A detailed guidebook for understanding why Big Tech now seeks not just wealth but political domination.
A report from the trenches on Silicon Valley’s totalitarian yearnings.
No one elected Elon Musk. The Constitution forbids him from becoming president. Yet, writes longtime San Francisco tech reporter Durán, he “found a workaround,” contributing almost $300 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign to “buy himself a kind of co-presidency.” The effects of his DOGE rampage were immediate, dismantling regulatory agencies that monitored Musk and his fortunes—as well as those of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and other exponents of a kind of libertarianism that has morphed, Durán writes, into “tech fascism.” The first tenet, as Thiel—the sponsor of JD Vance and many other Trump lieutenants—once proclaimed, is that democracy is the enemy of freedom, which is to say, the kind of unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism that Silicon Valley’s oligarchs wish to enshrine. The oligarchs have a theoretician in Curtis Yarvin, who proposes that the president be replaced by a monarchical CEO (with a tech pedigree)—just one of his “radically unhinged ideas [that] evolved from a blogger’s musings into a serious effort to undo democracy that would be adopted by a presidential administration.” Other antidemocratic projects include Balaji Srinivasan’s exhortation that those with the means “‘exit’ American democracy for life in privatized micro-nations called network states,” an idea that aligns with efforts to create “freedom cities” in easily bought-off countries, such as Honduras. Other gains in the second Trump administration are the direct results of Silicon Valley’s right-wing radicalization, thanks to big-ticket players “who had used crypto to capture the election, AI to seize government.” In doing so, they have gained immense power without any checks. Durán closes by proposing reforms that include ending the reign of the billionaires by expropriating their wealth through taxation: “We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy.”
A detailed guidebook for understanding why Big Tech now seeks not just wealth but political domination.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9781668221402
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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