Breda O’Brien: Big Tech is now the global monarch, answerable to nobody

The leader of Australia’s Greens, Adam Bandt, raised a storm when a mere five hours after Queen Elizabeth’s death he suggested that Australia needed to become a republic. Even ardent anti-monarchists rounded on him for his haste, with others criticising his gracelessness and lack of common decency.

Some of the vast amounts of media coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s death have focused on whether monarchy has any role in the modern world, with some praising the queen as a sign of national unity and others declaring the institution to be an expensive anachronism.

Monarchy has been criticised for its undemocratic, elitist nature, for having power (even if only soft power) without accountability, and in the case of the British Royal Family, vast wealth as well.

If only we could have such a sustained focus on technological oligarchy, where a small, incredibly rich cadre influences every aspect of our lives yet is virtually unaccountable.

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According to Forbes, the tech industry has been having a more difficult time since the pandemic. Big Tech had a very good pandemic as we were all utterly dependent on their products.

God love them, in 2022, tech billionaires’ wealth dropped from $2.5 trillion to a mere $2.1 trillion. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison remain some of the richest people in the world.

These men are rich in ways that we cannot even begin to visualise. For example, while it is untrue that Bill Gates owns the majority of US farmland, in 2020 he owned over 268,000 acres spread out over 19 states, meaning that he is the largest private farmland owner.

What is he going to do with all that land? Well, in a world where food security is an increasing problem, he is not going to go hungry. And it may give him somewhere to experiment with magic seeds.

‘Magic seeds’

In his annual Goalkeepers’ Report this week, Gates declared that a key element of solving hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa lies in agricultural innovation – what he calls “magic seeds”, gene-edited crops such as DroughtTEGO®, a hybrid maize that offers significantly better results in hotter, drier climates.

Except that experts such as Rachel Bezner Kerr, professor of global development at Cornell University, believe that Gates’ fervent belief in technological innovation reinforces dependency on fossil-fuel based fertiliser and is not helpful in the long-term for biodiversity.

Gates may be right. He may be wrong. But who has more influence? You have probably never heard of Rachel Bezner Kerr but you must have a particularly attractive under-rock dwelling if you have never heard of Bill Gates.

Gates’ influence and of Big Tech in general is discussed by Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert in their recently published book, Hegemony Now – How Big Tech And Wall Street Won The World.

They ask a question that they admit is crude and a bit simplistic but maintain is valuable nonetheless: “who is able to get what they want?” Their answer is straightforward. Writing from a left-wing perspective, they state that the “general tendency towards social liberalization has been effected by means of a general individualization and privatization of culture that clearly expresses the priorities of Silicon Valley libertarianism”.

None of the penetration of Big Tech into every aspect of our lives would have been possible without the low-cost manufacturing of computer and communications hardware in China

Neoliberalism once ruled. No longer. Williams and Gilbert state drily that it is unlikely that Thatcher and Reagan dreamed of the “vast bulk of the manufacturing industry once based in the Western economies being relocated to China”. So who wins in this scenario? Big Tech.

None of the penetration of Big Tech into every aspect of our lives would have been possible without the low-cost manufacturing of computer and communications hardware in China.

The authors paint a kind of unholy alliance between Big Tech, Big Finance and the Chinese Communist Party that has led to the dominance of the values held by Big Tech and Big Finance – “cosmopolitan liberalism, entrepreneurial individualism and networked collegiality”.

Intellectual monoculture

Discussion of the harms of Big Tech is often focused on our diminished attention spans, our increasingly polarised culture, our prematurely sexualised children, or the rise of the far right. These are real problems but the kind of intellectual monoculture that now prevails, the imposition of values that would have been considered outlandish a mere decade ago, is rarely examined.

The degree of unaccountability, undemocratic influence and wealth enjoyed by Big Tech makes the fate of the Mountbatten-Windsor family and whether or not more countries will move to be republics look like an irrelevant sideshow

There have been attempts at regulation. Just this week, Google lost an important case in the General Court of the EU Court of Justice. It was fined €4.125 billion for imposing unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators in order to give the Google search engine a virtual monopoly, thereby generating vast advertising revenue.

It is a setback but akin to a shark being nibbled by a goldfish when you consider Google’s profits. Google’s parent company Alphabet earned $257 billion in revenue for 2021, a 41 per cent increase from the previous year.

The degree of unaccountability, undemocratic influence and wealth enjoyed by Big Tech makes the fate of the Mountbatten-Windsor family and whether or not more countries will move to be republics look like an irrelevant sideshow. Real power and influence lie far from monarchs and increasingly far from republics, too.