How Tech Billionaires Screwed Us All

Even to the supremely cynical, it was striking to see the most recognizable billionaire leaders of Silicon Valley seated together at an event ahead of the second inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Alphabet (Google‘s parent company) Sundar Pichai, and Apple chief executive Tim Cook rubbed elbows before Trump was sworn into office — the first three companies had each donated $1 million to his inauguration fund, while Cook had personally chipped in another million. They were joined by Trump megadonor Elon Musk, who spent more than a quarter billion dollars to put him back in the White House, securing a role as close advisor during the transition of power and beyond.

Why are these titans of tech now in step with the MAGA movement? How did Bezos come to steer The Washington Post toward Trump-friendly coverage, while Musk and Zuckerberg instituted changes on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) to facilitate the kind of harassment, falsehoods, extremist language and slurs typically wielded by the hard right? Wasn’t the internet they helped to shape supposed to be a liberalizing, empowering, progressive force for society, ushering in an hyperconnected age of pure, unbiased information?

Not at all, argues technologist Mike Pepi in the eye-opening new book Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia. Through a series of essays debunking our most elemental assumptions of the web as we know it (titles include “Technical Solutions Won’t Solve Social Problems,” “Computers Can’t Think,” and “Algorithms Are Made of People!”), the veteran of numerous venture capital-funded startups (which he’d rather not name) contends that deliberate ideological choices have led us to the disastrous digital world we now inhabit. If you follow Pepi’s counter-narrative of the past 25 years, it can be no real surprise that the men who control the constellation of apps on our smartphones are now Team Trump.

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Trump “just wants to win, you know?” Pepi tells Rolling Stone. “And if you think about Silicon Valley, that’s kind of their mentality, too. They just want to win. They want to exit. They want to grow.”

It is this desire for growth at all costs, Pepi writes, that shaped the architecture of Web 2.0 — the social matrix we believed would accelerate human achievement by unleashing our greatest potential. The same kind of capitalist-libertarian philosophy, he says, has now given us a mania for cryptocurrency (along with evangelists who earnestly declare that blockchain tech is the answer to any question) and artificial intelligence (increasingly integrated across every possible product). These two areas of supposed innovation, both of which will be overseen by Musk ally and venture capitalist David Sacks in this Trump administration, “are similar in that they are basically fodder for VCs,” Pepi says. “Therefore, they almost exist as ideas that need to be propagandized as being the sort of new frontier. The reason you hear about them incessantly is because it’s just people pushing this out into the public sphere through pseudo-intellectual VCs.” The Silicon Valley oligarchy backing Trump, he predicts, will continue to insist that our “dissatisfaction with the federal government is simply because of a lack of a metaverse, crypto, or AI.”

Yet the core takeaway of Against Platforms is that none of this is truly new, and began as long ago as the dot-com bubble, at the turn of the millennium. It’s around this time, Pepi says, that many people assimilated a false sense of the internet as “a free-floating, immaterial thing that sort of exists out there in nature. But to the contrary, all these technologies we use are made by humans, and those humans have political ends.” Writers of pro-tech manifestoes (he critiques one such 2023 text by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley Democrat turned Trump supporter) prefer to pretend that apps, websites, and so on are intrinsically apolitical, Pepi explains, so that any attack on their negative influence over mass consciousness can be written off as Luddite fear-mongering.

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Still, there were major public epiphanies through the 2010s about the “massive tradeoffs” the tech giants made in their efforts to expand and conquer, Pepi says. He cites the National Security Agency’s secret access to Google and Yahoo servers, exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden; Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal; and the #DeleteUber campaign, launched in response to the ride-sharing app’s continued service to John F. Kennedy International Airport during a 2017 taxi driver strike in protest of Trump’s refugee travel ban. Pepi describes this mainstream awakening as the “tech-lash,” though he notes that our naivete as to the hidden agendas of investors and entrepreneurs behind these platforms has nonetheless persisted. “There are zombies of digital utopianism lurking even in some of the solutions that we put forth [today],” he says.

At the same time, figures including Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos have perhaps never been so open about their actual values — or lack thereof — as they are at this moment, while remaking the platforms under their control to suit MAGA culture. “Folks who are so used to platforms being relied on as an arbiter of truth, or arbiter of political speech, are in a bad position right now, because what they’re starting to realize is that this was never the point of these digital platforms,” Pepi says, with these companies only incentivized to drive engagement, harvest data, and increase their reach. Fleeing to competitor sites, he adds, leads to a “perpetual kind of Whac-A-Mole situation,” when the root cause of this ongoing migration is, in fact, “all of us crying out that we just need better institutions to govern these things,” not a seemingly better version of the last platform.

But if the tech industry effectively eroded our institutions, from government to journalism to education, by “disrupting” them with failed replacements, will the web find itself hollowed out in turn? “I think AI might be the bridge too far here in Silicon Valley,” Pepi says. “A lot of the ways that we are now encouraging users, artists, and musicians to automate creation — and in some cases, automate consumption — will potentially be, in a kind of historic irony, the thing that makes people realize, ‘Hey, no, this is a dead web, this is a gray web.'” Indeed, one revealing incident covered in Against Platforms is the outraged response to a dystopian 2024 Apple commercial that showed instruments, books, and paint jars crushed by a hydraulic press into the flat surface of an iPad Pro (the company apologized for the ad, saying it “missed the mark”). More recently, we have seen bafflement over Facebook’s plan to introduce user accounts for AI characters.

Wherever those trends take us in the future, what makes Pepi’s book invaluable at the outset of 2025 is its clear reframing of the tools that got us here, and the bogus ideals that led us to trust them as fundamentally neutral. As much or more than anyone else, tech zealots who made their fortunes in the industry have to answer for our political climate of brazen corruption and cheap, viral, reactionary hate. As Pepi writes, the platforms’ incessant service to capital has elevated “a network whose owners are beyond democratic control.” And that is what we should see as they stand shoulder to shoulder behind Trump, ready to dismantle the last few flimsy obstacles that might stand in his way.