Tariffs are hardly a MAGA invention, of course. On the contrary, the United States has levied protective tariffs almost from its origins as a nation. Tariffs and import substitution formed one of the central pillars of Alexander Hamilton’s political economy. 

Today, Europe screams about Trumpian tariffs, but the Continent has been reluctant to lower its own historically high protective barriers, most of them based on non-tariff regulatory policies. Canada, too, has been very protectionist and for a long time. Now, after decades in which Washington put global integration over its own workers and industry, America is playing the same game. 

The benefits of Trump’s tariffs will take time to become apparent. Already, they have spurred  companies like Eli Lilly to recommit to domestic production, forced Honda to scrap plans for shifting production of new models to Mexico in favor of Indiana, and prompted chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung to build new plants in Arizona and Texas, respectively.  Likewise, Nvidia, a company that long offshored its production to Taiwan, has committed to multibillion-dollar development projects. 

Still, job recovery is gradual. US manufacturing revival has been a bipartisan goal, pursued in fits and starts, since the Great Recession. As the Reshoring Initiative notes, the country has managed to claw back approximately 1.7 million jobs in an effort to bring manufacturing to or nearer the US homeland. This could just be the beginning. By some estimates, as China rises up the value chain and production costs there increase, up to a third of all Chinese capacity will move away from the Middle Kingdom in the near future. 

This shift gets an unintended boost from the increasingly hostile atmosphere in China, which confronts even big, established firms like the appliance giant Whirlpool, General Electric,   Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris. Most recently, Chinese exports to America dropped to the lowest level since the pandemic, driving the trade deficit to $280 billion this year, down from $500 billion under President Joe Biden.

Yet the road from here is by no means easy. One key concern is that firms will merely shift production from China to other third countries. This would be a plus in terms of weakening Beijing as a rival, but only domestic production in key industries can guarantee US economic preeminence and, with it, US geopolitical primacy.

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Like any trend that enriches some, reshoring faces strong opposition from those who benefit from the offshoring trend. You can start with the greens, whose anti-growth ideology and embrace of “net zero” are simply incompatible with industry-led economic growth. Their view boils down to letting the Chinese and their satraps do the dirty work, while America and the West purchase the products from the world’s No. 1 polluter. 

Traditional liberals also find tariffs distasteful, as reflected in most of the business press: The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, and the like. Most of their favorite pundits detest tariffs and focus on the ill effects on companies and consumers, while largely embracing the current trading regime, as long as financial markets thrive. Libertarians, especially, rail against the very idea of having national policies to encourage manufacturers.

Many mainstream Democrats naturally disdain industry, reflecting the prejudices of their party’s elite professional base. Factories, a Northwestern University economics professor claims, “aren’t the future,” and we can count on our service and tech economies to generate wealth. Christina Romer, who served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Barack Obama, claimed concerns that building stuff was more important than getting haircuts reflected merely “sentiment and history,” not modern reality.

Then there’s the Democratic Party’s increasingly powerful socialist left — which along with many Silicon Valley oligarchs — prefer welfarism over growth and who have abandoned higher-wage jobs in energy, logistics, and manufacturing as a means to grow family incomes. Many embrace a  universal basic income as a means to palliate a populace made redundant by globalization — in effect, offering handouts, porn, and weed to the jobless children of a once-proud working class.

Of course, China benefited the most from the status quo ante. Since its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, the People’s Republic has grown so much that it boasts as many factory exports as the United States, Japan, and Germany combined. 

In contrast, between 2004 and 2017, US reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, a barrage that, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000. Europe’s industrial sector also declined, losing a million manufacturing jobs just between 2019 and 2023. Germany is projected to lose as many 400,000 auto jobs by 2030 through competition with Chinese EVs. Britain, once the world’s industrial leader, has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010 and is now only the world’s 12th largest manufacturing power.   

Mass deindustrialization’s effects are not hard to see. Just travel to northern England, the outer suburbs of Paris, the American Midwest, or Germany’s “Rust belt on the Rhine.” All these areas suffer reduced  economic mobility, high degrees of welfare dependence, and mass out-migration. For millions, the loss of such jobs has meant that, as an MIT report put it, the traditional “job escalator” has shut down.

The digital revolution, and the creation of mega-companies in places like Silicon Valley has done little to make up the difference in terms of productivity or social mobility. Nor can services by themselves solve deep-seated social or trade woes. Overall US service exports, including those that go to tech firms, represents less than a third of the country’s overseas sales.  

Needless to say, Chinese manufacturing supremacy under the former neoliberal regime also threatened to bring about Chinese defense and geopolitical supremacy. 

But here, too, a reversal is underway, with new signs of life in the US defense industry. This comes not from the corporate dinosaurs, but a whole wave of new companies. “Innovation starts in the small shops,” notes the Dallas-based venture capitalist Bryan Chambers. Upstart “defense-tech” firms are feeding off a huge surge in investment, including the Army’s current $36 billion procurement overhaul.

Some of these companies, like Denver’s Palantir and Orange County-based Anduril have seized on a change in military affairs resulting from experiences with drone and missile attacks in Palestine, Yemen, Russia, and Ukraine. Equally important, we now see a shift among entrepreneurs toward “hard tech,” essentially AI-assisted hardware, as the best bets for the future.

Likely, the bulk of America’s reindustrialization won’t take place in blue areas like California, due to their high taxes, prohibitive regulations, and high housing prices. The fastest industrial GDP growth is taking place in Texas, Michigan, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, and North Dakota. These are also the states that, according to Supply Chain Digest, offer the best conditions for manufacturers.

If the industrial boom gains velocity, it could mark a massive reversal of fortune not only for the newly industrializing South, but especially for the Midwest, a region that, between 2000 and 2005, accounted for nearly 40 percent of all US industrial job losses. 

Contributing to the production comeback is the renaissance of the US fossil-fuel industry, now producing at a record level. The Permian Basin in west Texas, which by itself is the world’s fifth largest producer of oil, and new production sites in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania provide a critical raw material, cheap energy, for reindustrialization. For example, Shell in 2022 installed a $6 billion methane cracker in Monaca, Pa., to convert the region’s abundant natural gas into plastics.

Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, authors of The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, see the old industrial belt as the primary beneficiary of a growing interface between manufacturing and technology. Self-driving cars, wearable devices, smart grids, and smart farming all benefit from harvesting a legacy of industrial expertise. For example, Akron, Ohio, successfully reinvented itself from an auto and tire center to a hotbed for polymer research. Other parts of the heartland seem poised to do the same.

Tariffs alone will not bring industry back. After all, Europe and Canada have extensive tariff regimes but continue to lose industrial market share. A concerted drive to reshore requires basic preconditions: the use of new technologies and a better-trained workforce.

New technology and the spread of affordable digital manufacturing tools like 3-D printers enable domestic firms to design, produce, and sell locally, reducing reliance on long supply chains.  These technologies allow American firms to produce better and often cheaper products. In many of these dimensions, the United States is leading or regaining the edge.

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Finding competent workers will likely prove a more uphill battle. President Joe Biden talked about having factory workers and oil riggers “learn to code” but now artificial intelligence, backed by a huge infusion of Wall Street cash, threatens to wipe out many software jobs. But there is a most pressing need for skilled, dependable workers such as drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. The American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Pushing all students into four-year programs is one source of the crisis. Schools made a terrible mistake by no longer offering shop classes. Few were encouraged to learn industrial arts. Now many of the most competent industrial workers are over age 45.

Fortunately, an incipient sea change is slowly lowering the age of skilled workers. Shop classes are making something of a comeback, and some states are investing more in skills education, something that engages less than half as many US workers than in Germany. Much of this is occurring in red states in the Midwest and South. One US senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has even suggested taxing ultra-rich universities, once favored for their production of elite professionals, and using the proceeds to fund an expanded apprenticeship program.

Attitudes are changing. One recent survey found that roughly 83% of Gen Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college. That includes 90% of those already holding college degrees. Indeed, as college enrollment dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade schools grew by 10 percent.    

To a large extent, these shortages will likely be filled by working-class whites, but also increasingly immigrants and minorities. Today, barely 58% of all working-class Americans are non-Hispanic whites; according to a 2016 Economic Policy Institute study, people of color will constitute the majority of the working class by 2032.     

Even in the rural Midwest, long plagued by shrinking workforces, refugees from places like Bhutan and East Africa have become a critical source of workers. In Fargo, ND, employers routinely call resettlement director Dan Hannaher to inquire about new families moving to the region. Seventy percent of one local manufacturer’s staff is composed of first-or second-generation workers from immigrant families, hailing from more than 30 countries. In Texas, according to a number of recent studies, as many as half of all manufacturing workers are foreign-born.  

The challenge facing these companies will be to turn these newcomers, and the increasingly detached native-born working class, into effective workers, able to employ the new technologies. Today, the West needs these companies, and workers, to be well-compensated, restoring upward mobility as well as productive growth. These people will prove far more critical to the future of the West than social-media influencers or Wall Street wizards. In the 21st century, reindustrialization offers the best hope for economic renewal and revival of a real social democracy.

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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By Jacob Howland

Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

This may be about to change. The French Ministry of the Interior told AFP that they want a change in the rules to allow officers to venture up to 300 meters into the water. Both UK and French governments hope this new policy will be in place before the Anglo-French summit in July. It would mark a new stage in the cat-and-mouse game between authorities and smuggling gangs, but will it solve the small boats crisis?

Last year, 38,023 people arrived in the UK on small boats, a 22% increase on the previous year (though still less than the peak in 2022). Small boat arrivals make up 86% of detected irregular arrivals. But this does not necessarily mean that 86% of irregular entrants come on small boats. Far from slipping unseen onto empty beaches, the overladen and unseaworthy vessels are the most visible and best detected route of arrival.

The busy waters between England and France are so well monitored that “not a single migrant has reached the UK on a small boat undetected” since new surveillance aircraft began patrolling in 2024. The De Havilland Dash 8 planes are equipped with radar, cameras, and other detection equipment, feeding data to a control center at Lydd airfield in Kent. Patrolling continuously during peak crossing season, they are also used against drug smugglers and other criminal and security targets.

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These are just the latest additions to the high-tech surveillance arsenal. In 2019, the Home Office entered a £1 billion contract with drone company Tekever, whose low-flying AR5 UAVs use video and infra-red sensors, as well as more conventional ship-tracking technologies, to monitor small boat movements in real time. Footage from one of the drones was used to convict Iraqi people smuggler Rebwar Ahmed in 2020, after the inflatable boat on which he was ferrying 20 passengers was intercepted by a Border Force cutter.

Rishi Sunak’s 2023 deal with France included nearly £500 million towards joint operations, including more drones and a joint Zonal Coordination Center to bring together all the intelligence gathered by the many eyes in the sky. Drones equipped with infra-red night vision are now operating over the French coast.

Since November 2024, the UK Home Office has also been using a satellite monitoring system provided by Luton-based Telespazio UK. Their SEonSE (Smart Eyes on SEas) platform claims not only to detect vessels, but also to show their “estimated size, speed and direction… historical track analysis… list of anomalous events in which the vessel was involved, and aggregated risk assessment”.

From drones to orbiting satellites, there is no shortage of data about who and what is moving on the waters around the British Isles. Smuggling in people, drugs, or anything else has never been harder.

Nevertheless, record numbers of people are arriving on UK shores via dangerous sea routes, and record numbers are perishing in the attempt. In 2024, 73 people are known to have died, more than the total of the previous six years. All this data may help border authorities to understand patterns of movement, and to identify the gangs and individuals organizing the crossings, but meanwhile the little boats keep setting off, overloaded with their human cargo.

One problem is that moving from observation to intervention is risky, a fact which the people smugglers (and their passengers) can use to their own advantage. Many of those who have perished, either by drowning or being crushed in overloaded boats, do so within sight of the French coast. One reason for the policy of non-intervention once people are in the water, however shallow, was that French police have been unwilling to risk being blamed for causing deaths while trying to prevent departures.

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Trying to turn back overloaded boats once at sea is also potentially dangerous. Greek coastguards who intercepted a fishing vessel laden with hundreds of would-be migrants to Europe in 2023 now face criminal charges for “causing a shipwreck” and “exposing others to danger” by attempting to tow it, after monitoring its movements for 15 hours. Most of the people on the fishing boat drowned when it capsized.

This leaves border forces in a difficult position, as the obligation — legal and moral — to protect lives at sea outweighs the imperative to prevent irregular entry to the UK. Knowing this, people smugglers can presume on the duty of coastguards and other vessels to take their customers ashore for processing. However, they can also refuse to cooperate with French authorities, who may not risk endangering lives at sea by attempting to turn back boats or take individuals into custody.

People smugglers also adapt their methods to changes in policing. Instead of piloting the boats themselves, they will offer a free passage in exchange for steering the boat. In 2024 would-be asylum seeker Ibrahima Bah was convicted of manslaughter, after accepting a free passage in return for piloting an overloaded and unseaworthy boat in 2022. At least four men drowned when it sank.

Some have blamed the increasing overloading of the small boats — now carrying an average of 53 passengers, compared with 13 in 2020 — on the success of French and other authorities in confiscating or destroying them before launch. Boats are harder to come by and more expensive, and every launch brings greater risk of detection, incentivizing fewer launches with more passengers per boat.

In response to increased surveillance of French beaches, people smugglers have resorted to launching boats elsewhere before collecting passengers who wade out to meet them, sometimes watched by police officers who are not authorized to stop them. It is hoped that the new French policy will impede this development, though fears of endangering lives by doing so will remain.

Improved intelligence and observation is only part of a long, strategic game between the authorities, the people trying to cross the Channel, and those making a lucrative business out of getting them on the water.

But is the focus on small boat crossings misplaced? Most small boat arrivals apply for asylum on arrival, and over two-thirds of those applications are granted, a higher proportion than those applying from other routes. This suggests that most small boat arrivals intend to seek legitimate status to remain in the UK, unlike arrivals by less visible routes, who may seek to stay unofficially and work in the gray economy.

Small boat arrivals also make up only a third of all asylum claims, and around 10% of total net immigration. Other irregular arrivals include people arriving at ports or airports without correct documentation, or entering illicitly — concealed in freight lorries, for example — and only detected later, if ever.

Over a third of asylum claims are made by people who travelled to the UK legally on a visa, to work, study or visit, and subsequently claimed asylum in order to stay. Others who arrive with a visa may simply outstay it, without claiming asylum. Over three million visas were granted in 2024, over a million visitors got an ETA (Electronic Travel Authorization) for a short stay, and others did not need either to enter the country.

All of this suggests that high-tech surveillance of the UK’s sea borders is no solution to concerns about uncontrolled inward migration. Even so, another technological solution is being proposed: the BritCard. A digital ID card “issued free of charge to all those with the right to live and work in the UK” the BritCard “could be instantly checked by employers or landlords using a free verifier app”.

This would certainly make life harder for people overstaying their visas or failed asylum claims, as well as those who have slipped into the country undetected (probably not on a small boat). Unable to get legitimate jobs or rented accommodation, they would be forced into the “informal economy” and find it difficult to make the better life that drew them to the UK.

But what about the rest of us? The BritCard would be mandatory, universal, and “become a familiar feature of daily life for everyone in the country,” or so its designers hope. They seem undeterred by the 40% of people they polled who worry that “the technology could be misused by the government down the line”. A reasonable fear, given that the card would be integrated into the Government’s digital systems, enabling cross-checking with HMRC, the National Landlord Database, and in future benefit claims and the NHS.

Financially, the cost is estimated at £140-400 million, which is a bargain compared to the billions spent on surveillance systems for the UK’s sea borders. Socially, however, the price of tracking individuals when they attempt to work, rent a home, or interact with state services, would be a universal identity card (albeit one carried on a smartphone) that everyone would be expected to produce in more and more situations.

Governments today are increasingly keen to turn to technology to solve big social and political problems, and a lot less keen to consider what new social and political problems the high-tech solutions may cause.

All the surveillance technology and intelligence-gathering on small boat crossings have reduced neither the arrivals nor the tragic deaths. Turning instead to technological surveillance of everyone already in the country, regardless of immigration status, is no more likely to resolve a complex problem that the UK shares with most advanced economies. It would, however, move us a step closer to being, if not a “papers please”, a “QR Code please” society.

The speech, delivered “on the frontier of the new Millennium”, is one of the purest expressions of the Blairite creed you could hope to find. Politics was no longer about class struggle, Blair explained — the exploiters vs the exploited. It was a battle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction — a question of orientation. Are you for the future or the past? As for the substance of this future, Blair is weirdly uninterested. He’s just all for it. And so, like the Communist Manifesto — with its eerie talk of spells and spectres and sorcerers — the speech has its own touch of mysticism. “These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries,” he continued. “[They] don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal.”

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Blair’s delight in our silicon future might be dismissed as ancient history, were it not for his renewed influence on British governance thanks to the Tony Blair Global Institute for Change (TBI), the multinational thinktank fronted by Blair and underwritten by the Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison to the tune of over $200 million. The TBI’s position on tech is basically that it’s amazing. “Accelerating AI adoption is… not only a matter of boosting economic growth but also of improving social outcomes,” reads one report about how we need to “reboot copyright” and to ensure that the fruits of Britain’s creative sector can be fed into Silicon Valley’s shiny new machines.

Keir Starmer has reportedly outsourced much of his policy detail to the TBI’s gleaming legions of researchers and has delivered numerous iterations of Blair’s old speech: “There is no route to growth without embracing the transformative potential of AI,” he was promising back in January. We’ll doubtless hear more of the same during the Government’s forthcoming “London Tech Week” — perhaps even a little more detail on the $330 million that Peter Thiel has signed in order to gain access to seven year’s worth of NHS data. Remember: according to Blair’s oracular vision, the likes of Thiel and Ellison are emissaries of the future, so we just have to do what these guys say, right?

So when we learn that the TBI-stamped technology minister Peter Kyle has met lobbyists from Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta, on 28 separate occasions; or that the Government is minded not to ban smartphones in schools due to a “lack of evidence”; or that campaigners are “dismayed by the lack of ambition” in the new Online Safety Act; I think we are supposed to put away any cynical thoughts. The Government is on the side of progress after all.

The trouble is, the Blairites only seem to be able to see progress in terms of whatever the tech firms tell them is progress. This might have been a mildly credible position in 1999. It’s nothing short of idiotic in the enshittified techscape of 2025. Replace “universal” with “totalizing” in Blair’s little paean and you have a fairly accurate picture of where digital technology under the current oligopoly has actually led us. A handful of firms, none of them British, actively harming children in pursuit of profit.

We can argue whether successive British Governments’ failure to regulate tech in any meaningful way has benefited the nation in the grand scheme of things — but the evidence of its dire effects on children in particular is hard to ignore. According to ONS data, between 2010 and 2014, suicide rates among British 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167% and 92% respectively. Self-harm rates among girls rose by 78%. Anxiety diagnoses for 18 to 25-year-olds jumped by 92%. Similar patterns have emerged in just about every developed country since around 2010. Rates of adolescent depression and anxiety nearly doubled in the US between 2010 and 2019. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-14-year-old girls rose by 188%. This was before Covid struck and added accelerant.

Correlation is not causation, but as Jonathan Haidt demonstrated in his book, The Anxious Generation, there is no other social change as sudden, universal, or as intimately connected to the lives of teenagers as the introduction of smartphones. In 2010 smartphones barely existed; by 2024, 96% of British teenagers had one according to Ofcom. The teenage mental health crisis exploded around 2010.

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It wasn’t Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or Reddit that invented self-harm, revenge porn, anorexia, gender dysmorphia, misogyny, extremism, incel culture, or any of the myriad ways that teen misery can mutate online. But teenage life still largely takes place amid a hostile online ecosystem in which social media companies mine their attention for profit. Whatever you’re worried about in the depths of your teenager’s soul, whatever particular sadness they harbor, it’s fairly likely the algorithm has spotted it first and tried to exploit it.

It certainly spotted Molly Russell. In 2023, Senior Coroner Andrew Walker determined that the 14-year-old British school girl had died from an act of self-harm after Instagram’s algorithms pushed her image after image inducing her to kill herself. It was the first court case that directly named one of the tech firms as a cause of harm. Her father, Ian Russell, has been clear: “It’s time to protect innocent young people, instead of allowing platforms to monetize their misery.”

Meta responded with platitudes (including some from Nick Clegg, no less), meaningless verifications and assurances that the content was indeed “safe” (in fact, Instagram continued to push inducements to self-harm even after her death). But it wasn’t a design flaw; it was the business model. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg came close to admitting as much in the recent Meta antitrust trial in the US. He testified that only about 20% of content consumed on Facebook and 10% on Instagram actually comes from a user’s friends and family. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment…” Whatever keeps you glued to the screen, in other words, which just happens to be the most inane, harmful, enraging, depressing, divisive content. Content which, as a recent British Standards Institution survey found, resulted in 72% of 16-21 year olds feeling worse after spending time online. Fully 46% of them wish the internet had never been invented.

The backlash against smartphones — essentially a backlash against the totalizing tech monopolies — is finally strong enough that Labour cannot afford to ignore it. There are Smartphone Free Childhood chapters in just about every community. Parents talk of little else. Even Tony Blair has now been heard saying that tech is “messing with kids minds” — though he’s not sure what to do about it.

The Government’s own position is similarly confused. Starmer would like it to be known that he has watched Adolescence with his teenage son. Gillian Keegan has limply promised to “crack down” on smartphone use in schools. Political will seems absent. As one charity worker, whose work centers on vulnerable boys online, put it to me recently: “I keep telling the Home Office, ‘Why are we not doing more to tackle these big tech companies?’ And they basically said: ‘There’s no political appetite. Big Tech is too powerful to take on’.” As politicians are lobbied here, Zuckerberg has already managed to torpedo protections for young people in America — and we can only speculate what cases his representatives made to Kyle across nine separate meetings. I wonder if Molly Russell’s name came up.

Actual policy is limp. The new Online Safety Bill continues to welcome measures such as age verification (we’ll see how the kids get round that one) and potential fines on social media companies (with no risk of prosecution), but it has clearly been watered down, with no onus to remove “harmful but legal” content. There is nothing remotely as ambitious as Australia’s ban on smartphones for under-16s.

It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy. Hence the current position regarding a total ban on smartphones in schools comes down to “more research”. Tobacco firms once wanted more research. Betting firms want more research. The fast food lobby hungers for more research. We have the research. The research shows us that smartphones in schools have been a disaster.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republicans have joined the battle. The broligarcy are openly attacking nations like Canada, Australia and the EU for their attempts to rein in their tech monopolies. JD Vance has reserved particular fury for the UK with the implication that we should fall into line with our Imperial masters on issues such as “free speech” or risk losing favor. The cost of Silicon Valley’s favor is clear: access to data, to infrastructure and to the inner lives of British teenagers.

We have started into this moral vortex before, the strange combination of naivety, cynicism and evangelical uplift that characterized much of the Blair project. Perhaps it is the fate of apparently liberal, progressive governments to be easy on capital and vicious to the vulnerable — an inverted version of the Nixon Paradox. Yet to argue for more leniency for these companies is not to argue for change, but a still more enshittified version of the present. And this is what makes Starmer’s subservience to the exploiters so depressing. As the public begins to get the measure of these companies, the Government and its Blairite allies are opening the door wider.

Douthat believes that the virtual versions of friendship, education, art, love, and politics are degraded substitutes for the real thing. But still, we cannot easily resist the lure of online life, and not just because we are too busy typing emojis under pictures of comically solemn babies. It is also because few are prepared to speak up for embodiment over digitality, traditional experiences over what seem like shiny new ones — or the local over the global. To do so, liberals unaccustomed to standing up for anything concrete would have to weather uncomfortable accusations of “chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction” from their fellow travelers. Critics of liberalism, meanwhile, would have to eschew the lord-of-misrule attractions of the internet, control their anarchic tendencies, and (I would add) get serious about conserving what is genuinely valuable about social life. Friendships don’t easily happen in a vacuum; they need cafes, pubs, clubs, games, parties, and a modicum of social ability to keep them going.

In his reply, Cowen essentially proves the point about liberals, absurdly objecting that Douthat’s critique of online life reveals a questionable defeatism with respect to his fellow human beings. If you are horrified by the cumulative effects of slack-jawed scrolling en masse, this must mean you have “a very low opinion of current humanity”, finding people “incapable of creating meaningful, autonomous lives, centered around some notion of the good”. As so often with the libs, alongside a defense of the status quo there is a barely-concealed slur upon the opponent, throwing passive-aggressive shade instead of argument: are you, heaven forfend, a cynic about human nature?

But even worse, Cowen’s complaint completely misses the mark. The whole point of Douthat’s piece is that humans are indeed capable of meaningful, autonomous lives (etc.), but that present technological circumstances are leading most of us to focus on ultimately unsatisfying meanings and impoverished ends. And indeed, over at The New Yorker there is further proof: a Princeton academic enthuses that AI now means we don’t have to read books, since we can reach the good stuff in them by other routes. Historian D. Graham Burnett complains — at least, I assume it was him, but who knows — that “[books] are so oddly inefficient, so quirky in the paths they take through their material”. Meanwhile, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg was on a podcast this week, arguing that “the average American has fewer than three friends… but has demand for 15 friends” and that bots can fill the gap. “The personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better”, Zuck says, describing the experience as “really compelling”.

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Fundamentally, this kind of dispute marks a divide between the sort of people who habitually approach activities in terms of optimizing them for some further end; and the rest of us. If you relate to life as a series of video-game tasks, with the thought of some more distant prize permanently hovering in the background, then you are bound to start looking for cheat codes. So, for instance, if you think of having friendships as a useful way to learn more from clever people, as Cowen seems to, then all that time-consuming blah blah in coffee shops and bars is going to seem beside the point. Or, if you approach reading books only as a means of synthesizing the basic points into an easily digestible format, it won’t be surprising if you end up treating the literary canon like it’s Married at First Sight Australia and you’re looking for a quick recap.

But the logic of optimization has to stop somewhere. In the modern age, the chain of reasons justifying a particular action frequently seems to end at some supposedly unquestionable benefit to the self — after which, it is assumed, there are no more “why?” questions to be posed. According to this instrumentalized way of thinking, you should have friends, ultimately, for roughly the same reasons you should have pets; because having them is commonly supposed good for staving off cognitive decline, emotional well-being, increased longevity, or whatever it is. So if a chatbot or online therapist can do roughly the same job more quickly or cheaply, get one of those instead. And even if the virtual versions are inadequate in some ways, they are still better than nothing.

There is an alternative way of looking at things, though. You could just be pursuing particular friendships with other people (say) because you want friendships, and let the chain of reasons stop there. You could say that friendships are intrinsically valuable, which is just a fancy way of saying there is nothing else to explain here about why you like them. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get the relationships I have because I deliberately decided it would be good for my emotional well-being. They just happened as I wandered about the world, and met people with whom I clicked. I recognized such friendships were good for me afterwards, but that’s not the same thing.

Likewise with books: I just started to read them, and one book led to another — albeit punctuated by a lot of pointless scrolling over the last two decades. The fact you can truthfully describe lots of useful things about books, or indeed about friendships, doesn’t mean that pursuit of those potentially detachable ends is “really” what you were after all along, speaking in terms of the structure of your background motivation. And in fact, we might even reverse the habitual slide towards the self as the final point of explanation: maybe you are only trying to be cognitively healthy and emotionally well-balanced because ultimately, it puts you in a better position to have more friendships and to read more books.

For the real things we love to survive, we need to dispel the myth that virtual simulacra are remotely substitutable for them. Rather, their value is irreplaceable. It is not that internet life is doing the same thing imperfectly in a way we might finesse later via technological improvements; it is not even in the same ballpark. I’m online an awful lot, and I have many virtual acquaintances with whom I interact; but I just spent a weekend away with three old friends and there is literally no comparison. Chatbots are not friends; AI summaries of other people’s thoughts are not books; we are only squandering our wild and precious lives pretending otherwise.

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As Douthat intimates, all of this is particularly hard for liberals to acknowledge. Officially, anyway, they are not supposed to ask why other people choose the things they do: each to his own, and all that. Standing up for values brings you in conflict with others who don’t share yours, and no true liberal enjoys much of that. But it’s also because liberalism evolved alongside rationalism, and bequeathed us with a mania for means-end reasoning. The value of what you are doing at any given time has to be articulable in terms other people can also understand, or else it doesn’t exist. Saying “friendships are fabulous” is not enough; you also have to say why. And so you end up with boring platitudes about having friends for the sake of your mental ‘elf, at which point everybody else sagely nods, finally satisfied, and heads towards their screens.

Douthat thinks that, given the way internet life hoovers up our attention, the only way we will save what we love is by displaying “intentionality and intensity”: deliberately and consciously choosing the real, and limiting the role of the virtual in our lives. I completely agree; but we should avoid collapsing back into means-end reasoning here too. We should not pursue real relationships with people, or enjoy real works of literature, because doing these things “helps stave off cultural destruction” or some other such lofty motive. That way lies the madness of pro-natalists having children “because it is good for humanity”, or people espousing Christianity “to save Western values”. We should do it because we love having friends and we love reading books. Ultimately, we are trying to save the old ways in order to carry on having friends and reading books, and not the other way around.

A single volume would not be sufficient for Gates, however, and he has announced that he needs three to tell his life story. The first, Source Code, focuses on his early life, and the initial years of Microsoft, the company that made him a billionaire. As one of the most interviewed and talked about people in history, much of Gates’s personal story has already been told. So what could he tell us at this point that we haven’t heard before?

Actually, he could tell us a lot. But only if he wanted to. His remarkable life has been full of intrigue, filled with war stories — including the cut-throat tactics he used to kill Microsoft’s competitors and create one of the most powerful and destructive monopolies in the history of commerce. His personal life has been no less interesting. While his PR handlers have pushed the picture of a bookish nerd, the real Bill Gates has always lived in the fast lane; speeding in his Porsche, throwing explosive temper tantrums, and, apparently, enjoying a robust and diverse romantic life — one that, according to numerous allegations, has crossed lines.

Accounts of his bad-boy behavior are legion, and, in recent years, the media has been increasingly open to critical profiles of the billionaire. Over the past 18 months, three books (including my own, The Bill Gates Problem) have been published, all of which were at least cautiously critical. At the same time, many legacy news outlets, which have long praised Gates, have started interrogating his presumed moral authority — exploring, for example, his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

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Bill Gates wants to build a dystopia

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If Gates was willing to consider partnering with a monster like Epstein to advance his philanthropic goals — that’s Bill Gates’s explanation for their numerous meetings — what else might he be willing to do? What drives a man like Gates to such extreme behavior?

You won’t find an answer in Source Code, an insipid, sanitized work of revisionist history, a PR exercise aimed at humanizing and revitalizing Gates in the public eye — reminding us that, in a world of oligarchs, there truly are some “good billionaires”.

With a heavy focus on his youth, his book tells of the accidental death of his childhood best friend, the difficulties he had seeing eye-to-eye with his parents, and his earliest entrepreneurial activities in high school. These anecdotes are supposed to make readers see him as thoughtful and reflective, but they ring hollow because he never actually reflects on his hubris, his most defining character trait. Gates is a man who has always insisted that he is the smartest guy in the room — and should be sitting at the head of every decision-making table. As he once reportedly quipped at a dinner party: “Of course, I have as much power as the President has.”

Yet Source Code gives us few hints about the genesis of his god complex. As a result, it doesn’t help us understand who Gates is today, the promiscuous pedant who uses his extravagant wealth to position himself as leader, expert and authority on a dizzying array of topics — public health, public education, climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccines, contraceptives, agricultural development and endless other issues.

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If Gates had used his memoir to simply embrace his inner power broker and reveal his real self — a man obsessed with power and control, a man driven by ego and self-interest, a man unable to control his emotions, a man who, according to numerous accounts, has trouble respecting women — we might, then, have a reason to read it.

The timing of publication is interesting, coming at a moment when other tech billionaires are surging ahead of him. Gates seems anachronistic today. He exercises most of his money-in-politics influence through dark corridors and back rooms. Last year, it was revealed that he made a $50 million dark-money donation to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Publicly, meanwhile, he goes to extraordinary lengths to hide his influence, presenting himself as a wholly non-political humanitarian, driven by a selfless desire to help others.

This elaborate branding stands in contrast to billionaires like Elon Musk, a brazenly self-interested billionaire who seems to wear the title of oligarch like a king’s crown. He certainly doesn’t try to fool the public into believing that he is a philanthropist. Likewise, Donald Trump, though a politician who is required to at least gesture to the public’s interest, usually can’t help but show how devoted he is to his own interests. The reason these men are surging into public life may be, in part, because of the vulgar honesty they bring to the table. They are not nice, kind, or generous people. And they don’t pretend to be.

There’s something grotesque in seeing the contours of our oligarchs so exposed. But this behavior also seems like a natural evolution of oligarchy, at least in American politics. Republicans and Democrats have long normalized and legitimized billionaires like Gates — accepting his campaign contributions, giving him humanitarian awards, generously co-funding Gates Foundation projects, delivering to him massive tax benefits for his philanthropy, and financially partnering with the company that continues to make Gates rich, Microsoft. Elon Musk may present a new level of normalization and legitimization for oligarchy, but he’s standing on the shoulders of Bill Gates.

Gates, perhaps, also deserves comparison to another billionaire, Howard Hughes, a man who spent his final years in extreme isolation, losing touch with reality. He reportedly let his fingernails grow several inches in length, his toenails even longer. As his health declined, he pursued a regiment of self-medication and quackery, obsessively injecting himself in the groin with mysterious fluids.

Hughes’s self-destructive behavior and agoraphobia was probably not helped by his great wealth, which allowed him to surround himself with people who depended on him for money. Financial dependence, invariably, makes people afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. Or maybe even help a man clearly in need of assistance. And this is also becoming Gates’s story.

Today, Gates surrounds himself with people who depend on his money, and cloisters himself away from his critics, even as they grow in volume and viability, on both the Left and Right. Some of the intended beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation — farmer organizations across the African continent — are openly calling on the foundation to pay reparations for all the harm it is causing. A growing body of independent experts levy a similar critique: that the foundation is doing more harm than good. To this criticism, Bill Gates never offers a response.

Meanwhile, in his private life, Gates has found himself subject to headline after headline of alleged inappropriate behavior toward women. (He denies any wrongdoing.) And in his business affairs, his zealous efforts to present himself as a leader on climate change have fallen flat because none of the game-changing innovations he has promised have materialized.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this growing criticism, Gates and his handlers are going out of their way to create a world in which no critics exist. For his forthcoming book tour, he has decided to charge, which will keep out critics and naysayers. Couldn’t the $166-billion man simply rent out the venue at his own expense?

On the flipside, his philanthropic foundation shamelessly gives out hundreds of millions of dollars to the news media — The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC and dozens of other outlets around the world — which creates strong incentives to praise Gates. Though the news media occasionally does put a critical lens to Gates, most journalists even those not directly funded by the foundation, tend to treat him differently — and better — than other billionaires. To be sure, most news outlets appear to love Gates’s new memoir. The, the New York Times‘s recent, glowing review of Gates’s memoir was headlined: “Bill Gates isn’t like those other tech billionaires.”

A similar story can be found in the billions of dollars the Gates Foundation donates to universities, which has led to what academic researchers call the “Bill chill” — the chilling effect that makes them reluctant to criticize the man who so many look to for funding.

There’s always been something desperate about Gates deploying his money in a manner that reliably builds allies and quiets critics. Why not enter the public debate standing on his own two feet, explaining who he is and what his ideas are? What is Gates so afraid of? That he’ll finally hear the chorus of voices calling him the emperor who has no clothes?

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That certainly seems to be the gist of Facebook’s very brief explanation yesterday: “a fact-checking label was wrongly applied”. But in the absence of a more detailed statement, it’s still worth exploring what the company would say if it ever did decide to try to make a genuine effort at accountability. If that were to happen, I suspect it would go something like this: “the world is going through a pandemic and it is therefore exceptionally important that internationally recognised health organisations such as the WHO do not have their credibility undermined.”

Of course, that is just my conjecture — though, in light of Big Tech’s behaviour over the past year, it certainly seems conceivable. However, the problem with such an explanation is two-fold.

First there is the presumption that an international body like the WHO is not only not corrupted by the Communist Party of China, but that such a scenario is impossible. To see how naive this view is, we need only look at that other international organisation so often viewed as beyond reproach: the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

To an outsider, the UNHRC (like the WHO) may well sound like a venerable organisation. But look a little closer and it becomes clear that the entity is a farce. Only last month it allowed the North Korean representatives at the Council to spend their time expressing concerns about the human rights record of Australia. The truth is that these organisations are far less virtuous than one might think — and if we’re not allowed to criticise them, then what can we criticise?

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The second problem with Big Tech censoring material critical of the WHO is more obvious: there is simply no consistency in the position. If it were the case that Facebook censored or flagged all online material which questions the WHO’s narrative then that would be one thing. But that is not what is happening. For in reality, Facebook only tends to censor material which goes against the advice of the WHO if it leans in a particular direction.

For instance, since the start of the pandemic the WHO has supported the introduction of lockdown measures. But it has also repeatedly said that such lockdowns should be temporary, or otherwise short in duration. Yet in recent months, Big Tech censorship has only been aimed at people arguing against lockdowns, or urging people to break the restrictions — while completely ignoring the many people still arguing for their extension. The problem, in other words, is a double-standard. If the WHO’s advice is sacrosanct, why is one alternative view worthy of censorship but another one permitted?

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Ultimately, such an approach is entirely self-defeating. For if the credibility of the WHO is not as sacrosanct as Facebook seems to think, then by censoring dissenting views the platform is essentially protecting a polluted information source — all while claiming to be doing the very opposite.

The UK, among other countries, is now coming close to the first anniversary of the moment since everybody was first consigned to their houses. For much of that time we have been deprived our social antenna — unable to hear from friends and family in person or gather in large groups to exchange ideas. Instead, we have had to increasingly rely on the online world to communicate and share our thoughts. It is in light of that situation that sinister decisions such as Facebook’s this week need to be considered. This was not the first time that social media giants have shown themselves to be unaccountable, let alone incompetent. And I predict that it will not be the last.

Thus, when Obama utilised “big data” and social media to win an election it was a hugely sophisticated, progressive thing; but when Trump did the same, it was a sign that Orange Man Bad was in cahoots with Sinister Putin to exploit the bottomless stupidity of the unwashed masses.

With Biden hiring former Facebook execs and current Big Tech mega bosses to his transition team, and around 98% of Internet company donations during the last election flowing into Democrat coffers, I cannot shake the suspicion that we may now see an administration which is quite friendly to Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, America’s fascination with ultra-wealth means that the genre of puff pieces on tech billionaires and “unicorns” (startups valued at $1 billion or more) will continue to thrive in venues such as Fast Company, Fortune and Forbes, where “journalists” will continue to perform their valuable function as court stenographers for the charismatic founders building our shining future one app at a time.

And yet, despite all the useless stuff out there, we do from time to time get truly insightful takes on the world of tech. I still remember reading about grown men crying at their desks in The New York Times’  2015 expose of Amazon, and was fascinated by The Inventor, the documentary tracing the rise and fall of doomed-from-the-start blood test startup Theranos.

A few years ago, Dan Lyons’s Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble made a splash, as did Antonio Garcia Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. For my money, however, the best take on Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, the sitcom created by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame; its six seasons track the fortunes of the not terribly likeable founders of Pied Piper as they seek to protect their invention from a pretentious, megalomaniacal tech oligarch who is surrounded by unctuous boot-lickers. It is ruthless in its selection of targets and frequently hilarious in its ridiculing of Bay Area absurdities.

A more recent report from the tech interior, Uncanny Valley, is Anna Wiener’s memoir of several years spent working for startups in Silicon Valley. It is rich in detail about everyday life in startup land, but it is low on the high-grade weirdness of the sort some of tech’s more colourful CEOs can provide. Wiener always remains an outsider looking in; she did not, in the end, work for very interesting startups, never got close to any of the truly strange, charismatic/messianic types that gravitate to this environment, and, remarkably, fails to find any humour in the absurdities and grotesques of Silicon Valley.

Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser, by contrast, is rich in high grade weirdness. One of those super dense examples of American journalism in which a magazine features writer talks to hundreds of people and then condenses all those voices into 300 or so pages of tightly packed narrative, the book tells the tale of the rise and quasi-fall of Adam Neumann, founder and erstwhile CEO of WeWork, the real estate leasing firm that somehow managed to pass itself off as a startup unicorn to rival the likes of Uber, and which by early 2019 was valued at $47 billion, despite never having made a profit, and having no proprietary technology of any significance.

Neumann’s is at first an almost too perfect immigrant-made-good-in-America story. Born to Israeli parents who split up while he was young, he was raised by his mother and had a highly peripatetic childhood, including a stint spent living on a kibbutz. After serving in the Israeli navy, he follows his super model sister Adi Neumann to the US at age 22, where he almost immediately sets about looking for the idea that will make him rich. His first — baby clothes with knee pads — is terrible, yet he has a knack for persuading people to believe in him and before long he has parlayed this into a luxury brand called “Egg Baby”. This is but a prelude to the main act, however, which is co-founding WeWork in New York with Miguel McKelvey, owner of an ESL website called “English, baby!“

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WeWork is a better idea. Neumann and McKelvey set about opening coworking office spaces where they hope cool, hip knowledge workers will rent a desk and work on their world-changing ideas all day, while getting to know each other and participating in a creative community. It is, however, not a new idea. In fact, coworking spaces were pioneered by a UK firm called Regus (est. 1989); Regus went bankrupt in 2003 but returned in rebranded form as IWG and by the end of 2014 was bringing in $2 billion in revenue from 2,000 locations.

WeWork, it is true, had better design and branding, but coolness does not a different business model make. Wiedeman details Neumann’s attempts to find ways to fuse his real estate leasing business with technology, but these efforts are never integral to the business. In fact, when WeWork was founded its first CTO was a teenage boy not yet out of high school who went by the name of “Joey Cables”.

The fact that he is owner of a New York real estate leasing business does not, however, prevent Neuman from going full Silicon Valley CEO-guru in the grandiose yet vague utopian vision he pitches to employees and investors, or in the culture he builds, or the eccentric, New Age style-beliefs he adheres to. Having been introduced to the Kabbalah by his fiancé, Rebekah Paltrow (cousin of Gwyneth), Neumann goes all in for the ancient Jewish mystical tradition.

Only the version he adopts is the Hollywoodised Kabbalah, which was founded not in the 12^th century by Jewish rabbis, but in the 1960s by Philip Berg, an insurance salesman from Brooklyn, who sold candles to his followers with names such as Sexual Energy and Dialling God and later attracted those such as of Madonna and Demi Moore to his highly profitable esoteric operation.

Neumann drinks deep of this “spiritual technology” but in addition to raising his consciousness he also meets lots of wealthy people who become WeWork’s early backers. He also encourages WeWork employees to study the Kabbalah, and, according to Wiedemann, uses it as a “…guide to running an organization with devoted adherents”. Meanwhile he rambles on about “superpowers”, describes his life’s work as to “prepare for the the arrival of the messiah”, and treats WeWork as though it is not so much a machine for getting rich, as a vehicle for the spiritual transformation of the human race.

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WeWork, Neumann insists, is not a real estate leasing company but rather a “physical social network” à la Facebook or a “platform” à la Uber. He also establishes WeLive, to lease apartments designed to foster a more communal style of living, and WeGrow, a private school dedicated to “progressive” ideas. Towards the end of the book Neumann is even meeting with Elon Musk to suggest that they collaborate on establishing communities on Mars; the firm’s mission? To “Elevate the world’s consciousness”.

Neumann, clearly, is one of the great bullshitters of the age. According to Liedeman, WeWork employees described Neumann as having an “aura”, which they compared to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee “…once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do”.

This reality distortion field serves Neumann well for a long time, as he is able to deploy it not only to persuade millennials at the start of their careers to work for low wages, but also to get hard-headed Venture Capital types to pour money into his “unicorn”. It goes into hyper drive when he encounters Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank, who runs a mammoth VC fund and dreams of a 300-year plan that might culminate with SoftBank becoming a “telepathy company” rather than a mere technology company.

Indeed, it all goes wrong for Neumann when he is forced to engage with people outside of his reality distortion field. When he is unable to talk any more private investors into giving him more money, he is forced to go public and WeWork submits an investor pitch to the federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which exposes just how much money the company is losing and that it is in fact a real estate leasing company after all. Confronted with bad press, Neumann embarks upon a speaking tour of investors, but his reality distortion field does not work on those predisposed to scepticism. From that point his downfall is swift, he barely lasts a month before he stands down as CEO and WeWork’s evaluation is revised drastically downwards.

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Billion Dollar Loser is a fascinating book, and even though, or perhaps especially because Neumann never developed a “killer app”, his story represents the apotheosis of Silicon Valley as idea, as pure myth. Whereas Anna Wiener saw life at the unglamorous ground level in companies that actually had technology to sell, Neumann, by combining mimesis with his own charisma and appeals to investor greed, was able to create an imaginary reality that, rather like Tlon in Borges’ famous short story, left the world of fiction and, for a moment, threatened to supersede reality.

Reading about this period of madness that gulled so many, I feel grateful that we live in a society where prestige and power is attained through business rather than war or religion.

Had Neumann lived in a different time, where the incentives were different, who knows what he might have achieved? He certainly has some of the traits of a demagogue or cult leader. Meanwhile, there are far more skilled, and more ruthless, empire builders out there; we are fortunate that their energies are channeled into manipulating our desires and insecurities for profit and selling us shiny toys. It could be so much worse.

Facebook has had a terrible year, stumbling from one scandal to another. It stands accused of many misdeeds from tax-dodging and allowing dark forces to undermine democracy through to having a pernicious effect on the mental health of teenagers. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” confessed Chamath Palihapitiya, the firm’s former vice-president of user growth, last year. “Bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really bad state of affairs.” Yet many people seem oblivious to the dangers.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, once touted as a possible US President, has been desperately trying to deflect criticism and deter regulation, determined not to abdicate his domination of the company – he is both chairman and CEO – in the face of fierce investor criticism. Last month, he claimed the firm was cracking down on the dissemination of fake news but insisted they could not solve such problems alone. “Bad actors don’t restrict themselves to one service, and we shouldn’t approach the problem in silos,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. Yet a series of investigations exposed the limpness of their weak efforts – and now shocking evidence has emerged of how they sought to discredit critics and deflect attention.

Further reading

How Big Tech is buying its way out of trouble

By Mark Piesing

The New York Times has revealed that while Zuckerberg was busily saying sorry and the firm was presenting itself as a force for global good, his colleagues had commissioned an aggressive lobbying campaign to discredit critics. One tactic was to link Facebook’s foes to George Soros, the Jewish financier and philanthropist routinely targeted by the far-right with vile anti-semitic conspiracy theories. “It is disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook’s platform,” responded Patrick Gaspard, president of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. “To now learn that you were active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.”

So Zuckerberg has been back in the spotlight defending himself again; he is having to deny he knew about smears or anti-semitic narratives and has put a new recruit, one Nick Clegg, in charge of a review of lobbying. But the platform’s sinister effect reaches beyond democracies in the West. Take recent events in Nigeria. In June, at least 11 men were butchered or burned to death in Plateau State, a region riven with ethnic violence. Now police say tensions were inflamed by images circulated the day before on Facebook that claimed Fulani Muslims were slaughtering Christians from the Berom minority. “Fake news on Facebook is killing people,” said Tyopev Terna Matthias, spokesman for the police.

A BBC investigation found some of the most incendiary images did not even come from Nigeria and had nothing to do – as claimed – with mayhem in another district of the state. One widely-shared video showing a man’s skull sliced open was six years old and had come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Jos South was not under attack. But because of those images they saw, the next day, roads were blocked. People died. Vehicles were burned. So many people died.” said Matthias.

By the same author

Analogue dictators are no match for digital detectives

By Ian Birrell

Facebook claims to take such incidents seriously. Of course. Zuckerberg himself has visited Nigeria, such is its importance as his firm’s largest African market and the continent’s biggest economy. Yet the BBC found only four fact-checkers hired for 24 million monthly users. Meanwhile, the firm’s most recent figures showed a global profits surge in the last quarter above $5bn, so it clearly does not lack cash to hire many more monitors in the country. But that one regional police spokesman alone claimed he knew of at least 12 more incidents in which Facebook played a role in fanning violence from a riot though to a stampede and a double killing.

This is far from the first case in which fake news hurtling unchecked around this social media site has been tied to dead bodies in developing nations. Facebook has been linked to lynchings in India, Indonesia and Mexico over false rumours of child abductions. Online dissemination of hoaxes were blamed for fuelling bloodshed in Sri Lanka against the Muslim minority population, with far too few Sinhalese-speaking moderators for five million users on the island. In Libya, ‘keyboard warriors’ use the site to spread ethnic hatred, taunt rivals and help target attacks.

The firm also played an insidious role in Myanmar during the Rohingya crisis, which saw the largest forced migration in recent years after house burnings, murder and mass rape. Members of the armed forces were found to have led a systematic drive targeting Muslims on the widely-used platform, with sham accounts and trolls used to stir hatred.

By the same author

The dark side of Buddhism

By Michael Burleigh

Following media questions, Facebook took down many such accounts with a total of 1.3 million followers. Yet signs of  its malign power date back to 2014, when a nationalist monk sparked a deadly riot against Muslims by sharing false reports of a rape; critics claim the firm ignored warnings to tackle the spread of such inflammatory fake news.

Facebook believes its algorithms and artificial intelligence can tackle abusive posts, yet a new transparency report reveals it detected just 15% of those removed over the past three months; the remainder were the result of the alarm being raised by users. No wonder even Prince William accuses it and other social media behemoths of putting profits before values, saying they need to learn that power brings responsibility. “Their self-image is so grounded in their positive power for good that they seem unable to engage in constructive discussion about the social problems they are creating,” he warned, adding rightly that social networks had allowed “misinformation and conspiracy to pollute the public sphere”.

This is certainly true in the West, where amplification of extremist views and failure to thwart flows of fake news has corroded public discourse, devastated reliable media, widened divisions and weakened democracies. These issues are intensified in volatile places with weak institutions and bubbling tensions – especially when the firm is so focused on rapid global growth that it fails to impose adequate checks on content. The dangers in developing nations are not just to democracy but to people’s lives. For all the benefits of mass connectivity, Zuckerberg needs to face up urgently to the monster he has created or be stripped of his control.