What they did was founded on cutting-edge technology – but in terms of its underlying economic ideas, their business represented recently established nostrums being taken to their logical conclusion. Laissez-faire ideas, he says, joined with a bombastic arrogance in the minds of the “bros” who flocked to northern California to make their fortune from the mid 1990s onwards. He knows that the anti-state, libertarian mores that define what we now know as Big Tech were born in the 1980s, and that by the early 21st century, “hardly anyone in Silicon Valley knew there had once been a different way of doing things”. Aged 62, he is old enough to know that the US beat the depression and won the second world war when “we subordinated the individual to the collective good, and it worked really well”. Roger McNamee is a little longer in the tooth. And at the same time as old-school class politics was overshadowed, the lingering influence of the 60s counterculture gave the wealthy a new means of smoothing over their power and privilege: talking in vague terms about healing the world, and enthusiastically participating in acts of spectacular philanthropy. In the US, a new way of thinking replaced the bipartisan belief that monopolies should always be resisted: concentrations of economic power were not a problem as long as they led to lower prices for consumers. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were embedding the idea that government should keep its interference in industry and the economy to a minimum.

To truly understand the revolutions in politics, culture and human behaviour these giants have accelerated, you need to start not some time in the last 15 or so years, but in the 1980s.Įarly in that decade, the first arrival of digital technology in everyday life was marked by the brief microcomputer boom, which was followed by the marketing of more powerful personal computers. Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest are too often written about as if their arrival in our lives started a new phase of history, rather than as corporations that have prospered thanks to an economic and cultural environment established in the days when platforms were things used by trains. A s the so-called Techlash gains pace and polemics on the downsides of the internet flood the book market, one omission seems to recur time and again.

Zucked by Roger McNamee