state-owned body expected to take over the nation’s industry, will supposedly fix this problem, providing a central “guiding mind”, and a more integrated network. What with the energy crisis and the recent political turmoil, the Bill to create GBR has been postponed. But the location of its headquarters is expected to be announced in 2023 even so. Doncaster made the shortlist — and it seems by far the most deserving candidate among Birmingham, Crewe, Derby, Newcastle and York.

There is no grand panacea for the sites of former industry. Steps to a better future will mostly be incremental. But occasionally there will be strides. Victory for Doncaster might top even the arrival of the Great Northern Railway as an instance of real levelling up. The city would unequivocally be a railway place once again — an even better thing to be in 2023 than in 1923, perhaps, given the newly recognised environmental kudos of rail. Skilled workers would flock there once more. There would also be intangible benefits: restored pride, an escape from the melancholic retrospection. And perhaps the starry locomotive will have assisted. Doncaster’s pitch for the role contained a killer line: “We built Flying Scotsman”.

On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses were forced to shut down, triggering one of the worst jobs crises since the Great Depression. In 2020 alone, workers around the world cumulatively lost $3.7 trillion in earnings — an 8.3% decline.

On the other, a handful of mega-corporations, particularly in the Big Tech and Big Pharma sectors, have made a killing, raking in hundreds of billions more in “pandemic super-profits” than over the previous four-year average. Topping the list are behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Merck.

The success of the Tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook — is easily explained. As people found themselves confined to their homes, they turned to the internet for pretty much everything: shopping, dining, working, schooling, entertainment, socialising, even sex. In other words, what represented a curse for countless small and medium traditional businesses, represented a blessing for a handful of corporate behemoths.

The golden egg for the pharmaceutical companies, however, came later with the vaccines: the companies behind two of the most successful Covid-19 vaccines — Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna — made combined profits of $34 billion in 2021. And if the “new normal” ends up including permanent booster shots, such super-profits will become the norm. Crucially, these profits are then distributed to shareholders who predominantly belong to the richest 1% of society. It’s hardly surprising then that billionaires around the world saw their wealth increase by $3.9 trillion just in 2020. As Oxfam starkly put it in a recent report: “The wealth of the 10 richest men has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off”.

To see what this means in practice, one need only turn to Latin America, whose billionaires increased their wealth by 52% during the pandemic. In Mexico, meanwhile, multimillionaires saw their wealth increase by 31.4% in 2021 alone. On the other hand, over the last two years, 78 million people in the region were plunged into extreme poverty, while 13% of children abandoned education altogether.

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In Africa, where low-income countries predominate, the picture is equally stark. A report this month noted that not only had GDP fallen by as much as 7.8% in some cases, but that remittances from abroad had fallen by 25%. In a context where remittances from rich countries accounted for over half of private capital flows to Africa shortly prior to the pandemic, this has had a devastating effect on the daily economy, with over 40 million additional people in extreme poverty.

Couple this with a debt crisis, and it is not surprising that the impact on daily lives has been devastating: in Angola, a recent report described how youth unemployment doubled to nearly 60% in the past two years. Meanwhile, the continent’s billionaires have seen an uptick in their fortunes, as elsewhere; a January report from Nigeria found that Africa’s 18 billionaires had seen their wealth increase by 15% in 2021 alone.

Yet in many ways this is a global phenomenon; on every continent, there has been a hyper-concentration of wealth, and poorer communities have suffered. Wealth has been further racialised, with minority communities suffering the most in rich countries, and poorer continents the worst affected.

Why, then, have Left-leaning commentators supported the policies that have led to these terrible outcomes?

The usual explanation is that these impacts were an inevitable impact of the pandemic. And yet the evidence for this is weak, not least because most of those affected by the virus have been elderly people often beyond an age of active employment. In Africa, a 1% increase in mortality from Covid in a country like Nigeria cannot explain the 20% collapse in formal employment. In fact, Tanzania — one of the very few countries that did not impose Covid restrictions in 2020 — was also almost the only country in Africa to see its GDP increase, by as much as 5% according to some reports. Meanwhile in Sweden, where restrictions were much milder than in the rest of Europe, the country returned to pre-pandemic levels of production by the middle of 2021, in contrast to many other European countries (while registering lower per capita mortality rates than many other countries).

And so it seems that the staggering increase in inequality, and in the concentration of capital, must be the consequence of the Covid response measures, not of Covid-19. What, then, are some of the likely consequences of this massive accumulation of capital by a tiny number of people, expropriated from SME owners and the global working class?

A dystopian future seems to be emerging from the ashes of the pandemic — one in which not only is wealth more concentrated than ever in the hands of a small elite, but in which practically every sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of all-powerful mega-corporations. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that those who have most profited from the pandemic response, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, also supported that response and removed information from their portals which criticised it.

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However, there’s a further element that makes this scenario even more disturbing, if possible, and that is the growing consolidation not only within, but also between, sectors. This becomes evident when we look at the investment funds that actually “own” these corporations. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset management firms in the world, respectively managing $10 and $8 trillion. That’s 3.7 and 3 times more than the UK’s annual GDP. These two funds are the top “owners” of all the major Big Pharma (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck), Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and Big Media (New York Times, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp) corporations. Even more worrying is the fact that despite having shareholdings of “only” 5-7% in these companies, there is growing evidence that institutional investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard try to influence company management and boards on strategy.

It would appear that these funds also coordinate among themselves. When analysing the voting behaviour in board meetings of the two funds, researchers found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments. This is hardly surprising if we consider that BlackRock and Vanguard are also each other’s main institutional investors: in other words, they partially “own” each other through cross-shareholding. So, we are effectively in the presence of a single super-entity that “owns” and controls a huge chunk of the Western economy. While this was already the case before the pandemic, the latter has accelerated this trend. More importantly, it has brought to the surface the way in which these funds, through their cross-sector corporate control, can “harmonise” these companies’ behaviour to further their interests.

We can see this in the case of debate around pandemic strategies on social media, and the censorship exercised today by social media platforms against any critical voice, no matter how qualified. A good example might be the removal from YouTube of a video of a senior editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, discussing the Pfizer Covid vaccine trial in a US Senate hearing — in which among other things Doshi had questioned the accuracy of the reporting of the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness.

This is worrying in itself. But it becomes even more worrying when we consider that the companies selling the vaccine, the media outlets shaping the mainstream vaccine narrative and the social media platforms enforcing that narrative are, to a large degree, “owned” and controlled by the same two funds: BlackRock and Vanguard, which, incidentally, are raking in billions from the vaccines. This harmonisation among sectors (and between the latter and governments) points to the rise of a new ultra-powerful complex — the techno-media-pharma (TMP) complex. This is evident in increased “synergies” between these sectors: take Google’s growing investments in the health, pharmaceutical and pandemic-prevention sectors, for example, or Amazon’s investment in Covid-19 research.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the active support of governments, which create an enabling environment that rewards participants in the TMP complex. This is evident, for example, in the secrecy, overpricing, cronyism, and inefficiency that has characterised Covid procurement deals: Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies have all been parcelled out to transnational corporations without proper tendering processes or legislative oversight. In other words, this is not a scenario in which governments disappear, but rather one that relies on increasingly powerful and authoritarian state apparatuses furthering the interests of big capital.

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This is hardly surprising when we consider the extent to which these corporate giants have meshed with our political systems. The US is a good case in point. Obama was very close to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who later became a close collaborator of the Pentagon in developing military applications of AI. Today, Biden’s economic policies are heavily influenced by the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive. This ultra-elite is now in a position to shape every aspect of our lives — and it’s frankly terrifying.

If the Left is to recover from the catastrophic policies that it has supported during the pandemic, it must begin by recognising that it is lazy and misplaced to denounce those who point out these inconvenient truths: that wealth is hyper-concentrated as never before, that this is as a result of the policy choices during the pandemic, that these choices were unprecedented, and have been supported by those who enriched themselves enormously along the way, and censored any alternative point of view.

If we don’t want a world dominated by a very few ultra-wealthy people, and their vision for retaining that wealth, an unprecedented collective effort will be needed to fight for a different future. The huge TMP conglomerates will have to be broken up and their profits used for the benefit of all humanity, and not just their shareholders. This will be the struggle against the post-pandemic capitalist nightmare — and we are already losing.

“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

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How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

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Why the BBC is still selling Savile

By Tanya Gold

I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.

In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.

If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.

Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.

And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.

This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?

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The fightback against Critical Race Theory

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Twitter began to ask itself the same questions, and finally, after Trump’s response to the disturbances of 6 January, the decision was made to chuck the most famous and powerful man in the world off the platform. He went the way of Katie Hopkins into the next world (aka Parler) along with a string of others. Just this past weekend an odious little toad and anti-Semite called Nick Fuentes was chucked off the platform. Very few people were sorry to see him go.

But Trump’s removal was the most audacious sign yet that the platform was willing to make editorial decisions. It could no longer pretend that it was simply a neutral platform — it had become a curated outlet. The suspicion grew, too, that they were playing more insidious games behind the scenes. Twitter had always denied the practice of shadow-banning, which is when a user’s tweets mysteriously stop appearing, before it was eventually confirmed by Twitter that they were doing exactly that.

Yet all of this is as nothing compared to the devastating virus-like effect that Twitter has had across the public arena.

It has undeniably coarsened public discourse. There are commentators and journalists for whom I used to have some respect, but who use Twitter so constantly that I read their work with ever less anticipation and regard. There is almost no prominent figure on Twitter who hasn’t lowered themselves in one’s estimation. There are those who use the platform as a venue to carp about everything that their contemporaries, rivals or friends are saying. They berate other journalists, as though they are masters of the genre whose verdict is final. The pleasant communal hackery of old has been replaced by a melee of endless fall-outs, unnecessarily initiated and often with irreparable results.

The platform has also given the greatest possible voice to the general scold: the type of person who achieves great pleasure in taking offence and even causing someone to lose their livelihood or reputation — the “I am offended by that” or “I don’t find that funny” brigade. Where once people simply shrugged, now they “take to Twitter”, in the annoying parlance, to show that they are unimpressed, or to tell people off for saying something which they disagree. There is a performative rage which the platform has encouraged, and which people find it hard to withdraw from once they are caught up in it. It’s addictive. It’s thrilling.

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Do the culture wars really exist?

By Douglas Murray

And then there is the chihuahua effect: the way in which any small, yappy animal can distract the platform for at least a day at a time. Would-be chihuahuas can get the hang of this very easily. You simply say something silly and instead of the grown-ups just ignoring the small yappy dog, all respond to it. A whole day can go by in which some relatively good minds and a great many more mediocre ones have done almost nothing but got themselves in a lather about how annoying the small yapping dog is.

There are countless other reasons to loathe the platform: photos of dinner; stories of deeply dull train journeys or traffic jams; glimpses into the mundane aggravations which are bad enough in your own life without needing to read those of others. People misery-share their lives and the sadness and anger proves infectious. It is all a colossal waste of time, of course, yet is by no means the worst aspect of the all-powerful site.

That has been illustrated once again these past few days, with the anonymous racist abuse posted at black England footballers. Twitter acted as a megaphone for the most hysterical of these bigots, and highlighted the platform’s complete inability to sensibly and reasonably offer judgements about the actual state of the world we live in.

It made it seem as though these racists are vast in number. As though they are powerful and need the full force of every arm of the state to unite against them and quell them. Never mind that many of these tweets came from outside the UK, and that they were utterly dwarfed in number by supportive messages.

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The New York Times, whose correspondent seems to spend an awful lot of time news gathering on Twitter, even went as far as to describe these as “racist attacks”, never missing a chance to take a swipe at Britain. But we live in a country which is by every standard one of the least racist on earth, with statistics all demonstrating a vertiginous fall-off in people holding prejudice attitudes. Britain is one of the countries most unbothered, indeed most favourable, about things such as interracial marriage, or living next door to someone of a different race.

We have one of the most diverse cabinets in the world and our public square, from television and film to our national football team is visibly and un-controversially multi-ethnic. And yet reading Twitter you’d have no idea of that. No wonder that in Britain, as in the US, young people think that they live in such a racist society, beyond redemption. Here on this platform a very few shrill voices can be so magnified that people mistake that sound for the country as a whole. And so, 15 years after its launch, Twitter has become not just a megaphoning platform, but a distorting one, and the distortion continues to have a toxic impact on real life.

The Sleep Number Bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school Professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the 16-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the User Agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel … your Sleep Number account.” You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, the bed also transmits the audio signals in your bedroom. (I am not making this up.)

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How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

The business rationale for the smart home is to bring the intimate patterns of life into the fold of the surveillance economy, which has a one-way mirror quality. Increasingly, every aspect of our lives — our voices, our facial expressions, our political affiliations and intellectual predilections — are laid bare as a data to be collected by companies who, for their own part, guard with military-grade secrecy the algorithms by which to use this information to determine the world that is presented to us, for example when we enter a search term, or in our news feeds. They are also in a position to determine our standing in the reputational economy. The credit rating agencies and insurance companies would like to know us more intimately; I suppose Alexa can help with that.

Allow me to offer a point of reference that comes from outside the tech debates, but can be brought to bear on them. Conservative legal scholars have long criticized a shift of power from Congress to the administrative state, which seeks to bypass legislation and rule by executive fiat, through administrative rulings. The appeal of this move is that it saves one the effort of persuading others, that is, the inconvenience of democratic politics. 

All of the arguments that conservatives make about the administrative state apply as well to this new thing, call it algorithmic governance, that operates through artificial intelligence developed in the private sector. It too is a form of power that is not required to give an account of itself, and is therefore insulated from democratic pressures. 

In machine learning, an array of variables are fed into deeply layered “neural nets” that simulate the binary, fire/don’t-fire synaptic connections of an animal brain. Vast amounts of data are used in a massively iterated (and, in some versions, unsupervised) training regimen. Because the strength of connections between logical nodes is highly plastic, just like neural pathways, the machine gets trained by trial and error and is able to arrive at something resembling knowledge of the world. The logic by which an AI reaches its conclusions is impossible to reconstruct even for those who built the underlying algorithms. We need to consider the significance of this in the light of our political traditions.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It makes the difference between simple power and authority. One distinguishing feature of a modern, liberal society is that authority is supposed to have this rational quality to it — rather than appealing to, say, a special talent for priestly divination. This is our Enlightenment inheritance. It appears to be in a fragile state. With the inscrutable arcana of data science, a new priesthood peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program — the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

The feeling that one is ruled by a class of experts who cannot be addressed, who cannot be held to account, has surely contributed to populist anger. From the perspective of ordinary citizens, the usual distinction between government and “the private sector” starts to sound like a joke, given how the tech firms order our lives in far-reaching ways.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of “the network effect.” It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions. But it is not innovation, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government. 

Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” If we take the man at his word, it would seem to raise the question: can the United States government tolerate the existence of a rival government within its territory? 

In 1776, Americans answered that question with a resounding ”No!” and then fought a revolutionary war to make it so. The slogan of that war was “don’t tread on me.” This spirited insistence on self-rule expresses the psychic core of republicanism. As Senator Amy Klobuchar points out in her book Antitrust, the slogan was directed in particular at the British Crown’s grant of monopoly charters to corporations that controlled trade with the colonies. 

Today, the platform firms appear to many as an imperial power. The fundamental question “who rules?” is pressed upon America once again.

This is an edited version of Matthew B. Crawford’s testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on June 15th 2021.

At the time, precarious work felt playful and varied, like something you could always reverse later. I skipped between temp and short-term employments, lived hand-to-mouth and spent my energy on hipster art projects, experimental writing and fiddling about on the then still-nascent internet. It was fun and interesting. I wrote unreadable novels and was permanently skint. And, over time, I watched my resources and lifestyle diverge ever more sharply from those enjoyed by my university friends.

Much has been written in the last week about how the civil war within the modern Labour Party is a fight between working-class and bourgeois factions. Labour has been stolen, in this view, by a gaggle of North London poshos for whom Left-wing views are as obligatory as a Daunt Books cotton tote and something “ethnic” decorating the living-room wall.

Writing in UnHerd, veteran Labour campaigner and unionist Paul Embery recently blamed this on the party’s turn against the cultural values and priorities of the “traditional working-class base”: values that, in his view, include “communitarian impulse, traditional values, desire for belonging and sense of national pride”.

But while the tension between the woke Left and the “traditional” one is real, well-documented and hitting Labour hard, the conflict between Islington and Darlington is not the whole picture. For if there’s one thing my lucky escape from flatshares and gig-work taught me, it’s that a key line of battle in the 21st-century class wars is not guacamole versus mushy peas. Rather, it’s how liquid someone’s life and working conditions are.

These days, my life is the old-fashioned illiquid bourgeois package: a marriage, a family, a home. But my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on only came about because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home. Others have not been so fortunate: ONS data in 2017 showed that people aged 35 to 44, my cohort, are three times more likely to be renting than 20 years ago.

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In the years since I was pioneering millennial precarity, the balloon of home-ownership has gone on rising; the average house deposit is now 72% of an individual’s gross salary, or 137% in London. That blessed state now eludes not just feckless bohos like me but many who are striving as hard as they can to catch it — and still falling back. Previously, I’ve called this group an “Everywhere precariat”: the also-rans emerging from a higher education machine that now processes 50% of young people, before disgorging them into a shrinking job market with £30,000-£60,000 of debt, elite values and expectations of a middle-class lifestyle.

Those in this precariat who don’t score an inheritance, win the cryptocurrency lottery or otherwise roll a lucky six in the resources casino are left clutching their tickets for a middle-class party bus that seems to have departed without them. The US blogger Venkatesh Rao describes this lifestyle as “premium mediocre”: a kind of performance of bourgeois tastes and lifestyle, just about funded by hand-to-mouth spending.

For Rao, an increasingly critical class distinction here is whether or not you work “above the API” — a reference to the “application programming interface”, a software intermediary that allows two programmes to talk to one another. In other words, whether you issue commands to the digital networks that shape our lives, or whether they issue commands to you.

To illustrate, think about the difference between a freelance graphic designer and an Amazon warehouse worker. One operates Photoshop for a living: that is, “above the API” in Rao’s terms, telling a computer what to do. In contrast, the warehouse worker is monitored throughout the day, has their pick rate tracked and is “operated” by AI-powered performance optimisation algorithms — in other words: below the API.

But in terms of income, security, and prospects, there may be very little to distinguish them. As James Bloodworth detailed in Hired, warehouse operatives often compete through gangmaster-style agencies for insecure, unpredictable work with low-skilled migrants from all over the world. And they do so in a legislative environment that offers very few employment protections. Similarly, graphic designers compete through websites such as PeoplePerHour, against other designers from all over the world, in an environment that offers very few employment protections.

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And such precarious work is increasingly normal, especially for young people. These jobs are also the first to go in a pinch: the ONS reported in April this year that 53% of the employees who have vanished from PAYE over the last year were under 25. Both the warehouse worker and graphic designer have low-paid and sporadic income, funding at best low-cost and insecure rental housing; forming a family and having kids for many such people will feel nigh-on impossible.

Of course, there are plenty of occupations that don’t meet Rao’s description. But it disproportionately describes working life for the young, where a perfect storm of insecurity, rising costs and shrinking opportunities is driving them sharply Left: 56% of 18-24-year-olds who voted Labour in 2019, compared to 35% in my cohort (40s) and 14% in my mum’s (70s).

This group is increasingly militant. It’s a viewpoint epitomised by commentator Grace Blakeley, who is critical of Amazon while treating issues of culture and community as secondary to those of economic insecurity. What’s driving the civil war on the Left is that a life defined by instability tends to produce a worldview radically at odds with the core values that gave birth to “traditional working-class” politics.

The “traditional” Left – let’s call it the Proletariat Left – was born out of the industrial revolution: a transformation in working people’s lives that both displaced workers from agriculture and homogenised lives en masse. Think of the start and end bells marking factory shifts, the neat rows of workers’ cottages built in terrace style, the routinised movements of an assembly line or the sheer level of coordination needed to keep shift work running smoothly.

As well as being able to work en masse, this cohesion made it easier to organise en masse. Over time, what emerged was the potent blend of intellectuals, the quietly patriotic and the fiercely revolutionary that characterised twentieth-century Leftism. That Leftism humanised the rapacity of 19th-century industry, and softened raw capitalism with social-democratic infrastructure such as the NHS.

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In contrast, the Precariat Left was born into the post-industrial era, and many of its members have no personal experience of any other. They are defined by, suffer under, and also celebrate the absence of the very stability, cohesion and homogeneity that formed the bedrock of the Proletariat Left.

Stable jobs are dwindling — as is the cohesion that made it possible to unionise for better conditions. Above the API, how is a freelance graphic designer meant to negotiate for a better piece rate, when he or she is competing against workers all over the world? And below it, you don’t need to be a xenophobe to see how much more difficult it is to form a trade union if your co-workers are on zero-hours contracts, come from all over the world, and mostly talk to their fellow-countrymen during breaks. But at the same time, the Precariat Left welcomes diversity — because that’s the world they grew up in.

From the vantage point of the Proletariat Left, obviously what’s needed is more solidarity. For example, Blue Labour — perhaps the last remaining sub-group within the party that voices Proletarian Left concerns — sometimes discusses trade-offs between cultural cohesion and immigration. But from a Precariat Left point of view, talking about cultural cohesion simply doesn’t make much sense — and routinely traduces Blue Labour as racist.

Instead of Proletarian Left-style stability and solidarity, the world of the Precariat Left is shifting, provisional and temporary — whether in terms of identity, lifestyle, or domestic arrangement. It’s international; it doesn’t look askance at people with minority sexual identities or gender expressions; it’s suspicious of anything too conventional-looking — perhaps because those things now feel profoundly off-limits.

Coalition-building among the Precariat Left is not just between Hampstead and Hartlepool but across barriers of language, culture and values, as well as above and below the API and between graduates and non-graduates. At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.

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Yet it runs into difficulty on two fronts. Firstly, the Precariat Left preference for identities and alliances rather than values and solidarity is understandable on its own terms, but has also morphed into an aesthetic for many who are in fact comfortably “above the API” and always likely to remain so. In the process it risks turning against its own: consider how protests against police brutality in impoverished communities rapidly morphed into arguments about abolishing the police — in truth not a popular policy among the actual precariat, though still appealing to elite anti-authoritarians from safe neighbourhoods.

Secondly, as we’ve seen recently in Britain, hearing their entire worldview traduced as obsolete bigotry understandably incenses the Proletariat Left. And this group, despite the tectonic demographic shifts away from its worldview, is still numerous, and electorally essential for a Left-wing party.

This may change, though. Most of the giants of the 20th-century labour movement are old, or already gone. Most attendees at the Durham Miners’ Gala have no first-hand pit experience. The last industrial jobs in the West are falling to robots, and both the mass culture and the labour movement it created are a distant memory for most.

But it’s not as though working people no longer need advocacy. Amazon recently apologised for falsely denying that its drivers are sometimes compelled by tight delivery schedules to urinate in bottles. In response, the new post-industrial Left seeks to challenge Amazon and its ilk today, not via the old union style but forms of solidarity that celebrate instability, diversity and inclusion.

Will they be successful? This version of the Left has shown a poor record so far of evading those gilded entryists who love to play with instability but will never live amid the consequences of their games. And it remains to be seen whether the new Left is capable of organising at the scale needed to take on our new corporate overlords. But for the sake of the new precariats, let’s hope they are.

Even before lockdown, the conflation of work and home was well-established. Companies call themselves “families”. Cubicles have been replaced by the supposedly more relaxed open-plan office. The suit, symbol of the 9-5 day, is on the way out. “Knowledge workers” curl up on their sofas.

Work has also supplanted the home in more fundamental ways. In the mid-18th century Samuel Johnson reckoned that the ultimate human ambition was “to be happy at home.” For many, it’s now the workplace that promises meaning and fulfilment. Even Amazon warehouse labourers look up to see signs reading “We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”

Choose a job you feel passionate about — so a thousand gurus have advised us — and you’ll never work a day in your life. But as people are starting to notice, the language of “following your passion” is also a convenient way for employers to change the subject from, say, decent pay and conditions. Nobody is easier to exploit than someone working for love. If you want to build a prison without anyone noticing, make it look like a playground.

The homeliness of work, then, turns out to have a more sinister aspect. Home is a place of self-sacrifice; so it makes sense that gig platforms like Fiverr openly seek workers for whom “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug Of Choice.” At home, you expect to be known and seen; naturally, then, employers take ever more invasive steps to survey their employees, tracking each mouse-click or making workers’ health-insurance rates dependent on how much exercise their Fitbits record.

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WeWork's mad messiah

By Daniel Kalder

The two faces of modern work — one cheerful, one ruthless — are the subject of a couple of new books, Jamie K McCallum’s Worked Over and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. They tell similar stories, of stressed and burnt-out workers ruing the broken promises of the “Follow your passion” economy. Wealth, of course, has flowed upwards: in the last 30 years, according to the policy analyst Matt Bruenig, the US’s top 1% has increased its net worth by $21 trillion, while the bottom half has lost $900 billion and, once you factor in debt, literally owns less than nothing.

And power has flowed in the same direction. Welfare programmes force the destitute to choose work over childcare; low-wage employees are subject to algorithms which deprive them of predictable schedules, with severe consequences for mental health and family life. Even the most “flexible” workers have to meet tough standards: to maintain good status on the handyman platform TaskRabbit, for instance, you have to say yes to 85% of requests.

McCallum’s book is lucid and tightly argued, but Jaffe’s is in some ways more intriguing: it shows how the madness of modern work has opened the mainstream to radical thinking. In Jaffe’s case the radicalism has a Marxist flavour. Work Won’t Love You Back, which has been applauded everywhere from Marie Claire to the Financial Times, makes an unfashionably dogmatic argument. Wage labour under capitalism just is exploitation, Jaffe tells us. Your boss may seem like a decent person, but in the end “financial concerns will come first for them.” Jaffe doesn’t “believe in bosses”; or, for that matter, in the family, which has “developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labour … The only option, as theorist Jordy Rosenberg wrote, is to ride ‘the supernova of the family’s destruction’ through to something new.” Jaffe doesn’t believe in charitable works, either (“a relationship of power”). Only some kind of revolution, she believes, can restore us to our true selves.

Anyone baffled by the enduring appeal of Marxism should read Jaffe’s final chapter, with its plaintive note of spiritual yearning. “It is true,” Jaffe concedes, “that there is no outside to capitalism, but it is also true that there are moments in our lives where we can see, briefly, beyond it.” Our nameless desires, she writes, come closest to making sense on a strike or protest march. “Solidarity doesn’t mean you have to like every person you’re fighting alongside. But in those moments where you stand shoulder to shoulder, you do love one another.” Here the reader catches the last glimmerings of the revolutionary dream, that hope which throughout the 20th century animated so many courageous and intelligent people — as well as quite a lot of psychopaths and moral monsters — to give their lives to it.

Besides, it isn’t just radical socialists who are rethinking work from the ground up. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently toyed with the idea that “there’s no natural dignity in work.” Prophets of a robot takeover, like the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, argue that we should reshape the welfare state to serve a mostly wageless society. The post-work movement actively hopes that the machines can be given our jobs while we find something better to do; proponents of “fully automated luxury communism” agree, only adding that the robots should be collectively owned.

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These groups are right that too much time is currently spent on mindless wage-slavery instead of friendship, creativity and truth-seeking. But there are a couple of problems — even apart from the much-disputed question of whether a robot job apocalypse is really on the cards. The first is that, despite it all, many people (including the most eloquent critics of contemporary work culture) really do like or even love their jobs. Work can be demeaning, but it can sometimes be deeply fulfilling, whereas a utopia of round-the-clock poetry readings and community bake sales might at some point start to pall. The other problem with “post-work” is that it assumes a future which “we” as a society are all going to shape. But right now, there is hardly a functional “we” — there are workers and there are owners, and the owners have all the power.

Jamie McCallum’s book is especially acute on this point. He tells the story of Disneyland’s underground laundry service, where employees arrived one day “to find giant screens affixed around the workplace, with their names colour-coded like traffic lights blinking on and off.” If they failed to meet productivity targets, their names switched from green to amber and then red. Hidden away in an upstairs room, managers tweaked the system for maximum efficiency; anyone who understands power dynamics will not be surprised to learn that, before long, the injury rate rose, the break room and bathroom were deserted, morale plummeted and the workers began to turn on each other. Until, thanks to one determined leader, they banded together and came up with a pact to all work at a reasonable pace. It is the kind of collective action which unions once organised. But today, the worker often stands alone against a giant employer.

All of which gives extra significance to this month’s vote in Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers could become the first in the United States to form a union. The almost unbelievable tactics used to thwart them — reprogramming traffic lights, bombarding employees with anti-union messages — show that Amazon fears the tide is turning. After years of telling its workers what to think (“We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”), the company seems appalled at the possibility of those workers speaking with their own collective voice. Is it any wonder that capitalism is going out of favour, when an astronomically wealthy corporation which employs 1.3 million people worldwide can’t abide the thought of negotiating with them? You don’t have to be sentimental about “solidarity” to hope fervently that, this month in Alabama, the workers win.

God help all of us, Rule 34 has been working its magic on recent Washington politics. I’m not talking about the way the real-life dating history of the sort-of-historian, Trump cheerleader and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza — who is on record as having courted both Laura Ingraham and Anne Coulter at one time or another — resembles a discontinued experiment in alt-Right “slash” fanfiction. Nor the grisly real-life sexual behaviour of the beltway hanger-on Jason Miller. Nor, indeed, those indelible images of Rudy Giuliani adjusting his trousers on a motel bed in the new Borat movie.

No, I’m talking about the equally grim but at least victimless proliferation of Trump-era erotica available at knockdown prices in Amazon’s Kindle store. There’s really quite a lot of it, and some of it is very eccentric indeed. Of course, as much as you can put it down to Rule 34, it seems likely that a handful of PhDs are going to be spawned by this stuff. For my recent survey of the canon suggests that most of the authors are not aiming to arouse a sexual response in the reader so much as to make the reader gag — with laughter or revulsion.

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That makes sense, anthropologically. After all, lewd sexual depictions have long been a primary recourse of political satire. Think of the filthy late-medieval flytings of Skelton, the restoration rumpty tumpty of the foul-mouthed Second Earl of Rochester, the earthy vulgarity of a Hogarth or a Gillray; or in our own age the early work of Gerald Scarfe or the Spitting Image material that was too rude to put on TV. The high-quality stuff survives — Rochester was a first-rate poet — but you can be pretty sure that in each age any number of talentless poetasters and loo-wall scribblers were likewise aiming their political commentary below the belt.

Take “Chuck Tingle” (I suspect this of being a pseudonym; apologies to Ma and Pa Tingle if I’m wrong). One of the most prolific pornographers on the Kindle Store, Mr Tingle makes up in productivity what he lacks in literary — and he certainly seems to have taken an interest in the day-to-day beltway news cycle, as well as being jolly keen on bottoms. One of the many titles available at the time of writing was Domald Tromp’s Ass Is Haunted By The Handsome Ghost Of His Incriminating Tax Returns.  Or: Lindsey Ram’s Ass Is Haunted By The Physical Manifestation Of His Hypocritical Words About Not Filling A Vacant Supreme Court Seat During An Election Year Which He Specifically Ask To Haunt Him.  

One of the things you’ll notice about Mr Tingle’s work is characteristic of much of this subgenre of erotica. Its authors are far more cautious about libel lawyers than they are about family values campaigners. So “Lindsey Ram” is in no way to be mistaken for the senior senator from South Carolina with a similar sounding name, and likewise any resemblance between “Domald Tromp” and Donald Trump is entirely a trick of the reader’s imagination. In Dirty Debate: When the Masks Come Off, by “Byron Buffoon” (again, apologies to Ma and Pa Buffoon), the elderly but Viagra-toting protagonist is a presidential candidate called “Hoe Bi-man”. Attending a masked Hallowe’en party at the White House, he finds himself snatching a moment of sordid passion with “President Hump”. “Will you shut up, man?” he exclaims at one point. “I can’t stand your voice but goddamn this ass feels amazing.”

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We should at least consider the possibility that real sexual feeling is involved, of course. Could all this be a sign that the ferocity of the culture wars, like Beatrice and Benedick’s “merry war” of courtship in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the proxy for something else? After all, it’s a law not just of the internet but of the human libido that the more taboo something is the more arousing some people are going to find it. As Woody Allen (don’t @ me) said: “Is sex dirty? Only when it’s being done right.”  Does it, perhaps, account for the flowering of fantasies in which  political passions are channelled into baser enthusiasms? Is there a love-across-the-barricades, opposites-attract thing going on, in which milquetoast liberals secretly dream of being given a good seeing to by a hairy QAnon Shaman or a redneck in a Maga hat?

Honestly? I doubt it. Most of these stories show signs of having been written at some speed, and with drink taken. Donald Feels the Bern, by Cliff Fuxtable, has a bash at dramatising the psychosexual tensions between Left and Right. It opens with an “ageing Marxist” on a bar stool, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, fulminating against the Koch Brothers and wondering if the struggle to which he has devoted his life was worth it: “Just once, thought Bernie, I’d like to give the 1% a taste of their own medicine. Give it to ‘em nice and hard.” Happily, he gets the chance when a billionaire called Donald walks into the bar, and soon they’re in the toilets, reaching across the aisle. “Bernie had to admit that cavorting with a chivalrous billionaire was more arousing than he expected. Perhaps he could spend less time railing on the 1%,” it occurs to our hero, “and actually start railing the 1%.” The scenes that follow would give Lou Dobbs himself nightmares.

Charlie Dirk’s Ins-erection At the Capitol sees a Maga-hatted Capitol invader coming upon a wizened turtle-man (actually a turtle, for some reason, but let’s pass over that): “one of the traitors he hunted — a sitting US senator”. But rage turns to passion and “within seconds the two star-crossed antonyms were deeply intertwined…”. The old senator’s “papery old skin” is said to slap against the young stallion “like take-out crepe – pliant, somewhat warm, but still enjoyable”. 

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Why can't the Left let go of Trump?

By Kat Rosenfield

The protagonist of Babs Fluffmore’s I Pr0ned the GOP Platform is a liberal-minded seductress whose “almighty magic hooha” is carving a bisexual trail of havoc through a Republican convention in the romantic city of Cleveland. The story takes a strange turn halfway through when she steals a printed copy of the GOP Platform and uses her magic hooha to bring it to life. “It had transformed from a multi-strategic manuscript to a strong, attractive man… his body was composed of pages fluttering with excitement… ‘Shadows of Schafly!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s so big!’”

We are in the realm, here, not so much of proper erotica as of home-made satirical invective. From this point of view, then, T-Rex Pounds Presidential Butt by Buster Fritz is part of a distinguished literary and philosophical tradition that includes Aristophanes and Juvenal. But there again, it’s also about a President Tramp (the name thing again) and his successor President Byeden taking turns to be goosed in the caboose by a priapic dinosaur.

I’m afraid that though I have tried hard to find a sample of this story suitable for quotation on a respectable website such as this one, the project defeated me. Suffice to say it involves a lot of dinosaur dingus, and that if that’s your bag you’ll find it free to read with KindleUnlimited, and it may one day be a set text for your grandchildren’s GCSE History.

These are among the alarming stats cited by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, published earlier this year just as lockdown sped up some of the trends he chronicled: increased tech dominance, rising inequality between rich and poor, not just in wealth but in health, and record levels of loneliness (4,000 Japanese people die alone each week, he cheerfully informs us).

Kotkin is among a handful of thinkers warning about a cluster of related trends, including not just inequality but declining social mobility, rising levels of celibacy and a shrinking arena of political debate controlled by a small number of like-minded people.

The one commonality is that all of these things, along with the polarisation of politics along quasi-religious lines, the decline of nationalism and the role of universities in enforcing orthodoxy, were the norm in pre-modern societies. In our economic structure, our politics, our identity and our sex lives we are moving away from the trends that were common between the first railway and first email. But what if the modern age was the anomaly, and we’re simply returning to life as it has always been?

Inequality was almost universal from the agricultural to the industrial revolution, and medieval Europe would have had a GINI index higher than modern Latin America, with a handful of families owning up to a quarter of land in England, and the monarch a similar share.

Most of the medieval left-behinds would have worked at home or nearby, the term “commuter” only being coined in the 1840s as going to an office or factory became the norm, a trend that only began to reverse in the 21^st century (accelerating sharply this year).

Although I imagine most people will return to the office after the vaccine, unemployment patterns will continue on their pre-modern course. One of the peculiar features of the modern world is the shortage of labour, while the medieval era was characterised by mass underemployment, except in times of harvest, which is why land was so valuable relative to labour.

The industrial revolution increased the demand for labour and helped drive up wages, which rocketed in the 18th century, but with automation increasing numbers will be unemployed or underemployed; while government policies used to focus on creating work, the seemingly inevitable logic of Universal Basic Income reflects the fact that we may have to give up on that dream.

Along with income stratification, another pre-modern trend is the decline of social mobility, which almost everywhere is slowing (with the exception of immigrant communities, many of whom come from the middle class back home).

Social mobility in the US has fallen by 20% since the early 1980s, according to Kotkin, and the Californian-based Antonio Garcia Martinez has talked of an informal caste system in the state, with huge wage differences between rich and poor and housing restrictions removing any hope of rising up. California now has among the most dystopian of income inequality, with vast numbers of multimillionaires but also a homeless underclass now suffering from “medieval” diseases.

Unfortunately, where California leads, America and then Europe follows.

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Social mobility was not unknown before the modern age, but it was rare and mostly only possible through the Church or war. William of Wykeham was the son of a Hampshire freeman and rose to become Bishop of Winchester and also Chancellor of England, founding Winchester College, the oldest public school in England, with its famous motto “Manners makyth man”. But Wykeham was fortunate to have received patronage from two wealthy men, which was necessary before the age of welfare and free education.

Patronage has made a comeback, especially among artists, who have largely returned to their pre-modern financial norm: desperate poverty. Whereas musicians and writers have always struggled, the combination of housing costs, reduced government support and the internet has ended what was until then an unappreciated golden age; instead they turn once again to patrons, although today it is digital patronage rather than aristocratic benevolence.

A caste system creates caste interests, and some liken today’s economy to medieval Europe’s tripartite system, in which society was divided between those who pray, those who fight and those who work. Just as the medieval clergy and nobility had a common interest in the system set against the laborers, so it is today, with what Thomas Piketty calls the Merchant Right and Brahmin Left — two sections of the elite with different worldviews but a common interest in the liberal order, and a common fear of the third estate.

This new age of liberal inequality is dominated by and defined by tech, with the four big firms, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, having a GDP equal to France. Tech accounts for eight of the 20 richest people on earth, as well as nine of the richest 13 under-40s, all of them based in California.

Tech is by nature anti-egalitarian, creating natural monopolies that wield vastly more power than any of the great industrial barons of the modern age, and have cultural power far greater than newspapers of the past, closer to that of the Church in Kotkin’s view; their algorithms and search engines shape our worldview and our thoughts, and they can, and do, censor people with heretical views.

Rising inequality and stratification is linked to the decline of modern sexual habits. The nuclear family is something of a western oddity, developing as a result of Catholic Church marriage laws and reaching its zenith in the 19^th and 20^th centuries with the Victorian cult of family and mid-20^th century “hi honey I’m home” Americana. Today, however, the nuclear household is in decline, with 32 million American adults living with their parents or grandparents, a growing trend in pretty much all western countries except Scandinavia (which may partly explain the region’s relative success with Covid-19).

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This is a return to the norm, as with the rise of the involuntarily celibate. Celibacy was common in medieval Europe, where between 15-25% of men and women would have joined holy orders. In the early modern period, with rising incomes and Protestantism, celibacy rates plunged but they have now returned to the medieval level.

The first estate of this neo-feudal age is centred on academia, which has likewise returned to its pre-modern norm. At the time of the 1968 student protests university faculty in both the US and Britain slightly leaned left, as one would expect of the profession. By the time of Donald Trump’s election many university departments had Democrat: Republican ratios of 20, 50 or even 100:1. Some had no conservative academics, or none prepared to admit it. Similar trends are found in Britain.

Around 900 years ago Oxford evolved out of communities of monks and priests; for centuries it was run by “clerics”, although that word had a slightly wider meaning, and such was the legacy that the celibacy rule was not fully dropped until 1882.

This was only a decade after non-Anglicans were allowed to take degrees for the first time, Communion having been a condition until then. A similar pattern existed in the United States, where each university was associated with a different church: Yale and Harvard with the Congregationalists, Princeton with Presbyterians, Columbia with Episcopalians. The increasingly narrow focus on what can be taught at these institutions is not new.

Similarly, politics has returned to its pre-modern role of religion. The internet has often been compared to the printing press, and when printing was introduced it didn’t lead to a world of contemplative philosophy; books of high-minded inquiry were vastly outsold by tracts about evil witches and heretics.

The word “medieval” is almost always pejorative but the post-printing early modern period was the golden age of religious hatred and torture; the major witch hunts occurred in an age of rising literacy, because what people wanted to read about was a lot of the time complete garbage. Likewise, with the internet, and in particular the iPhone, which has unleashed the fires of faith again, helping spread half-truths and creating a new caste of firebrand preachers (or, as they used to be called, journalists).

Most of us grew up in the industrial age of politics, when the great divide was over class and economics. But that is something of an anomaly — and the culture wars that were first identified in the mid-90s are just the return to normal, of people screeching at each other about their sinful beliefs.

English politics from the 16^th to the 19^th century was “a branch of theology” in Robert Tombs’s words; Anglicans and rural landowners formed the Conservative Party, and Nonconformists and the merchant elite the core of the Liberal Party. It was only with industrialisation that political focus turned to class and economics, but the identity-based conflict between Conservatives and Labour in the 2020s seems closer to the division of Tories and Whigs than to the political split of 50 years ago; it’s about worldview and identity rather than economic status.

Post-modern politics have also shaped pre-modern attitudes to class. In medieval society the poor were despised, and numerous words stem from names for the lower orders, among them ignoble, churlish, villain and boor (in contrast “generous” comes from generosus, and “gentle” from gentilis, terms for the aristocracy). Medieval poems and fables depict peasant as credulous, greedy and insolent — and when they get punched, as they inevitably do, they deserve it.

Compare this to the evolution of comedy in the post-industrial west, where the butt of the joke is the rube from the small town, laughed at for being out of touch with modern political sensibilities. The most recent Borat film epitomises this form of modern comedy that, while meticulously avoiding any offence towards the sacred ideas of the elite, relentlessly humiliates the churls.

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The third estate are mocked for still clinging to that other outmoded modern idea, the nation-state. Nation-states rose with the technology of the modern day — printing, the telegraph and railways — and they have been undone by the technology of the post-modern era. A liberal in England now has more in common with a liberal in Germany than with his conservative neighbour, in a way that was not possible before the internet.

Nations were semi-imagined communities, and what follows is a return to the norm — tribalism, on a micro scale, but tribalism nonetheless, whether along racial, religious or most likely political-sectarian tribes. Indeed, in some ways we’re seeing a return to empire.

The common theme running through all these trends is the decline of the middle class, a group who were unusually strong in the industrial age but are struggling in the tech era. The mid-century United States may have been the best time ever to be the average man, although as always one form of equality clashes with another; egalitarianism between men went with reduced opportunities for women, as well as racial exclusivity.

The middle-class age meant the triumph of bourgeoise values and the decline of the middle class has led to their downfall, widely despised and mocked by believers in the higher-status bohemian attitudes. Now the age of the average man is over, and the age of the global aristocrat has arrived.

But when it came to the crunch, it appeared that Airbnb did not see the company’s relationships with its hosts as requiring particularly substantial obligations. That relationship was only useful so long as it was mutually beneficial; and now that it wasn’t, the weaker party was on his own.

The question of what obligations, if any, a business should have to anyone but their shareholders is an old one, but for some decades the most popular answer has been “None save what regulations demand, and regulations should be as light as possible”. The resulting commercial environment can be characterised by the callous phrase “business is business”, a formulation that dismisses all considerations save economic competitiveness, even in the face of suffering inflicted by this approach.

At the same time, we have continued to believe (informally at least) that loyalty and mutual obligation can and should persist — at least in the service of economic competitiveness. The whole point of ‘networking’, after all, is to build the relationships that can drive further commercial activity; pursuing customer loyalty is in a company’s economic interest, and will drive a higher quality of service and hence better products.

This central privileging of commercial individualism has, over time, created an economy that resembles a pyramid. Each layer seeks to skim rents off the layer below, all the way down to a low-paid precariat whose role is to make the actual stuff — such as food, buildings or consumer products — that powers the whole ecosystem.

Few organisations better epitomise this model than Airbnb, where the platform’s owners earn rents by providing advertising exposure to Airbnb ‘hosts’, who in turn seek rents from ‘guests’ who want accommodation. This model is not even dependent on asset ownership, but has in fact prompted a further proliferation of activities in the pyramid, such as arbitrage, managing others’ portfolios or even outright scams.

Airbnb sets great stock by ‘culture’, promoting a glossy, aspirational worldview via its cutesy magazine. John Patrick Leary savaged this Airbnb ideal in Jacobin in January, as “a fantasy of production without exploitation, of an economy made of smooth glossy surfaces, benefiting all”. Now, as coronavirus rips through economic systems worldwide, we are beginning to see how little real power this model of ‘culture’ actually commands, however chummy its copywriting, within a system where loyalty is optional but competitiveness institutionalised.

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The Airbnb host in the viral video, sad though his situation is, didn’t receive much sympathy from those lower down the rent-seeking food chain. But then, why should they? The Airbnb ecosystem has been accused of contributing to housing shortages in high-rent cities, as landlords eschew less lucrative longer-term rentals in favour of Airbnb, pushing up prices in the remaining rental stock. Wired estimates that one in 50 London properties is let via Airbnb, while a 2017 study by the FCA found that Londoners in their 20s were paying almost half of their income in rent.

Though rent-seeking slum landlords are not new, the widespread acceptance of a moral system that views rent-seeking as legitimate (albeit unwelcome) is out of step with post-war ethics, if not those of earlier ages.

Though they were landlords, my grandparents would have been baffled and repelled by it. As farmers in Herefordshire, from the 1950s until my step-grandfather’s death in the 1990s, they let their attached farm cottage at a peppercorn rent to Bob, who worked with them on the farm.

When I stayed with them, I remember often coming back from an outing to find muddy vegetables left on the kitchen windowsill, gifts from Bob’s garden. As my grandparents became more frail, Bob and his family did odd jobs for them, kept an eye on them and kept them in countless small ways connected to the community.

After my step-grandfather died, the farm was sold and the proceeds divided between my grandmother and my step-grandfather’s children. My step-grandfather’s son-in-law, a property developer, was keen to evict Bob and his family, and re-designate his cottage from agricultural to residential status, so as to realise its market value.

My grandmother balked at what she saw as an unacceptable betrayal of a long-standing relationship. To resolve the ensuing conflict, she gifted some tens of thousands from her share of the farm sale to Bob, so he could make a competitive offer and stay in his family home.

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In my grandmother’s worldview, shaped by her experience of wartime communitarianism, land ownership and rent were elements in a broader set of mutual moral obligations. To her, asset ownership conferred a duty to ensure Bob’s welfare as far as she could. Her stepson, on the other hand, saw the situation through a post-Thatcher transactional lens, in which it was proper to disregard such considerations in favour of the asset-owner’s right to maximise economic gain.

When it works, this latter model — “the Airbnb model”, you might call it — creates a mobile, liquid and creative economy, in which growth and innovation are unleashed to drive new gains. Economic relations are freely entered into by autonomous individuals and organisations, via agreements enforced by contracts, all founded on a presumption that each entity involved is — as is proper — engaged in the pursuit of its own interest. Reciprocal social connections my grandmother saw as conferring binding obligations are here largely decorative, as Airbnb’s hosts just discovered to their distress.

As this model gained widespread adoption in the late twentieth century, it enabled the ‘release’ of considerable economic ‘value’ that had previously been constrained by social limits. Building societies demutualised, enabling these institutions to move from the less lucrative business of lending money to small regional businesses into the wildly profitable one of trading financial products — at least until the system collapsed in 2008.

Elsewhere, companies saved money by outsourcing jobs instead of incurring the obligations attendant on direct hiring. At a personal level, all prizes in this mass shedding of social obligations went to individuals with the energy, entrepreneurial vigour and determination to keep re-skilling. Today, all are told to view ourselves as individual maximisers of personal brands, and the quintessential Airbnb model worker is a freelancer, engaged in some more or less lucrative aspect of the gig economy.

Not all businesses today are selfish rent-seekers. Far from it: faced with the pandemic, some companies are demonstrating a keen awareness of their social embeddedness. Manufacturers are retooling to meet social needs such as ventilators, while the restaurant chain Leon is delivering meals to NHS critical staff. But everywhere the Airbnb model dominates, companies are still seeking to minimise obligations.

Amazon, owned by the world’s richest man, has been criticised by senators for its lack of protection for workers affected by coronavirus. Airbnb only offered cancellation compensation to hosts after an outcry. The University of Pennsylvania will pay directly employed staff this term, but lay off subcontracted dining staff at the end of the month. And freelancers are now struggling and also the most elusive demographic for government to reach with bailouts.

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By David Goodhart

The usual voices are now declaring that the solution to coronavirus must, inescapably, be socialism: more nationalisation, more state support for workers. Jeremy Corbyn’s retiring salvo amounted to “coronavirus proves I was right”. But underwriting businesses’ ability to pay their workers — even if, or especially if, they are not willing to see themselves as having obligations to those workers — does nothing to address an “Airbnb model” of commerce that explicitly rejects any notion that the commercial sphere owes duties to wider society as well as to shareholders.

In 2008, government bailed out the banks at taxpayer expense, driving a decade of public service cuts. Today, faced with total economic shutdown, they are bailing out the rest of the business world as well. Others have already pointed out that the commitment of governments to underwrite economies throughout the developed world will amount, in practice, to a staggering transfer of wealth to existing asset owners from ordinary workers and taxpayers. Far beyond just the banks, this is now happening across the entire global economy, on a scale that dwarfs the 2008 bank bailout.

But the solution cannot be socialism, or indeed a massive wealth transfer to asset owners under the sign of socialism. We need to talk not about nationalising companies — which has not gone especially well whenever it has been tried — but re-mutualising or re-embedding businesses in a wider network of social duty and purpose. Companies such as Timpson are leading the way on this front. We need to talk about how about how we incentivise prosocial corporate behaviour — structurally, that is, not as greenwash or window dressing — and sanction companies that cling to the Airbnb model.

However we go about it, we must now grasp the nettle of about re-institutionalising social purpose, and social obligations, in the world of commerce. If we do not, we will end up (as in 2008) mortgaging our children to the eyeballs to shore up an economic model where, the higher up the “value chain” you go, the more returns are realised by liquidating mutual social obligations.

I am not optimistic. All the talk about worker representation on boards came to nothing after the Great Crash. Between the default Tory setting of market fundamentalism, and a Labour Party captured by the hard left, I see little hope of us taking concrete steps to re-mutualise commerce in the near future. Far more likely will be that we inch ever closer to adopting a system where an overwhelming state underwrites Airbnb capitalism. China, in other words, just without the bat soup.

A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.

Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.

That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.

Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.

Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:

“Nah, don’t tell anyone about it, bro.”

Wow, just wow. I mean, he paid for that (allegedly). Yet perhaps I am being unrealistic, and even unfair in my expectation that Bezos be all will-to-power all the time. Love can make fools of kings, as the philosopher Bryan Ferry reminds us. Besides, even that interpretation may be jumping to conclusions; Bezos’s consultation with the psychic may not have been the consequence of an otherwise rational mind scrambled by love.

Who is to say that he doesn’t visit psychics regularly to consult on all manner of things? He wouldn’t be the first powerful person to do so. The Reagan White House had a secret astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was sought on far more consequential matters than running a retail empire, while Hillary Clinton roamed the halls having conversations with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt, although she claims it was a psychological exercise. And what about that time T. Blair and his wife Cherie smeared fruit over each other in a replica Mayan pyramid as part of a “rebirthing” ritual? A trip to the psychic seems pretty tame next to that.

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Meanwhile, Bezos’s behavior is not necessarily an outlier among his peers in the tech world. Many of these hi-tech oligarchs have an interest in the spiritual side of existence. Steve Jobs was a big fan of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi (also the inspiration for the ultra-proggy Yes LP Tales from Topographic Oceans) and also retained a Zen master to serve as his spiritual adviser.

Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, is a devotee of self-actualization and yoga. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter spent a recent birthday on a 10 day silent meditation trip to Myanmar. And Anthony Levandowski, an engineer central to both Google and Uber’s self-driving car programs established his own church (of AI). I could go on, but you get the picture.

It also turns out that my somewhat down-at-heel conception of what a consultation with a psychic looks like is less than accurate, at least when it comes to the super-wealthy. Roadside mediums are for the proles; Bezos’s psychic is reported to have cost “thousands”. In fact, those with a talent for talking to the dead or revealing the future can make good money if they can nurture the right kind of clientele.

For instance Laura Day, a “financial psychic” who advised both Wall Street bankers and the CEO of data storage firm Seagate Technology, charged $10,000 a month for her services, and that was back in 2008. Branding is important with this elite audience; for instance, Robert Ohotto, an astrologer whose clients are reported to include Google executives, describes himself as an ”intuitive life strategist”; David Zarza, who, like Amazon, is based in Seattle, describes himself as a “psychic medium and intuitive life coach.”

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Indeed, the mystic offerings on offer in today’s America have proliferated like the varieties of kombucha on offer in Whole Foods (acquired by Bezos in 2017), as entrepreneurs of the $pirit world have sought to establish a presence in this increasingly crowded marketplace.

A quick Google search for metaphysical services in my local area turned up such options as “profound reading and instant healing”, an “eclectic intuitive”, varying takes on astrology, “wise women holistic services”, “angel readings”, “aura readings”, “intuitive-angelic-reiki readings”, an “intuitive tune-up” consultation, “throat chakra clearing”, “spirit whispering” and “Akashic record readings” based on “theosophy and anthroposophy.”

Thus the language of mediums merges with the language of wellness, a crossover exemplified by episode six of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, currently streaming on Netflix and which I absolutely do not recommend unless you are writing an article about psychics for UnHerd and need to do some research.

And even then, I do not recommend it. In this episode, the queen of this notorious wellness/lifestyle brand (valued at over $250 million) dispatches her millennial, (mostly) female employees to discover their inner mediums by participating in assorted exercises aimed at channeling the dead with a certain Laura Lynne Jackson. What was most striking to me was how aggressively boring the show was; there was no spooky music, no crystal balls, nothing morbid.

The studio was tasteful and brightly lit, some of the activities took place in a lush garden, the graphics were straight out of a lifestyle magazine, the millennials were all young and upbeat (bar one sceptic, who even so still smiled a lot), and the language was of “energy” and “connection” as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter — a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.

This was the world of psychics gone fully mainstream, but it doesn’t end there. For those who like a dash of intersectionality with their “mystical services”, there’s always Chani Nicholas, the subject of one of the most eye-wateringly terrible articles published in the last decade, on the website of the perennially-straining-to-get down-with-the-kids Rolling Stone: “Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology”. And no, that’s not a Titania McGrath spoof.

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As organized religion declines in the US, this all comes with a certain dreary predictability; I am reminded, once again, of the observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Nature abhors a vacuum and today’s spiritual entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the gap. Indeed, according to one report, the demand for “psychic services” in the US is growing steadily and the market is worth around $2 billion.

Little wonder, then, that Venture Capital is trying to get a slice of the action. Want to know what the stars have in store for you? There is an app for that; more than one, in fact. For a mere $19.99 a month Sanctuary  will provide you with birth charts, opportunities to talk to professional astrologers and promises “weekly cosmic insights sent straight to your inbox.” Meanwhile, Co-Star promises “hyper-personalized, real time horoscopes” and claims to utilize an AI that “merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers”. Both have attracted millions of dollars in Venture Capital, according to The New York Times.

But that gives me another thought. What if Bezos is not, in fact, a fool for love, nor as keen on metaphysics and mysteries of the soul as some of his tech oligarch peers? Could it be that his interest in the psychic realm is actually part of his plan for world domination, and that this most relentless of tycoons has his eye on the growing market for spiritual services?

Could spirit mediums and astrology soon join keto-friendly organic kelp granules, data storage and the Washington Post on the ever growing list of products and services owned and/or supplied by Bezos? Will Amazon Prime soon include insight into our fortunes alongside movies and free two-day shipping?

Psychics of America, gaze into your futures. Bezos is coming.

Much of the focus so far has been on the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall in the North and Midlands. The people’s party has been losing ground to the Tories among the working class for decades but it has ramped up under Corbyn who, ironically, was touted back in 2015 as the candidate who, by swerving to the Left, could win back the party’s disenfranchised “core” vote.

Four years later and nothing remotely like this has transpired. In seats where Labour once commanded majorities exceeding 20,000, the Tories are triumphant. Talk of blue-collar conservatism is in the air. Brexit is one of the causes but there is a deeper malaise in the Labour camp. The party is increasingly dominant among students and liberal voters in the big cities but the working classes are turning their backs on them.

Things are more complicated than that, of course. Labour is still doing well in northern cities such as Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield; yet it is flailing in towns. This is as true in parts of the South as it is in the North and Midlands.

Back in 2016 I spent some time in Rugeley in the West Midlands. And I returned there last year to make an audio-documentary for UnHerd. The former mining town is situated in the constituency of Cannock Chase, which, in the years from 1997 to 2010, saw a Labour majority of 14,000 gradually wittered down to nothing; today the constituency boasts a Conservative majority of 20,000.

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Rugeley’s town centre has a ghostly air. Blackened brick dwellings, dwellings which once housed the town’s miners and their families have — since the shuttering of the pits — been partitioned and turned into buy-to-let properties. It was in one of these houses that I lived during my stay here, lodging with two young Romanians and an older English man in a house that reeked of cheap paint. All the inhabitants of the house worked in the Amazon warehouse — or “fulfilment centre” as it was called by management — situated about a mile down the road.

Amazon set up shop in Rugeley in 2011, 20 years after the Lea Hall Colliery shut its gates. The colliery, which opened in 1960, was the first modern coal mine opened by the National Coal Board, and the Cannock Chase coalfields at one point supported 48 mines. The last of these, in Littleton, closed in 1993.

The Amazon warehouse itself — the pale-blue colour of a swimming pool — looks incongruous amid a landscape of sodden green fields. At a café on the high street a local woman had told me that Amazon’s arrival had been a “massive thing for the community”, recalling that “There was gonna be all these jobs, but no one ended up getting one, did they? There’s a hell of a lot of anger round here about it now”.

She was referring to the army of Eastern Europeans who were brought in each day on coaches to work the shifts that locals were unwilling to do. “They don’t employ local people, do they?” the woman said accusingly, jabbing a finger at me as I left the café.

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

“Well, they never seem to take any locals on, that’s all I’m saying.”

When I revisited the town last year, that café had shut.

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Amazon — or more accurately, the agencies Amazon tasked with employing people — did in fact take on locals. I met some while working at the company. But most didn’t stick around. The work was too gruelling and the regime too authoritarian; we used to walk around 10 miles a day and were forbidden from talking with co-workers during shift time.

Taking a day off sick — even with a note from the doctor’s — landed you with a disciplinary “point”. Spend too long on a toilet break and you received another point. Six of these and you lost your job. Amazon was the largest employer in Rugeley and like other big employers in the towns employed its staff on zero-hours contracts.

On the surface Rugeley was a success story, a model pupil of the “regeneration” agenda promoted by various governments. Identikit out-of-town retail parks sprang up all over the place during the nineties and noughties. Like the rise of companies such as Amazon, this may have helped to strangle our high streets, but the payoff was job creation.

Amazon’s arrival in areas such as Rugeley, Swansea, Doncaster and South Yorkshire — all former coal mining areas — brought the tantalising prospect of restored pride. “Online bookseller Amazon has been swamped with jobhunters for its new depot in Staffordshire — leading to delays in the recruiting process,” announced the local paper, the Express & Star, shortly before the fulfilment centre — which was set to employ over 2,000 people — opened its doors.

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It’s a pity no one bothered to ask whether the jobs being created were any good or not. By the time I arrived in Rugeley it was only Romanians and Bulgarians willing to do the gruelling entry-level jobs at the warehouse. This ought to have been a warning sign, yet the reluctance of indigenous workers to do work like this at the rates being offered was put down to the cosseted nature of the British working class.

When a group of Right-wing Tory MPs claimed that British workers were among the “worst idlers in the world”, I suspect many liberals quietly nodded along. That was certainly the response I got when I broached the subject with liberal friends and family members.

Amazon is a convenient whipping boy in Rugeley; but there is a broader challenge around the sorts of jobs being created in Britain’s towns, towns that were once thriving centres of industry. A 2015 report by the Centre for Cities described a reality in which jobs in declining industries were being replaced by “lower-skilled, more routinised jobs, swapping cotton mills for call centres and dock yards for distribution sheds”.

Moreover, there were a particular set of institutional affiliations that were lost when industry was wound down. When the old jobs went people were thrown out of work, but a culture was destroyed with them, too. Jobs that offered security have been replaced by part-time non-union work. Pubs and social clubs have closed while the pews in local churches continue to empty out. The Labour Party is less and less rooted in towns like Rugeley.

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Back in 1997 the late Tony Judt, too nuanced a thinker to hold much sway with the faction that controls the contemporary Labour Party, wrote the following about towns in western Europe:

“In post-industrial France or Britain and elsewhere, the economy has moved on while the state — so far — has stayed behind to pick up the tab. But the community has collapsed, and with it a century-long political culture that combined pride in work, local social interdependence and inter-generational continuity.”

People in the communities Judt was writing about were “looking for someone to blame and someone to follow”, as he phrased it nearly 20 years before the Brexit vote.

Identity is a neglected aspect of the debate around deindustrialisation. Working people nowadays are encouraged to derive their identity from what they consume rather than what they do for work. Yet as Alex Smith, a former pit mechanic and member of the rescue service at Rugeley’s Lea Hall Colliery, told me, “People actually say, ‘I’m only at Amazon,’ and in the past they would’ve never said, ‘I’m only at the pit. You’d have said, ‘I’m a collier,’ because that’s what you were and you were proud of it.”

Rugeley’s experience will differ from that of many other former Labour-voting constituencies, but its lessons are certainly applicable elsewhere. As I wrote in April 2016, in a diary that would later turn into a book:

“Most of the men I spoke to that evening [in the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Club] planned to vote Leave in the forthcoming European Referendum, though almost all of them had voted Labour all their adult lives. It was the noticeable decline of Rugeley that seemed to bother them more than the presence of eastern European immigrants however.”

I don’t know how the individuals I met in Rugeley voted last week. Collectively, though, Cannock Chase gave the Tories an increased majority — despite its local MP, Amanda Milling, voting in 2015 for the Trade Union Bill, which will make it more difficult to bring dignity back to the working-class jobs in towns like Rugeley.

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Survey the town properly, however — delve behind the stereotypes about unreconstructed white folk nostalgic for a vanished era — and it’s no surprise that many residents long to “take back control” and to “get Brexit done”. Brexit may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, but the people badly want change and they’ve been led to believe — hoodwinked some Remainers would say — into voting for the only change that is currently on offer.

Does this mean that Labour is correct to blame its humiliating election defeat on Brexit and Brexit alone? Hardly. Promising radical change is easy; persuading people that you are capable of delivering it is the hard part. And that’s where Labour floundered. You can promise what you like, however if only 16% of people trust you with the economy then it may as well be hot air.

To some extent, Labour’s dilemma is about economics. As Lisa Nandy has pointed out, our towns need investment (the fact that the usual types started mocking her for this on social media demonstrates just how much trouble Labour is in).

But it’s also about community: how do we reinvigorate the sense of community that towns like Rugeley once had in an era of Amazon, Netflix and a more generalised contempt for the folk who choose not to leave the towns they grew up in? Moreover, how do we ensure that migrants are not exploited, as they seemed to be in Rugeley, to undermine the rights of indigenous workers? And how does the Left reconcile its instinctive hostility to nationalism with the ordinary, inoffensive patriotism that is a fact of life in any English town?

As the infighting begins over what went wrong in Labour’s election campaign, I fear that these questions will get buried under a tide of invective and vitriol. Yet they are more important to the future of the Labour Party — more I think than most members realise — than another round of bloodletting over whether the Blairites or the Corbynistas are the true and authentic inheritors of the Labour mantle.

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Who knows if this superb story — which appeared in a Taiwanese newspaper — is true? Certainly, the British executive was performing well in his job before being suddenly forced from it after just two years. And his resignation, which followed Beijing pressure that airline staff be stopped from joining protests after the high-profile arrest of a pilot, was first announced by China’s state-run television station before the company itself made a statement.

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The claim has led to Hogg being hailed as a hero by pro-democracy activists in the region. It would be nice to think this is a true tale, a businessman’s defiant stance reflecting the bravery of the protesters I have seen out on the streets demanding freedom and democracy in the face of Chinese autocracy. For we need corporate icons at this time of immense change. And it would also make a welcome contrast with all the grubby kowtowing seen by other Western business leaders before the Chinese authorities, toeing the Beijing line to preserve their flow of profits.

Their tawdry behaviour has been highly depressing, a reminder that capitalism and morality are not always natural bedfellows. Now we hear of a climate of fear among staff at Cathay Pacific, warned they could be fired if they “support or participate in illegal protests” in a disgusting betrayal by their bosses, who are, admittedly, under fierce assault from Beijing. Unions are urging the company to end “white terror” (acts that create a climate of fear) after the dismissal of the head of a flight attendants’ association. Staff must also endure Chinese searches of electronic devices for evidence of joining demonstrations.

This is an alarming capitulation to political pressure from an autocratic regime. Yet the Cathay Pacific firm is far from alone. Jardine Matheson is a British-listed company run by a billionaire British dynasty that enjoys the fruits of our freedoms, yet it rushed out a statement echoing the Beijing line of condemning violence while praising the police whose brutal response inflamed unruly events on the streets. PwC issued a contrite statement after employees of large accounting firms publicly backed protests, while luxury fashion houses Coach and Versace prostrated themselves in apology before China’s communist rulers after implying Hong Kong is a country.

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These firms might say their duty to shareholders and staff is to make money — and that China is a vital and fast-growing market. As Milton Friedman argued, the social responsibility of corporations is to increase profits since, as the Nobel-winning economist argued, free-market capitalism ultimately made the world a better place.

As he wrote in his 1970 New York Times essay: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Even half a century ago, this was a controversial theory; it has since sparked ceaseless debate and rebuttal. I have sympathy for his view of capitalism as an inherently progressive force. Yet now Friedman’s stance — echoed by all those panicked firms doing Beijing’s bidding — is being challenged from within the world of commerce. For the chief executives of 181 major companies, including many of the world’s best-known brands, are seeking to redefine the role of a corporation.

Their pitch, made in a statement through a group called Business Roundtable, is that business must seek to serve not just shareholders but the wider community, arguing that it should improve society as well as maximise profits. So they talk of fair pay for staff, fostering diversity, dealing ethically with suppliers, protecting the planet and supporting local communities.

Great stuff. Few would quibble with these firms doing more to hire black and disabled workers, improve staff pay among lower ranks or soften the environmental impacts of their massive global operations.

Yet we should judge them by their deeds, not their smooth words. The average chief executive in America takes home 280 times more than their workers, a grotesque imbalance that seems unlikely to change fast. In reality, the statement looks like a fearful response to rising concerns over capitalism — with one billionaire financier saying inequality poses an “existential threat” to the United States — as well as the issue playing a key role in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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In Britain too, we have seen loss of trust in capitalism. But when you look at many signatories on this document, it is hard to see it as more than a glib public relations effort designed to diffuse public anger.

After all, is the head of aircraft maker Boeing really the man to lecture the rest of us on protecting the environment? Are the bosses of banks the best people to talk about ethics after their greed caused global fiscal meltdown, and they have shown so little contrition? How can the chief of Walmart boast of supporting communities when his firm — recently described as “the largest retailer of firearms in the world” — refuses to stop selling guns despite the plague of mass shootings tormenting the United States? Should the chief executive of Lockheed Martin pose as a moral paragon when her firm is selling missiles to barbaric nations such as Saudi Arabia?

Then there is tax. For if the likes of Jeff Bezos want to show they care about communities, there is a simple way to do this by starting to pay fair taxes. This is, after all, how our society collectively funds public services such as schools and hospitals, care homes and police forces. Instead, Bezos has become the world’s richest man, able to build his vast business and indulge his ideas for space travel, by using sophisticated financial trickery to flip Amazon’s digital profits and evade traditional tax collection methods. The same goes for the companies such as Apple and Oracle.

The more you delve into the list, the more it reeks of hypocrisy. It includes pimps in pin-stripes fostering tax-avoiding practices at accountancy firms and financial houses. There are two airline and one oil company chiefs claiming to protect the environment, the boss of a fizzy drink and crisp firm ignoring the obesity crisis to pontificate about respecting communities, another major weapons-maker talking about letting people lead lives of “dignity and meaning”.

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This is a shame. Capitalism does need to clean up its act and there is much to admire in the sentiments set out by these corporate titans and multi-billionaire tycoons. But this smacks of all those bogus mission statements, the thin veneers of greenwashing, the tiny nods towards corporate social responsibility proclaimed as transformational. The truth is that until such people start showing genuine desire to practise what they preach, even if it impacts on their bottom lines, then the clamour to control capitalism, check its dynamism and stifle competition will only grow.

Capitalism has transformed our world and the experience of humanity for the better, and business can be a highly progressive force, whether by accident or design. Just looks at the numbers being lifted from poverty around the planet, the pace of innovation in medicine, the advances in communication and connectivity. But we live in a time of incredible technological change that is disrupting work and societies with unprecedented speed, while leaving politicians paralysed in the face of its strength — and this is shaking faith in the invisible hand identified by Adam Smith.

Businesses transform society by being dynamic and open. Yet they need to start displaying social responsibility and stop undermining wider well-being before they are shackled by their foes and we all suffer the consequences. Unfortunately we have seen a glimpse of the prevailing corporate ethics exposed by the submissive behaviour of Western firms towards China’s communist rulers, not in this week’s shallow stunt from a bunch of over-paid corporate panjandrums in the US. Whether the Hogg story is true or a flight of fancy, we most definitely need corporate heroes prepared to place morality before money.

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It’s not that video door entry systems are anything new. They’ve been available for decades. The Ring system, however, is easy to use and pretty affordable. It’s also fully digital – on your smartphone or tablet, you can look at what your doorbell sees and have the footage stored online for a modest monthly fee.

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In America, a Ring doorbell can be yours for as little as $99 – or nothing at all if your local police force is giving them away to residents. The New York Post reports on the cops’ enthusiasm for these gadgets:

“…as more police agencies join with the company known as Ring, the partnerships are raising privacy concerns. Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. Police say the cameras can serve as a digital neighborhood watch.”

We’ve come to think of CCTV as a top-down intervention – the province of law enforcement agencies and security services. Indeed, the spread of CCTV networks conjures up the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian state has its citizens under continuous surveillance, not least through the ubiquitous Telescreens.

However, unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the reach of CCTV in the real world is limited. Indeed, the state sometimes struggles to fund installation, maintenance and monitoring – leading to cuts in coverage. But rather than celebrate their liberation from the all-seeing-eye of the state, local people tend to react with dismay: never underestimate the popularity of security.

The technology is advancing – becoming cheaper, smaller and smarter. With Amazon and other providers developing video surveillance as a mass consumer product, the old top-down model of deployment and control is giving way to something more decentralised and, some might say, insidious.

Back in 2017, I speculated that it might not be long before ordinary members of the public start creating their own surveillance networks – and joining them up through social media:

“Access to existing CCTV networks is generally controlled by private businesses or public bodies… however the ultra-cheap (and therefore widely owned) internet-connected sensors of the future may operate on a different model – feeding information into a shared system in much the same way that we currently feed our photographs into Facebook and Instagram.  

“Whichever website does the best job of integrating data from the ubiquitous sensors of the near future will become the dominant digital platform of the 21st century.”

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In 2019, the age of bottom-up, citizen-led surveillance is well-and-truly underway. It’s not a surveillance state we’re building, but a surveillance society, catered to by a surveillance market.

A particularly interesting feature of the Ring system is the Neighbors App. It is mentioned in a report by Wesley Dockery for the International Business Times:

“One of Ring’s services, Neighbors, allows members of a community to share safety information and suspicious footage captured on their Ring doorbells in a shared network, akin to Facebook’s news feed.”

It’s easy to see the direction this technology is going in.

As it becomes ever cheaper, more homes will use it, and each home will have more cameras creating a bubble of surveillance around each property. Surveillance social media will become more sophisticated, with neighbours granting each other access to their camera feeds. The individual surveillance bubbles will thus merge – to cover the whole street and, in time, the entire neighbourhood. The police, community groups, landlords and insurance companies will encourage the process.

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Inevitably, artificial intelligence will be used to integrate and analyse camera feeds, thus eliminating the need for constant monitoring by human eyes. If surveillance bubbles are merged across wide enough an area then AI-powered image recognition of faces, objects, number plates etc. will allow users to locate, identify and track an individual or a vehicle through a neighbourhood, town or city.

So, good luck being a burglar in 10 years’ time. In fact, good luck doing anything you might get in trouble for, because within a surveillance bubble, it’s not going to go undetected. Burglars, muggers, car thieves, vandals, truants, under-the-radar adulterers and secret smokers should all beware: the streets will have eyes.

As well as looking around you for doorbell cameras, don’t forget to look up. Because, as Bobby Allyn of NPR explains, Jeff Bezos is leaving no angle unexplored:

“Going on vacation and want some extra security around your home? Someday you may be able to call Amazon’s drones.

“The Seattle tech giant is moving closer to making that scenario a real possibility after winning approval from federal officials this month for a patent for ‘home surveillance’ drones.

“Company officials stress that the plan is still in its infancy, but the patent papers describe a future in which Amazon customers order drones to hover around a home and scan for things such as a garage door left open, a broken window, graffiti or a fire.”

Ever wanted to call in a drone? One day, Amazon might be able to arrange it for you – though I imagine missile strikes won’t be an option.

Further reading

Elon Musk's extra-terrestrial threat

By Peter Franklin

The company is well placed to succeed in the surveillance society to come. It’s not just the Ring system or the Neighbors app or the vast door-to-door distribution network – or even the plans for an aerial drone delivery service. More important than any of those will be the ability to store and process the overwhelming quantities of visual data thus collected. As luck would have it, Amazon also owns AWS – one of the biggest cloud computing companies in the world. So, if anyone ends up hosting a live video feed of the entire planet, it’ll be Amazon.

In thinking about what is already possible – or soon will be – one can’t help but be impressed. That said, when one contemplates the implications for privacy, one might also feel an uncontrollable urge to sit down and cry.

But make sure you do your crying behind closed doors. You wouldn’t want the neighbours to see.

Or Jeff.

This vision of a consumer that sits alone in their home, clicks on their desires, tunes into entertainment and reclines in their easy chair to wait for all their wishes to be granted may seem as contemporary as it gets. But it was the premise of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops – which was published in 1909.

More from this author

Does dirty money make the art world go round?

By Libby Emmons

The eerily prescient tale opens with Vashti, a woman who doesn’t leave her underground home. She doesn’t need to. No one leaves their little cells to venture out in to a post-apocalyptic world. They don’t have to: all needs are met by an omnipotent ‘Machine’. Communication with others is done via instant messaging and video conferencing. In any case, people have no inclination to meet up; they only want to share ideas. And the Machine knows what you want, without you having to ask…

It doesn’t feel so far removed from Amazon’s promise that, with its new “Prime Air delivery drone”, consumers will be able to go from click to delivery in 30 minutes. The convenience of such almost-instant gratification will be irresistible.

Meanwhile, Walmart is rolling out a beta version of their in-home delivery service – a direct rival to Amazon Fresh and Fresh Direct. Instead of boxes of food being left on doorsteps, the shopping will actually be delivered to your kitchen. Your fridge and cupboards will be stocked by Walmart employees, with the help of body cams on the drivers and special security locks on homes. They will even pick up returns for you if you leave them on your kitchen counter. You can wave at them from your reclining easy chair, if you can stand to look up from your screen to have a brief, real-life interaction with a stranger.

So often in our culture we avoid each other. We avoid taking the lift for fear we will encounter another person; we keep our air pods in-ear in the supermarket queue, or use self-checkout. Living in New York City, the most populated city in America, it is possible to go for whole days without speaking to another human being. We keep our eyes on our screens, recorded voices in our ears.

Phones, apps, laptops, smart watches, fit bits and GPS devices, drones and delivery trucks. We have built our machine around ourselves, swaddling ourselves with our own tech – mind, body, and soul.

It is salutary, then, to consider the ghostly, empty shells of humanity in Forster’s story.

Vashti’s relationship with her son Kuno is the most awkward thing in her life, because he wants to see her in person. She’s so busy with the interface that she barely has the time for travel – plus, she doesn’t want to (his cell is on the other side of the world). It takes multiple and increasingly demanding missives from Kuno to get her to leave her home, and board the air ship to see him.

But still, Kuno is a troublemaker. Everyone else seems content to live in an echo chamber, where new ideas are not as well attended as old ideas, reframed. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” one of the Machine’s believers says in the last chapter:

“First-hand ideas do not really exist… Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation.”

It’s like Forster is satirising Twitter!

But Kuno is not content with living to serve the machine and be served by it. He wishes to see the Earth’s surface, feel its dirt, breathe its air, even though humans have lost the ability to live there. This very notion is apostasy. In The Machine Stops, the catered luxury of a thoroughly machine-facilitated life is the reward for those who put their faith in the machine. Those who won’t are threatened with homelessness, forced out onto the Earth’s inhospitable surface, and left for dead. This punishment is what Kuno wishes to embrace. He laments:

“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills.”

He is alluding to the machine’s match-making service, which pairs off mates specifically for the act of reproduction and nothing else. Once conception has occurred, the parties are returned to their private, efficient existences; once the baby is weaned, it too is removed to a communal nursery. There is just enough human contact to continue the species – but it is done without joy, without love and without any long-term relationships.

Suggested reading

The consequences of cosy AI collusion

By Tom Chivers

We have something similar today. People swipe, chat, maybe meet up, maybe hook up, maybe get knocked up, and move on with their lives, independently, without regret, and without connection.

Perhaps, 110 years after The Machine Stops was published, we are not as different from our ancestors as we think we are. We tend to believe we are making progress, but our desire to exert minimal effort remains the same. Yet we ridicule those who came before us for their ignorance. Vashti does, too:

“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own–the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.”

Forster predicted that humankind would, through technological development, give itself over to the mercy of an overweening power – with a sense that it’s what we’re entitled to. Now, we bemoan how we are cut off from each other just as we cut ourselves off more. We tweet and post about how much we need a break from tech, only to stay as integrated as ever, because the truth is that we are past the point of no return. We are locked into our progress.

We won’t turn back because we can’t turn back. We will submit to the drones and deliveries.

And what does that mean for the future? Right now, we hold the interface with our hands; it is separate from us. But the predictions are that it will increasingly become part of our physical form, it will be impossible to tell where a human being ends and technology begins. This is a kind of apocalypse – an apocalypse of the human form.

Suggested reading

Winterson's monstrous world

By Julie Bindel

And as scary as it sounds, it is a burgeoning reality that we barely notice, because it feels natural. People are already beginning to adopt these forms, linking to tech in a full and permanent way with chips and robotic limbs. It could make us stronger; but it could also turn us into exactly what Forster feared.

The interface could, eventually, become the reality itself. We once used our senses to reach out to the known and unknown world, to glean knowledge, or at least perception. In the future, we will reach with our interface, our machine.

And just as philosophers like Kant, Berkley and Plato questioned what our senses are – their reliability, their veracity – we must question our machine interface.

Because sinking into the comfort of believing the reality our interface presents could destroy us. And this destruction will happen inch by insidious inch. We won’t even notice the point at which we become neither human nor machine, but comfy blobs rehashing the same tired ideas, utterly enslaved to the machine we built to serve us. Might we be able to stop it from happening? Might we be able to stay awake and question and resist? We do still have the choice. But Forster didn’t hold out much hope.

They helped to lift almost a billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010. And they drove the so-called ‘Great Enrichment’ – the period since the late 18th century in which real per capita income has risen by 3,000%.

In general, then, open markets are a boon. And the modern rhetoric of ‘free markets’ has had huge value: in the fight against communism in the 1970s and 1980s, in highlighting the dangers of modern socialism in states such as Venezuela, and in making the case for the modern international trading order.

But like all rhetoric, free market rhetoric is better used for put-downs than for policy. It often misses the complexities of modern tech-enabled markets, and underplays the role of the state in creating and sustaining markets. Moreover, it smuggles in a host of mistaken assumptions and ideas, with potentially dire longer-term consequences. Markets are not merely mathematical constructs; they have social and cultural functions as well as economic ones. And they are all different – some very different indeed, from others.

In my recent book on Adam Smith, and in a new essay in Britain beyond Brexit by the 2020 Conservatives, I address these issues directly. What matters is not the rhetoric of free markets, but what that rhetoric often, paradoxically, impedes: the reality of effective competition. More effective competition requires better ways to think about markets, and new means to tackle the lurking monopolies of the tech giants.

Suggested reading

Why Adam Smith would approve of Boris

By Tim Montgomerie

It also means we need to bust the myths.

Myth 1: the truth is that in the modern world there are very few, if any, entirely free markets – markets that do not rely on any external rules or regulations at all. Even the most devout free-market theorists recognise that property rights need to be clear, public and enforceable, and that generally means law, police, courts and other institutions of the state. Some will actively argue for patent, copyright and other laws protecting intellectual property, but these are themselves significant infringements on market freedoms.

This catalogue merely scratches the surface. In fact, there are many things that generally cannot be legally bought and sold at all: people, body parts, hard drugs, votes, court decisions, public qualifications, the outcome of sporting contests. Then there are items that in many countries can only be sold under licence: guns, alcohol, and many medicines.

There are regulations on who is allowed to work: on child labour, on immigration, on the professions and the qualifications needed to enter them. There are regulations on organisational form: companies, associations, partnerships, mutuals, cooperatives, employee-owned firms, charities. There are entry requirements for some industries, such as tests on ownership, capital and track record in banking.

And then there are rules on product safety, on weights and measures and on conditions of trade, such as the right to a refund. The global foreign exchange markets are often thought of as the nearest thing to a perfectly free market. It is true that they are astonishingly large and astonishingly liquid. The Bank for International Settlements estimated, for example, that trading averaged $5.1 trillion a day in April 2016. Yet they are also very closely bound by rules and regulations.

Myth 2 concerns how markets function. Markets are far from identical to each other, and do not all operate to a single equilibrating mechanism. Markets for food products are very different from asset markets; financial markets differ radically from labour markets; markets in primary goods are different from secondary or resale markets in those goods.

Suggested reading

Is capitalism immoral?

By Victoria Bateman

To take a few examples: in product markets, buyers know fairly precisely what they are getting in advance. This is not the case in labour markets, despite the best efforts of recruitment consultants. In financial markets, the edge for participants generally lies not in serving some need in the real economy, but in knowing what their competitors are doing and second-guessing them.

The British housing market has evolved into a form of proxy savings vehicle in which price inflation, far from being despised, is actively welcomed by owners keen to see their properties increase in value. The owners’ reliance on mortgage finance makes them preternaturally sensitive to interest-rate changes, conditioning both domestic politics and central bank monetary policy. The German housing market, by contrast, is dominated by rental and leasehold properties, reducing both political tolerance of and economic exposure to house price inflation.

Myth 3 is about culture. Markets shape our lives, our homes, our possessions – even the music we listen to. And yet, they do much more that this. They shape our expectations of others, our manners and our capacity to trust, and those things in turn shape them.

Markets are not merely antiseptic objects of expert study, or neutral tools of public policy. The people who trade in them are not economic automata operating purely in accordance with financial incentives. On the contrary, markets are subject to ‘animal spirits’. These are the human passions of confidence or pessimism in the face of the unknown, as well as the human instinct to be moved by stories and narratives, and to react to unfairness or corruption.

In sum, markets constitute a created, constructed order. Of course, foolish government interventions can undermine or even destroy markets. But far from being intrinsically opposed, states and markets rely on and benefit from each other. Indeed, they rely on each other more and more today, as competition increases pressure on public resources, private property rights become more contested, and globalisation drives the need for enforceable international standards.

The old bromide that “the private sector makes the money and the public sector spends it” misses a deeper and more interesting truth: that both require each other to function effectively. To take a recent example: the Space Industry Act 2018 sets out law to enable a person or company to put a private satellite in space from a UK launch site, and to cap their liability. The result is expected to be a new era of British space entrepreneurship — all made possible by an Act of Parliament.

Suggested reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

What does this mean? As an ideology, neoliberalism is dead. Meanwhile, the debate we as a society need to have – the debate about what markets are and should be for, about the limitations of the idea of ‘market failure’ and the role of the state – has been left by the wayside.

Modern technology has brought with it rapidly increasing complexity in markets, as choices proliferate for consumers. Public attention has rightly focused so far on the use of intra-company transfer pricing and other devices to reduce tax payments to a minimum, and on escalating concerns about privacy and the manipulation of public opinion. But we also need to think again about competition policy.

Companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook enjoy gigantic and increasing asymmetries of power and information versus the individual consumer. These asymmetries allow them the scope to exploit their consumers, both in specific segments, in groups, or individually in ways that run counter to established norms of fair dealing and justice.

These businesses are modern titans which bestride their markets as completely as did the old oil and railway trusts. They are hard for government or regulators to scrutinise, because they are closed systems. But at the same time their status as networks means the normal armoury of regulatory tools against market monopoly or oligopoly is far less effective.

In due course, the world will need to have a deep debate about the astonishing power, and the astonishing absence of accountability, of the technology platforms. But in the meantime, we can look at competition policy. More transparency and disclosure are a prerequisite in this regard, yet markets all being different from one another, different levers will be needed to achieve it.

The Standard Oil Company was broken up after 1911 under the Sherman Act into a host of smaller (but still enormous) oil and gas companies, including what would become Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Mobil, Amoco and Sohio (the latter two later bought by BP).

Few if any people seriously believe that Google could be effectively broken up into different regional or business units, or that to do so would generate economic value. But that approach might work better for Amazon, with a split between its marketplace and product provider functions, and national or regional services working from a common back office but competing against each other in the marketplace.

Suggested reading

When competition ends in conspiracy

By Jonathan Tepper

As for Google and Facebook, we can lift an idea developed by the father of economics and social psychology, Adam Smith. Human shoppers can be supported by new algorithmic consumers – that is, by pieces of software able to compare and contrast different offers in the digital marketplace and make choices on the human’s behalf.

Imagine trying to choose the best home insurance in such a world, instead of poring for hours over dozens of sites and hundreds of products, or using potentially costly price-comparison sites. You could have your personal online assistant do it for you, in its own time and using networked computational power.

Over time, such online assistants are likely to become commonplace; still more so if data comes to be seen as a public good created by individuals, rather than simply accumulated by companies. These digital agents could, in principle, make automatic purchases subject to individual guidelines, negotiate transactions, and even build coalitions with other digital consumers automatically in order to get keener prices or elicit new products.

There is no reason why an array of new businesses should not emerge to enable this levelling of the playing field to take place. They will require coordinated regulatory intervention, but there is no reason to think that any of this is technically, economically or politically impossible.

These ideas come from recognising the limitations of free-market rhetoric, grasping the possibilities offered by a really deep understanding of markets, and pushing hard for more, and more effective, competition. They can potentially set the new trading and trust-busting standards of the digital future.

Then, with impeccable timing, on Tuesday, 14 May, the National Labor Relations Board released a month-old letter finding that Uber drivers are not legally employed by the company and are therefore ineligible for federal protection for collective bargaining. The company’s fortunes turned on a dime, the share price was in free-fall no more, and as of this writing, its value is above where it began. Tens of billions of dollars hinged on that favourable regulatory decision.

Back in 2012, when Facebook’s IPO started badly, there was an epidemic of hand-wringing about the gullibility of financial markets in valuing big-name tech stocks. But the situation was easily remedied – $1 billion was all it took to shut down the competition from upstart Instagram and seal Facebook’s domination of worldwide social media, to the tune of over $50 billion a year of revenue.

Coming hot on the heels of global euphoria about the liberating power of social media in the Arab Spring, Facebook looked like that rarest of species, the company that does well by doing good. With the floatation the public was offered a piece of the action.

But the value in Facebook turned out not to come from global emancipation but from its opposite – global dominance of the social networking market. It is a service that claims to foster human connection and interaction, but for a price – and that price is one that users, and governments, are increasingly unwilling to pay. There seems to be a disconnect between Facebook’s value to investors and its value to society – they push and pull in different directions. Uber is in a similar place now.

Uber, like Facebook, experienced a long train of popular congratulation as the globally disruptive innovator shaking the dust out of urban taxi markets. It offered to revolutionise local transportation, and investors couldn’t wait to get involved. Uber raised $11.5 billion through nearly 20 funding rounds, ultimately valuing the company at $68 billion.

But a reckoning is coming. As indeed it is for Facebook.

Suggested reading

When you get online – get paranoid

By Carl Miller

The “techlash” is highlighting the degree to which tech’s business models consist of running roughshod over everyone else’s privacy, security, democracy, environment, and livelihoods, and cashing out in spectacular Wall Street fashion before the public truly understands what hit them and how much autonomy they’ve lost.

Uber is no different – though its model has its own peculiar quirks. The platform’s value depends on its ability to charge what it wants to riders, whilst paying as little as possible to its drivers. It classifies the drivers as independent contractors, so as to escape adhering to labour standards, avoid contributing to social insurance, and enabling it to offload the cost of capacity it doesn’t use. It relies on there being as many drivers logged on at peak times as possible – for customer convenience – without having to pay for their availability. The drivers bear the risk of a quiet night.

Uber, and other gig economy ‘platforms’ have been celebrated as creating venues for individual entrepreneurship, a new path for upward mobility. In the case of Uber this seems a stretch. The driver may differentiate the service offered by providing riders with bottles of water, ambient music, good conversation, or no conversation, according to tastes, but the most they can hope for is a higher rating, which does not automatically translate into more rides and revenue. Rather, high ratings are needed to maintain Uber’s strict minimum to stay on the platform. It’s more like the scores of Roman scribes, dutifully copying down set texts, being told that they are the authors of history – Uber drivers control very little of their individual “enterprises”.

Alex Rosenblat’s book Uberland details how Uber’s business model works: bonus-based driver compensation directs drivers to work where and when Uber needs them, whilst penalising them for time spent logged into any other ridesharing platform. The bonus-based pay schedule closes off any other opportunities they might have: if they log-off before they earn the bonus, then the whole shift will turn out not to have been worthwhile. Even with the bonus they just barely break even.

Suggested reading

The gig economy: a platform for exploitation

By David Z Morris

Uber has, for the most part, escaped regulatory intervention to force re-classification of drivers as its own employees, which would compel them to absorb some of the risks that drivers currently bear. Just recently, both the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board issued opinions highly favourable to gig economy platforms, holding that such platforms don’t exercise sufficient control over drivers to qualify as their employers.

The NLRB’s general counsel stated: “The drivers had… complete control of their cars and work schedules, together with freedom to choose login locations and to work for competitors of Uber.”

As Rosenblat and other scholars’ work has shown, this statement is empirically false – the fact that Uber drivers can operate outside the bounds of what its compensation system incentivises is a dead letter if they can’t make a living by doing so. The UK Court of Appeals also found that the categorisation of drivers as independent contractors engages a “high degree of fiction”.

Meanwhile, the company has also challenged its drivers’ right to collective bargaining even outside federal protection. When Seattle tried to grant Uber workers that power, the city was sued by the Chamber of Commerce at Uber’s behest. It argued that such a union of independent contractors would violate the US antitrust laws.

The federal antitrust agencies weighed in on Uber’s side, and a federal appeals court agreed. As a result, the ordinance was amended to exclude collective bargaining over wages. But Uber continues to claim that the whole concept of driver collective bargaining on any matter violates the federal antitrust laws.

Suggested reading

Who benefits from the Uberised economy?

By Peter Franklin

The irony seems lost on Uber that while it has used antitrust regulation against its drivers, it has managed to avoid any antitrust scrutiny on its own account, even as it fixes prices and wages for these supposedly independent businesses. A private class action against Uber on those grounds was set to go to trial in New York in 2016, but the company successfully sent the case to arbitration, where it hasn’t been heard from since.

No public enforcer has yet alleged that Uber’s non-employment of its drivers constitutes grounds for price-fixing antitrust liability. In fact, if anything, antitrust enforcers have viewed Uber’s business model as introducing much needed competition into urban taxi markets, and have encouraged local officials not to question it. So, between lax labour law and lax antitrust, Uber is able to operate a business model that depends on controlling drivers without being responsible to them as an employer.

In this way, Uber’s profitability hinges on continued regulatory forbearance, as the market response to the NLRB letter showed. Far from being an innovative company challenging comfortable monopolies hiding behind state power, Uber is itself dependent on government regulators for its continued success. The intricacies of labour law and antitrust law, developed in a time before the platform economy, continue to be debated. But at the heart of the controversy is the question of who should have the power to determine drivers’ working conditions – the government, through employment law, drivers themselves, through union participation, or – as now – Uber.

But even with the deferential treatment it receives from regulators, Uber is operating at an enormous loss and has no immediate way of reversing the hemorrhage. Given its cheap ride strategy, it doesn’t generate enough operating revenue to both pay drivers enough to stay on the platform in the long run and generate a return for shareholders. It is already trying to increase the prices its habitual customers are used to, but that has not yet come near to solving its basic cashflow problem.

Suggested reading

Big tech is out of touch

By Henry Olsen

The fact that it has enjoyed privileged access to investors and their wealth is also a big part of the company’s success at acquiring market share at the expense of legacy taxi companies. At least so far, these investors have viewed Uber’s aggressive pricing and the trampling of local regulations as likely to pay off in the long run, with a dominant market share and significant pricing power, or through the ability to phase drivers out entirely and move to full automation.

For most of the big-name tech IPOs, the companies aren’t looking primarily to raise cash. That’s because the public equity market has transformed from a source of capital with which to finance investment, expansion, and growth, into a means by which insider shareholders can diversify their risk: an IPO gives founders and early venture capital backers the big exit they have been waiting for, and a way to cash-in before the true costs of the business model catch up with them.

That dynamic is certainly at play in Uber’s case: should regulators go the other way on the employee/contractor categorisation – which the UK Supreme Court may well do if Uber loses its appeal – then it is useful to have already cleared a way out for investors. In the meantime, investors can take advantage of market optimism (and well-timed letters of support from the US regulators). Unusually, Uber also actually needs the money. In the real world, as opposed to in the purely digital realm, the runway to world dominance is a little rougher, though no less assured as long as investors are willing to strap down for the bumpy ride.

But even though it needs the money, Uber has not been willing to cede control, nor has it had to. The typical Silicon Valley IPO retains total control over operations among the insiders through a dual-class share structure: the insiders retain full voting power in their ‘old’ stock, and the ‘new’ stock they sell on the public markets comes with no voting rights. No matter how much of the company is ultimately made available to the public, no outside investors can ever challenge the founders’ control over their company. The company is still run in the interests of shareholders – and often at odds with the interests of society – but it is a sub-set of privileged, insider shareholders, whose interests are even less aligned with the average public-facing pension fund and institutional shareholder.

Suggested reading

Can Big Tech save its soul?

By Charles Arthur

For as long as it remains in need of infusions of cash, Uber’s management and core group of founders may not be able to maintain the complete independence enjoyed by other tech behemoths such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Otherwise, it would need to raise fares, potentially curtail its geographic coverage, and lower its world-bestriding ambitions for autonomous vehicles. It probably has not yet tested the patience of late-coming partners such as Softbank and the Saudi Arabian Investment Authority, if only because these investors aren’t necessarily seeking the highest return, but rather American companies where they can stash their wealth. Others might not be so forgiving.

Uber’s long-term viability as a going concern will depend on whether the regulatory rope-a-dope it has played to date is permitted to continue. The recent backlash in the form of drivers’ strikes and policy-makers worried about the ability of gig economy platforms to exercise control while evading responsibility may also start to put pressure on the company. Perhaps they will finally constrict the legal grey area where it has been permitted to grow with a great deal of deference and little in the way of limits.

But in the meantime, the IPO has simply confirmed that the real Silicon Valley business model is the concentration of wealth and power at the top. And it reminds us there are few protections for those who rely on the permission of powerful gatekeepers to earn a living.

Amazon and Allen had been on the verge of promoting Allen’s previous film, Wonder Wheel, in October 2017, when Allen made public statements in support of the disgraced Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein. In an interview with the BBC, he said:

“The whole Harvey Weinstein thing is very sad for everybody involved. Tragic for the poor women that were involved, sad for Harvey [that] his life is so messed up. There’s no winners in that. It’s just very, very sad and tragic for those poor women that had to go through that.”

Allen went on to lament the state of the American entertainment industry under the prevailing attitudes of #MeToo and #TimesUp. His perception was that this era of heightened suspicion between men and women would hinder creativity.

“You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself,” he said. “That’s not right either. But sure, you hope that something like this could be transformed into a benefit for people rather than just a sad or tragic situation.”

When asked to explain himself, he said: “When I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man.”

Amazon alleges the director’s comments “sabotaged” its attempts to promote his movies.

Further reading

#MeToo cowardice is threatening artistic freedom

By Wendy Earle

These weren’t, of course, the first allegations of impropriety against Allen. His adopted daughter Dylan has said he molested her in 1992 when she was seven, which he strongly denies. The claims were repeated by her brother Ronan. Those allegations were thrown out by courts in Connecticut and New York but Ronan Farrow stands by them. Amazon knew about them when the deal with Allen was signed.

According to court documents filed in a Manhattan federal court seeking to dismiss some of the claims from Allen’s lawsuit, Amazon believes that “Understood in the broader context, Allen’s actions and their cascading consequences ensured that Amazon could never possibly receive the benefit of its four-picture agreement (despite already having paid Allen a $10 million advance upon signing)”.

If Amazon had a clean track record of only working with artists that comply with these #MeToo approved standards of conduct, Allen and his lawsuit would not have a leg to stand on. You’d think they might have put some provisions in his contract to make it clear what kind of personal behaviour they expect from artists on their payroll. But perhaps it’s not as straightforward as that. A close examination of Amazon’s practices in acquiring contracts suggests that they wouldn’t appear to be quite so strict with their international artists as they have been with Allen.

Further reading

Why bad romance can't survive #MeToo

By Tanya Gold

In a sweeping move designed to increase diversity of language and offerings on the Amazon Prime platform, Jennifer Salke recently acquired a large slate of international projects. Work from India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan got the green light. While the work itself looks like it may be worth the price of a subscription, it’s not clear that these artists or production companies signed up all accord with the vague, shifting tenets of Me Too and this new era where an allegation goes quickly from public accusation to publicly assumed guilt.

The new work in development under the Amazon banner, for example, includes an Untitled Reality Series from the event management company Only Much Louder in India. The show creator and host is Sapan Verma, of East India Comedy, and the show promises to be a cross between comedy and a talk show. However, if unproven allegations and accusations, for which the artist offers denials and refutations, are the standard for cancellation, then what are we to make of the fact that Verma was accused of catcalling and harassing a woman when she was auditioning for a TV show? As Allen did, Verma denies the allegations, saying that he could “very confidently verify” that the incident never took place at all. But Verma remains on the payroll.

Further reading

Sex: a warning from history

By Matthew Sweet

Does Amazon have different standards for international artists and companies than it does for American ones? If so, this is the worst kind of cultural imperialism. American leftists have a bad habit of granting a cultural exception to the sort of mistreatment of women globally that they would not stand for in the US. If an accusation is enough to bring an artist down in America, why is it allowable internationally? Is that which is intolerable for American women in entertainment acceptable for female entertainers in other countries?

The case of Mexican production company Televisa is quite a different matter from those unproven, deniable allegations against Allen and Verma. These ones have been proved accurate. In fact, the company has a documented history of harassment.

Further reading

How we warp our moral code for genius

By Douglas Murray

From Televisa, Amazon bought an untitled political thriller series dealing with Mexican political and drug cartel intrigue. But Televisa has a long track record of bad behaviour against actresses, going back to the first complaints in 2015, which included on air groping and rape. While Televisa fired the director who was accused of rape, the network was also alleged to have paid bribes to secure rights to host the World Cup, though the execs have denied it.

Is this the kind of corporate practice that Amazon wants to associate with? A company accused of bribery, rape, and harassment surely has no place in the Amazon family.

Why are the standards to which Amazon is holding Allen so at odds with those they seem to apply to their international acquisitions? It very much looks like Amazon and Salke are more concerned with virtue signalling to Hollywood #MeToo and #TimesUp activists than upholding a moral standard.

If unproven allegations against Allen, or his opinions on the use of allegations against third parties, are reason to breach his contract, then surely Amazon must hold their international collaborators to the same standards. If they don’t, it’s simply hypocrisy, hastily applied, and conveniently meted out for public approval.

Further reading

The consequences of cosy AI collusion

By Peter Franklin

There’s a parallel between the world of The Matrix and what I’m assuming is the actual real world. Of course, our own AI systems aren’t about to achieve sentience, let alone the ability to enslave us. But here’s the parallel: though AI can ‘learn’, the learning process is in most cases deeply dependent on human beings. I don’t just mean the clever researchers who create the hardware and develop the software – I also mean the people who supply the data that’s the basic fuel of the learning process.

Those people include you and me. When you fill in one of those ‘I am not a robot’ forms on a website – perhaps by decyphering a piece of distorted text or clicking on images that contain a specified object – you are creating labelled data that an AI system can learn from. By spotting commonalities in labelled data items, the system learns to identify unlabelled data items that contain the same patterns. And, of course, if they’ve done it once, they can do it again and again with super-human speed and attention to detail.

However, every time we want an AI system to learn a new pattern it needs another source of human labelled data – this is the ‘energy source’ that powers AI’s continued progress.

In an important piece for Bloomberg, Matt Day, Giles Turner and Natalia Drozdiak write about the workers who help Alexa – the digital assistant who ‘lives’ in Amazon’s smart speaker products – to get better at her job :

“Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.”

This is the sort of thing the Alexa’s human assistants do for her:

“One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as ‘Taylor Swift’ and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist.”

Further reading

Are you truly unfakeable?

By Tom Chivers

It’s not that Amazon and other companies in the field are denying this. Indeed, the whole point of a smart speaker is that it’s listening to us, ready to act upon our desires.

Is it a problem that Amazon’s human workforce may be listening in too? The article includes a statement from Amazon assuring us that they “only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience” and that “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow”. (But – see this follow-up report from Matt Day and his Bloomberg colleagues).

A quick flick through UnHerd’s tech coverage should make it clear that we’re not exactly uncritical of the big tech companies. However, on this issue, I don’t think we should panic – yet. Day tells us that 78 million smart speakers were sold last year alone. To the extent that the tech companies can afford to pay people to listen in, it will be to gain a competitive edge in improving the technology itself. I doubt they’re interested in our private gossip. We give away enough of that to Facebook anyway.

If the AI companies are downplaying the human side of their operations, it’s to make the AI side seem more impressive than it actually is so far. It’s an uncomfortable irony that this most futuristic of technologies is dependent on so much mundane human labour.

As with so much else in the tech industry, costs are kept down by outsourcing much of the work to low-wage countries. However, this leaves companies with a problem when they want to train up AI systems in languages that are only spoken in high-wage countries.

Writing for The Verge, Angela Chen looks at the situation in Finland – a country whose beautiful but difficult language is spoken pretty much exclusively by Finns. Where can you find enough people both willing and able to do the laborious work of teaching an AI how to process spoken or written Finnish? Chen reports that one start-up has hit upon a solution: a joint venture with the authorities to get the country’s prisoners to do the work. Apparently, it’s preferred to traditional prison work – which includes metal-smithing – because it doesn’t involve equipment that can be used as a weapon. 

It’s also a great example of the domain dependency of AI – however well it learns one task it is extremely limited in applying that skill to another task and thus must turn once more to human tutors. Far from finding ourselves trapped in a computer-generated simulation, the fact is that AI lives within the ‘human matrix’ – the various bubbles of language and thought through which we perceive and conceptualise the real world.

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that the army of human workers currently being used to fuel the development of AI is ultimately working towards its own obsolescence – a state in which computers will be able to recognise anything we can recognise and understand anything we can understand.

Further reading

The true cost of digital convenience

By Mark Piesing

This will mean a world of surveillance unlimited by the availability of human eyes and ears. Potentially anything we say or do within sight or hearing of a machine will be looked at, listened to and, in some way, interpreted. Just how much power that will give them (and their controllers) and what they do with it remains to be seen.

What’s less appreciated is that the world’s transport networks have undergone a similar revolution. Thanks to common standards, they’ve become increasingly inter-operable, boosting global trade. The containerisation of shipping and freight has proved especially important – something that Ruth Davidson wrote about in her UnHerd launch essay:

“Before containerisation, loading cargo cost $5.86 per ton and only 1.3 tons could be loaded per hour. Today, cargo can be loaded at a rate of 10,000 tons per hour and at a cost of just $0.16 per ton.

“90% of all purchased goods are now shipped inside a container and 90% of the world’s nations have at least one container port.”

Obviously the parallels between the internet and transport aren’t exact. The internet is pretty much instantaneous, but can only move information, while neither of those things is true of the global transportation system. However, in other ways, the similarities between the two global networks are growing – indeed, they are gradually merging into one another.

Suggested reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davison

For instance, containerisation didn’t just streamline shipping in a physical sense, it also did it electronically, establishing globally-shared systems for recording and tracking goods as they travel around the planet. The growing automation of both the physical and informational components means that within decades the global transport network will become a robotic extension of the internet, able to see and move physical objects as precisely as the internet currently does with bits of data. Our transport networks and the internet will become one.

Who is best-placed to dominate this emerging super-network?

I’d look to those companies whose operations and expertise already cut across the still distinct spheres of electronic communication and physical transport. One company in particular comes to mind: Amazon.

Writing for Bloomberg, Shira Ovide urges us to keep an eye on the most expansive of the tech giants:

“We shouldn’t lose sight of Amazon’s interest in transportation and logistics — moving physical goods by land, sea and air, organizing that transportation, storing merchandise or delivering it to the right place. PwC has said this is a roughly $5 trillion annual market, which fits with Amazon’s love of attacking massive pools of spending.”

Here are just some of the things that Amazon has been up to lately:

“Amazon and General Motors Co. are discussing an investment in an electric truck company. Amazon was among a group of recent investors in autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation Inc. Last month, Amazon said it would test package deliveries by small robots in a Seattle-area neighborhood.”

For all of the prototyping, it will be years, perhaps decades, before driverless vehicles and delivery drones go mainstream – and there’s no guarantee that Amazon and its partners will win the technological race. So a more immediate test of the company’s ambitions concerns its existing capabilities.

Amazon is a vertically integrated company, with massive investments at almost every stage in the online retail value chain. It has a history of using those strengths as a base from which to expand horizontally to create parallel businesses. Ovide gives the example of Amazon Web Services (AWS):

“The company had already built data centers and servers to support its online store. Turning this into a service for others required different technology and a lot of work, but the initiative let any company rent Amazon-caliber computing horsepower. “

In previous UnPacked columns I’ve looked at another example – Amazon’s plans to expand from online to real world retail via its fully automated Amazon Go stores.

Suggested reading

Bezos and his offensive, self-serving philanthropy

By James Bloodworth

Given this track record, will Amazon use it mastery of logistics and deliveries to expand into territory currently held by companies like FedEx and UPS?

“The huge volume of existing packages — about 2 billion a year in the U.S., Cowen & Co. estimates — helps Amazon learn the delivery routes that hit the most homes. It’s already paying for those routes. How much harder and more expensive would it be to layer on more deliveries to those routes from other companies?”

Perhaps the question is not how much more expensive would it be for Amazon to deliver other packages, but whether they can do it more cheaply than the established companies. If they can, and if Amazon were willing to act on such an advantage, then governments would be faced with a dilemma: to allow consumers to enjoy the immediate benefits or to prevent this over-mighty giant from becoming even more powerful.

The pattern thus far is of governments giving Amazon what it wants. Take US taxation policy, for instance. It was recently reported that the company made a profit of $11.2 billion, but paid nothing in federal income tax. Indeed, as the saga of Amazon’s new HQ demonstrates, it is often the corporates who benefit from the public purse, not the other way round. 

I don’t know if Amazon has plans to expand into public transport too, but someone’s being taken for a ride.

Last week I wrote about the fury provoked by Amazon’s search for a second HQ – and the special favours and subsidies offered by cities and states vying to play host. It was, said the critics, a grotesque example of corporate welfare.

Further reading

The ugly truth behind Amazon's beauty contest

By Peter Franklin

Of course, Amazon is not the only tech giant to come under political pressure – whether at home or abroad.

But what does it all amount to? Will we see concerns about the power and practices of the FAANGs turn into something like the antitrust reforms of the early 20th century?

In a convincingly pessimistic article for Vanity Fair, William D Cohan doesn’t think so:

“On Wall Street, however, bankers are betting that Americans don’t really care about reining in Silicon Valley—and that Congress, for the most part, doesn’t really care, either.”

Well, the bankers of Wall Street should know all about the failure of government to properly regulate an out-of-control industry. They certainly recognise a weakness of political will when they see it.

Cohan mentions a conversation he had with a Wall Street executive whose job was to ascertain the likelihood of meaningful regulation for the tech sector:

“His point was that there still is no natural, large constituency for regulating any of the major tech companies that dominate portions of the U.S. economy. What legislators and aides were conveying, this person told me, was that they believed the outrage was limited… the congressional staffers told my source, ‘We’re not getting calls on this. Nobody’s marching on Washington because they’re upset about Facebook. When we go home to our districts, nobody’s showing up in our town halls and complaining about Instagram or complaining about Amazon.’”

So, the reason why the politicians aren’t really bothered is because we’re not. But why don’t we care?

Further reading

Ida Tarbell - the crusading journalist who humbled Big Oil

By Liam Halligan

Cohan points out that tech companies are hard to regulate because many of the services they provide are free to the public. How does one assess the harm done by a monopoly when, for most people, there is literally no price to pay?

This also explains the lack of public anger. Unlike, say, a utility company, there is no bill waiting on the doormat at the end of each quarter, no final demand for payment, no risk of disconnection. And even with the tech products one does have to pay for, there are usually cheaper options to switch to – options which include going more or less tech free. To a considerable extent these are services that we want rather than need to consume.

Of course, in a broader sense, there is a price to be paid for the growing dominance of the tech companies: the loss of shops in the High Street; the decline of print media; the control and exploitation of personal data; the disruption caused by platform capitalism on independent businesses in a variety of sectors from taxis to tourism; the impact of the distraction economy on economic productivity; the effect of social media on mental health; one could go on.

Further reading

Platform cooperativism – an alternative to technopoly

By Peter Franklin

However, these are second and third order effects – things that the public may lament, but which they don’t link directly to the services that FAANGs provide to them. Or, when we do make the link, we have to admit that we’re actively complicit – regretting the demise of the local bookshop while ordering books from you-know-who.

It’s hard to get angry at businesses whose power is based on our all-too-eager cooperation.

But this is precisely why politicians need to take the lead. The whole point of representative democracy is to mobilise the diffuse, and therefore individually powerless, interests of the public, against the concentrated and highly-motivated interests of powerful corporations. We need saving from their – and our – our worst instincts.

‘Vulture capitalism’ is a play on the words ‘venture capital’. It refers to practices like the purchase and asset-stripping of an ailing company. Nasty stuff, but a bigger threat is ‘vampire capitalism’ – which is also extractive, but much more attractive. After all, the most dangerous kind of predator is not one that overpowers its prey, but charms it.

The FAANGs are not wholly villainous. Much of what they do is impressive and occasionally life-enhancing. Nevertheless, we need politicians to keep them in check. This might not be the time for sharpened stakes, but a bit of garlic wouldn’t go amiss.

But all of that is as nothing compared to Amazon’s latest achievement, which is bringing unity to America’s fractured political landscape. Leftwingers like Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rightwingers like Tucker Carlson of Fox News now speak as one… against Amazon.

Indeed, an extraordinary range of American publications from the socialist Jacobin magazine to the centrist Atlantic through to the conservative National Review have published pieces lambasting the company. The focus of this widespread rage is something that might seem relatively innocuous – a decision over where to site the company’s second headquarters (the first is in Seattle). Compared to all the other controversies that Amazon is embroiled in, the acquisition of some extra office space might seem an odd thing to get so exercised about.

Suggested reading

Cheap consumer goods come with a high human price tag

By James Bloodworth

However, there was an awful lot at stake: 50,000 new jobs and a $5 billion investment in new construction: a huge prize for a big city; the promise of complete transformation for a smaller one.

Which is why a grand total of 238 cities (including some in Canada and Mexico) entered the competition to be chosen. This was narrowed down to a shortlist of 20 cities in January, with the final result announced earlier this month (of which, more later). The whole process was distinctly reminiscent of the competition between cities to host the Olympic Games.

Unfortunately, for Amazon, its quest to find a second home has become a symbol of corporate welfare. That’s because the company wasn’t just looking for the best possible location, it was also angling for incentives.

It is estimated that the various levels of American local government (including state governments) spend between $45 and $90 billion every year enticing businesses to invest in their states and communities (or to not move existing investments elsewhere). The sweeteners take many forms from tax breaks to targeted infrastructure investments (though what counts as a special favour and what is something that the state or city would have done anyway is not always clear). The justification is that the locality will receive much more in return once the corporate welfare recipient moves in and starts creating jobs, tax revenues and reasons for other businesses to move in. From a nationwide perspective this amounts to a system of subsidies for businesses big enough to demand them, but from the narrow perspective of the locality, it can look like a good deal.

Therefore, Amazon wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary… for corporate America. But if they thought that the spectacle of a trillion dollar company touring the country soliciting favours from investment-hungry cities would look good, they were mistaken.

Suggested reading

The traitors and thieves of Silicon Valley

By Jonathan Tepper

The secrecy surrounding the bidding process didn’t help. One could argue that this is just how business is done – with Amazon expecting no more confidentiality from its prospective public sector partners than it would from the private sector. However, government, whether national or local, is not just another client/supplier, it is a democratic institution. While it isn’t necessary to give a running commentary on every twist and turn in a negotiation, the people of a community can’t be frozen out altogether – not when the deal is as consequential as that on offer from Amazon. Citizens need to be treated with at least as much respect as shareholders – in fact, rather more, because they not only ‘own’ but also legimitise the government side of the deal.

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All of these concerns and others were bubbling away during the 14-month competition, but it was the final result that blew the lid on public anger.

It wasn’t that most of the cities making the bid were doomed to be disappointed. After all, with one new HQ there could only be one winner – something the 238 bidding cities will have been aware of going into the process. As it turned out, there were two winners, because Amazon decided to split its second HQ between two locations. But rather than lessening the disappointment the joint award accentuated it. That’s because neither winner was a city that really needed the break; both winners were located along the BosWash corridor – the mighty connurbation that runs from Boston to Washington. Hopes that Amazon might establish an HQ somewhere in heartland America – helping to bridge the divide between the coastal cities and flyover country were dashed.[2. There will, however, be a $230 million “Operations Centre of Excellence” in Nashville, Tennessee]

Suggested reading

What does America want?

By Henry Olsen

One of the winners was New York – always a strong contender given its global profile. But the other winner was, if anything, of greater geographical significance. Arlington County, Virginia cannot be described as heartland America. It’s not even heartland Virginia – but rather in the western suburbs of Washington. It is therefore well within the infamous ‘Beltway‘ – seen by much of America as the home of an out-of-touch political elite (though it’s also home to a great deal of poverty). The specific location is a business district of superblocks called Crystal City. Despite the name, it is not the most sparkling of places – but it is right next door to Reagan National airport. It’s also got metro stations, is just across the bridge from the Capitol and handy for the Pentagon (where Amazon has business). Jeff Bezos also happens to own the Washington Post.

So despite a high profile competition in which cities across and beyond the nation were considered, the winners were America’s biggest city and its capital city. A big-ticket investment decision that might have helped disperse the concentration of economic power in America, has confirmed it instead.

In the light of the outcome, Amazon is open to accusations of having staged the competition as a publicity stunt. Though to be fair, if it had opted for New York and Washington without the competition, it would have been accused of not giving the rest of America a chance.

Other critics see the competition as a clever way of obtaining commercially useful information about the expansion plans of candidate cities – handy when you’re in the business of building a nationwide distribution network (not to mention a chain of automated retail outlets). That said, obtaining such information is what major developers are pretty good at anyway.

Suggested reading

Who will take on the undeserving rich?

By Deborah Hargreaves

The fiercest aspect of the backlash centres on the corporate welfare aspect of the final decision. Despite picking the most ‘Amazon-ready’ locations, the company has nevertheless secured a reported $2.2 billion of additional inducements. Even the most reliable defenders of corporate America have had enough. In an editorial entitled ‘Amazon’s Golden Fleecing’, the Wall Street Journal had this to say:

“We rarely agree with socialist Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s right to call billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon “extremely concerning.” These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst.”

Fox News host, Tucker Carlson also weighed in: “the richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?”

And yet, some of the rival locations were offering a lot more than that. Amazon literally turned down billions of dollars so that it could locate in New York and Washington. What clearer proof could there be of the pulling power of a fortunate few locations over everywhere else.

The fact that this involves Amazon only makes it worse. This is a company with a physical footprint of facilities and employees across America. With its expertise in cloud computing services, logistics and distribution, there can be few organisations better positioned to overcome the tyranny of distance. If anyone could have made a non-obvious location work, it was Amazon.

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The ‘Amazon moat‘ is not a water feature planned for either of its new headquarters, but a reference to the company’s well-defended position in the marketplace. Its operational infrastructure from websites to warehouses is so extensive and interconnected as to make it all-but-impossible for a serious competitor to emerge. Without the Amazon’s economics of scale (and accumulated expertise), it’s very hard for rivals to compete on price across such a range of goods and services – and if they can’t do that they can’t grow big enough or last long enough to match Amazon’s heft.

Suggested reading

What does the 'charging elephant' - also known as Amazon - want? Only everything (and beware of getting in its way)

By Peter Franklin

‘Superstar cities’ like New York and Washington also have their metaphorical moats: the connections, attractions, size and diversity that smaller and/or poorer places cannot compete with. Unlike a company, a city is limited in the scope of its geographical expansion. A city cannot grow ever onwards across the world. What it can do, however, is bring the world to the city. Companies are nothing without people and are, therefore, drawn inexorably to the places that have the people it needs, which in turn attracts more people and, of course, their money.

So is that it, then? Are nations like America doomed to a circular process of growing geographical inequality? A favoured few mega-cities monopolising a favoured few mega-corporations?

A country can’t afford to give up on its smaller cities (or to ignore the interests of its smaller businesses). However, changing the dynamics of economic concentration will require concerted action on the part of central and local government. Here are five things they should be getting on with now:

A crackdown on corporate welfare. It should be against the law to offer inducements to one business that aren’t available to all businesses – especially when it comes to their treatment in the tax system.

A transparent city planning system. All information about governmental land-use and infrastructure investment decisions should be open source – with no privileged access for powerful interests. Maximising the involvement of local citizens in key planning decisions requires radical openness anyway.

Giving communities more control over their land. One of the reasons why Crystal City was so attractive to Amazon is that much of the relevant land was owned by one developer – greatly simplifying matters for a major investment. Instead of offering tax breaks and the like, local government would be much better engaged in entrepreneurially obtaining and preparing land for development.

Rethinking the way the state allocates capital spending – which should be counter-geographical as well as counter-cyclical. Investing to maximise returns on the basis of conventional assumptions means that the same places will get most of the public investment as well as the private investment. It would also help not to include rent in GDP calculations, which counts the inflation of land values in overheated property markets as ‘growth’.

Suggested reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

Introducing a land value tax. The concentration of development in a few favoured locations sends rental values soaring. Not only should this bonanza for landlords not be counted as growth, it should also be properly taxed. In the long-term, this would help shift investment out of economically unproductive, socially useless speculation. In the shorter-term, it would raise revenues that could be invested locally in social housing and community land trusts – and nationally in boosting the potential of smaller cities.

Finally a word of warning: dominant cities don’t stay that way forever – and neither do dominant companies. The tendency towards economic concentration is driven by factors that shift over time. Taking active steps to spread the productive potential of a nation isn’t just a matter of maintaining social cohesion, still less is it an act of ‘charity’. Rather, it is the policy of keeping options open in a world where change is inevitable.

Or, to put it more succinctly, don’t put your eggs all in one basket – Amazon baskets included.

Today, the $740 billion former bookseller’s tentacles stretch far beyond e-commerce: into bricks-and-mortar retailing, air cargo, cloud computing and AI – technologies that are, or will become, the backbone of countries such as the USA and the UK. It has combined traditional market dominating techniques with an unrivalled understanding of its customers’ online behaviour, to awesome effect. And concern about monopolistic behaviour is increasingly being voiced.

Further reading

Can't we stop data monsters from devouring their rivals?

By David Morris

Everyone used to understand what a monopoly was, and nearly everyone, other than monopolists themselves, understood that it represented the failure of capitalism rather than its apex. When one company dominates a market then the good things that come from competition between producers, such as quality, variety and innovation, are likely to come to an end. Without competition, there’s little incentive to do any of these expensive things, and both consumers and the wider economy loses out.

Then in the 1970s a new idea emerged from America’s law schools that turned this thinking on its head. The size of the company no longer mattered: the only criterion by which it should be judged, or a takeover blocked, was consumer welfare. To put it crudely, a firm like Amazon could be as big as it wanted as long as it kept prices low. Today to be concerned about the ‘bigness’ of companies is to go back to the popularist goals of the past, argues Professor Daniel Crane of the University of Michigan.

By the second decade of the 21st century, that reinterpretation of the law has had – if you are cynical – its intended effect. We are living in a new age of concentration, where a few corporate giants like Amazon dominate the economy. The ratio between the cost of a good or service and its selling price in the wider economy – often seen as evidence of market dominance – has risen in advanced economies by 43% since the 1980s.  The combined revenue of the tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – is larger than the GDP of more than 90% of the world’s nations. Start-ups are even founded with the sole purpose of being acquired by one of these Big Five.

Further reading

Who commands the internet?

By Carl Miller

Then, in 2016, an unknown law student decided to dust down some forgotten textbooks hidden away on the top floor of her university library. Early in 2017, Lina Khan published ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ in the Yale Law Journal. The one word that Big Tech didn’t want to see in the public conversation – monopoly – was back, and at the worst moment. For the first time, Big Tech was caught in a bipartisan squeeze in Congress as real political pressure built up over the abuse of customer data and fake news.

Khan’s argument was simple. Once laws that were designed to prevent one company controlling a market had been pushed to one side, companies like Amazon were able to gain market dominance through anticompetitive practices. This gave them control of the infrastructure that many businesses and other parts of the economy depend on. Khan suggests that either Amazon should be regulated more forcefully to ensure competition – or that it should be recognised as a natural monopoly like the water or gas supply, and run as a publicity utility.

Now, Amazon, Google and the other modern monopolies have a battle on their hands. Worryingly, it looks like they have a formidable range of weapons to fight it with – and Khan and her allies have already been labelled as “hipster radicals.”

Further reading

How the big tech companies are eating free markets

By Charlotte Pickles

Big Tech’s lobbying dates back 20 years, but the scale of it has grown significantly. In America, five years ago Amazon spent $3.5 million on lobbying, last year they spent $13 million. In just a few years, Amazon’s lobbying operations have gone from almost nothing to rival Google. To defend its sprawling empire from the politicians that are circling the tech giant has assembled the biggest lobbying team of any tech company in Washington: 28 in-house lobbyists, compared to Apple’s and Facebook’s eight. 

Perhaps more disturbing is the influence that companies like Amazon and Google have that you can’t see. Both regulatory capture, where the regulators identify too closely with the companies they are trying to control, and policy capture, when commercial interests so infiltrate governments that they can affect the design of measures relevant to their activities, should concern us.

Since 2005, concern has grown over Google’s political influence after research showed that it had poached at least 65 government officials from all over the European Union. During the same period, 15 ‘Googlers’ have been appointed to government positions in Europe, thus penetrating to the heart of the decision-making process. In the UK, Google has targeted for recruitment civil servants from key parts of the government machine like the Treasury and No. 10. This revolving door between politics, tech and regulators is a key characteristic of crony capitalism.

More from this author

The book the tech titans love

By Mark Piesing

Then, of course, there is the ‘dark money’ – the think tanks, research institutions and publications who enjoy their journey on Big Tech’s gravy train and can be used to shape the debate. Last year a critic of Google was fired from the New America Foundation, when he posted an article in support of the European Commission’s antitrust regulators. The think tank has received over $20 million from Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google, his family trust and the company itself.

Then in July 2018, US activists really woke up to the power of Amazon, and the damage it could do to democracy, when the company used its influence to repeal a law passed by its home city of Seattle that imposed a small employee ‘head tax’ on large corporations. The purpose of the tax was to fund affordable housing in a city whose horrendously high costs are partly down to the very same tech companies. Many were left with the feeling that Amazon was too powerful to tax and regulate.

If politicians can be persuaded to act, the big question is how to tackle the problem. The traditional anti-monopoly medicine would be to break up these large conglomerates into their smaller component pieces. Amazon could easily be split into retail, cloud, logistics and video production. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) could be broken up into divisions such as Google Search and YouTube.

Further reading

How to bring the tech giants to heel

By Mat Lawrence

Others are thinking about an updating of the vision behind the BBC. In Britain, the think tank IPPR argues that the digital economy should be reorganised as a “digital commonwealth”, to be an open, collective resource for the common good. The major digital platform companies would be regulated like broadcasters and mobile providers. Where large digital companies have the advantage of existing data when moving into a new market, such as banking or mobility, they would be compelled to open it up for others to use. And a new public service corporation would ensure that public data is widely available for innovation and public good.

This is already being done in other industries. In the energy industry, consumers who share their data with new firms such as Switchd can already get better access to cheaper prices, and the process will only get better, faster and more automated as energy suppliers share more of their data digitally. Banks and other financial institutions are also opening up their data for others to access, use and share. Customers are doing something similar by sharing data from their accounts with third parties they trust.

In the end, the convenience of Amazon’s platform has turned us into lazy consumers who would give up almost anything in return for same day delivery. But if we are not careful it won’t just be the High Street that we have abandoned. Big Tech has the will and the wallet to bypass traditional regulators, and that leaves few options other than to turn them into social enterprises that serve the common good.

In 1911, the breakup of John D Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil Company prevented one man from having a stranglehold on the fuel that America depended on. If data is the new oil, then perhaps it’s time we stopped a handful of men from controlling the lifeblood of every advanced nation.

Further reading

Time to topple the technopoly

By Charlotte Pickles

It is hard not to be cynical about such an initiative, not least because it comes on the back of a deluge of criticism directed at Amazon for its aggressive tax avoidance and exploitative treatment of warehouse workers. Bezos’ generosity looks an awful lot like an attempt to distract from those brand-damaging facts.

It is also an exercise of power, as philanthropy often is. Some philanthropists, such as Microsoft chief Bill Gates, seem genuinely to want to make a difference in the world. Others, however, are demonstrating that they have the power to dole out money on a whim – Bezos is the only American among the world’s five richest people to not join the Giving Pledge.

Further reading

'Open' London is built on exploited labour

By James Bloodworth

This attitude to philanthropy was summed up well by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who viewed the “man of wealth” as “the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren.” The philanthropist, he went on, should use “his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” to help the poor and needy because he is able to do so “better than they would or could do for themselves”.

Grasp this pseudo-paternalistic view of humanity and you begin to understand how the super-rich are able to rationalise their tax avoidance and reconcile it with care in the community. Men like Jeff Bezos view it as their job, rather than the job of the democratic state, to distribute their vast riches. In pledging a fraction of his wealth to assist the poor and needy, Bezos is flaunting the power that only unimaginable riches can bring – the power to dodge the full force of the tax man, dole money out on a whim and be applauded for it as a munificent philanthropist.

There is particular effrontery in adopting a lofty philanthropic air when you can’t seem to find the money to make life bearable for workers in your warehouses. I have written many times about my experiences working in an Amazon warehouse back in 2016. Workers were urinating in bottles because they were afraid to take toilet breaks (a recent survey by Organise found that 74% of Amazon warehouse workers in England were scared to go to the toilet because of productivity targets), and disciplinaries were given out by management for taking sick days, regardless of whether they have a doctors note. The agencies Amazon used to employ workers in the warehouse frequently underpaid people – one young woman I interviewed was paid 62p an hour by one such agency, and it took six weeks for her to claw back the money she had earned.

Further reading

Our broken tax system is threatening the free market model

By Charlotte Pickles

Bezos may see his philanthropy as ‘giving back’– the cliché deployed by every self-important philanthropist – but his company was giving very little back to the community of Rugeley, the town in which the warehouse I worked in was located. Every job as a picker or packer in the warehouse was temporary and lasted for nine months, providing little stability.  “Be under no illusions, this is a temporary job,” we were informed on the first day. And despite being the biggest employer in the town, few local people worked at Amazon. Instead the warehouse relied on an army of Romanians bused in predominantly from neighbouring areas – apparently the only people economically desperate enough to put up with the Victorian working conditions.

This state of affairs exists because companies like Amazon are run like dictatorships. A cult of personality prevails – witness the army of sycophantic Twitter users who turn up under any article critical of Amazon to blast out positive statements about the company. One of these paid-up brand ‘ambassadors’ seems to turn up whenever I tweet about the company these days. Within the warehouse, language is distorted in an Orwellian fashion. If you lose your job at Amazon you are not sacked or fired, but, euphemistically ‘released’.

Workers’ representation – through forums such as trade unions – are all but non-existent. Those on the shop floor at Amazon are, as Carnegie put it, subject to the “superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” of higher ups like Jeff Bezos.

Last year Amazon trebled its UK profits yet paid less in tax than the year before. If Bezos really cared about the lives of the poor he would use some of that profit to pay his workers a decent wage – enough, perhaps, so that they do not have to sleep in tents, as has been reported in Scotland. The billionaire may believe he is better able to spend the money generated by his workforce than they would or could do for themselves, but his charitable initiative, based in the US, will do nothing for low income families outside of North America.

More from this author

Amazon: the new Victorian workhouse

By James Bloodworth

Bezos has said that his new network of pre-schools will “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” Yet it is precisely Amazon’s intense customer obsession that has led to such detrimental workforce conditions. If a 24-hour Amazon Prime delivery requires an army of downtrodden workers, hidden away in vast warehouses where they are afraid to take a toilet break, how are those who work in Amazon’s network of pre-schools going to fair? If “the child will be the customer”, as Bezos puts it, is the teacher going to be the professional equivalent of the warehouse skivvy peeing in a bottle?

Charity is inevitable in any society. It is foolish and utopian to believe that the state can provide cover so comprehensive that nobody ever slips through society’s cracks. But the increasing reliance, particularly in the United States, upon mega-rich givers reveals wide economic distortions – the 1% are getting ever richer partly because of the low wages that mean ordinary workers are struggling to make ends meet. Before rushing to laud Jeff Bezos for his generosity, we should judge him for the exploitative treatment of workers in the company that has made him so wealthy.

Audio documentary

Audiocast: How dead-end jobs killed small-town pride

By James Bloodworth

Though they provide different functions and services, this immense power resides in a shared business model: the extraction and analysis of data and the control of digital infrastructure – from mapping to cloud computing – that underpins all digital technology. And as a result of this control, they are also poised to dominate artificial intelligence markets, extending their power far into the future.

Further reading

How the tech lords privatised the public square

By Jamie Bartlett

Profiting from data generates a circular, expansive dynamic: the more data that is captured, the greater the potential for revenue. As such, the impulse to accumulate more and more dominates the strategies of the tech giants, and dictates how they develop and deploy their technology. By instinct, they seek to move into more markets, buying out more competitors, driven by their voracious appetite for more data and infrastructure. Amazon, for example, has filed for 5,860 patents, while Alphabet has acquired over 190 businesses since its foundation.

These companies will counter, accurately, that in the process they provide many benefits. Consumers get useful services at low to no immediate cost, with greater convenience through coordination, and with more personalisation. Businesses get access to new markets and experience lower transaction costs. At a societal level, their platforms increase access to information, and enable social connections and greater efficiency.

But this business model is driving platforms to behave in ways that create serious economic, social and political problems. By acquiring innovative start-ups and limiting access to their large datasets, platforms are almost certainly limiting the innovation potential of the economy.

Further reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

As the digital giants increasingly dominate their markets, their profits are soaring, and with relatively low levels of employment these labour-light digital firms are helping drive inequality. Their dominance in advertising markets has already eroded news media, while social network platforms have potentially been used to manipulate democratic proceedings. And as the power of the tech monopolies grows, these problems will grow with them.

In the face of such concentration, defenders of open and inclusive innovation must have a strategy for reining in the digital giants. So far, the development of the modern digital economy has largely been determined by powerful market actors, with little proactive response from government. Without action, the boundless ambition of the universal platforms threatens to undermine democracy, accelerate inequality and concentrate economic power.

The goal must be to move from conditions of ‘enclosure’, where data and infrastructure are dominated by a few tech giants, to an open and innovative digital ‘commons’, where they are organised as a collective resource. In the process, this can unlock a wave of more inclusive innovation and enterprise, supporting the revival of democracy.

Further reading

How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

There are, of course, limits to what the UK can achieve with domestic levers ­– the digital economy is international. Nonetheless, we are not powerless. Much more can be done with bolder policymaking, and IPPR’s new report, The Digital Commonwealth, sets out an ambitious reform strategy to build a ‘digital commonwealth’.

First, we should strengthen competition law to foster innovation. The Competition and Markets Authority should be reformed so that it is better able to regulate tech companies. This should include a new requirement for major digital companies to open up their data upon entry to new markets in which they have a major advantage as a result of their existing data.

Second, where platform giants provide vital infrastructure services such as searching, matching, or communicating, under monopolistic conditions, we should regulate those activities and companies as public utilities. This should be done through a new Office for Digital Platforms, which should include powers to open up the data of the digital giants in cases and markets that are deemed to be in the public interest.

Further reading

To save democracy, we must disrupt it

By Carl Miller

Third, to better drive the curation and productive use of public data, a new public service corporation, Digital UK, should be created. This would establish a Digital Citizen Account and ‘public data stores’ through which useful insights from pooled, anonymised data could be shared. It could also oversee the creation of a national data portal, which would provide a single site linking to private- and public-sector data. Under appropriate privacy and security conditions this could provide an immense and shared resource for civil society, enterprise, and local communities to build better products and services.

Finally, we should learn from the cities at the cutting edge of digital governance, such as Barcelona, and get local authorities to set up Local Digital Commonwealth Strategies. These would aim to support the development and adoption of local platform services – from community decision-making apps to innovative businesses – leveraging public sector data sources and personal data from the opening-up of private sector data. This would ensure that value is retained and circulated among communities where the data is generated, to provide economic, social and environmental value.

Taken together, this is an ambitious agenda to rein in the power of the tech giants and foster inclusive innovation. The alternative – a status quo that will enable widening inequality and the growing concentration of economic and technological power – is the route to deepening democratic and social crisis. It is time we acted with an ambition fit for the machine age.