Monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes…. In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something you can jack up the price…but the world we live in is dynamic: it’s possible to invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.
And yet the bigger the monopolists get, the less creative they seem to be. It’s impossible to invent new and better things if you can’t openly collaborate about what needs to be fixed or invented.
The tech companies spent the last ten years addicting people to their vices. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman bragged about how the best companies are those that celebrate the seven deadly sins. (Twitter is wrath, Instagram vanity, Uber Eats gluttony, Tinder lust, and so on.) In the long run, the wages of sin are death. But in the meantime, tech has enjoyed wages of a different sort as Silicon Valley turns the most productive minds to the most wasteful of tasks—addicting people and turning them into mindless consumers.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” noted former wunderkind Jeff Hammerbacher, a twenty-three-year-old math genius recruited to work for Facebook. “This sucks,” he pronounced. And yet it’s very rational to go work for Facebook.
In politics, we treat monopolies differently because of their overwhelming and corrosive effects on the public square and marketplace. We recognize that monopolies are bad not just for the public but also for those holding the monopoly. They do little to encourage innovation; they use their largesse to buy off competitors. Note, for example, how America’s tech monopolists are partnering and buying companies with India’s. Sure, Indian monopolies were built with graft and ours with grit, but are we really so confident that they won’t end up behaving the same way in the end?
Past thinkers on monopoly, including Judge Robert Bork, argued that monopolies need not be bad for consumers, but we are not a nation of consumers. We are a nation of free citizens. Not everything that has a price can be put into dollars and cents. There is a high price for free things. We should always be embarrassed by monopolies—and not make excuses for them. They should have to explain themselves to us, and to the extent that they are necessary, they should behave in ways that are in the national interest. While businessmen may seek to be monopolies, statesmen seek to bust them.
This trust-busting must be done when a monopoly ventures into those areas that intersect with the public discourse. We cannot tolerate an enforced private monopoly in public opinion; we must be free to disagree not because we know all the answers but because we know so few. Information makes us free. And so, too, does open debate.
“Public sentiment is everything,” said Abraham Lincoln during one of his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” Lincoln would have dominated cable news.
What about he who codes to suppress public sentiment? I fear we are already finding out.
The major tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, YouTube—make it impossible for tech’s best minds to help make America great again if they ever want to work in technology. Like all people playing intimidation games, these companies make an example of the weak.
Software engineer James Damore was fired from Google for pointing out well-established personality research between the sexes. Kevin Cernekee was also fired from Google. He warned on Tucker Carlson’s show that he, along with other conservatives, had been harassed and bullied and added to an internal political blacklist. In America you should be fired for being bad at your job—not your “bad views.” No wonder Elon Musk calls it “Sanctimonious Valley.” We wanted flying cars, but we got Communistic struggle sessions.
Cernekee raised the problem to the Google human resources department and eventually the California and federal labor boards. He was ignored. He told the country about the censorship on national TV, but still our conservative leaders are “monitoring” the situation—and doing nothing to fix it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and tech increasingly has absolute power over what we see, feel, and hear. They’ve bought off most of our politicians, Republican and Democrat alike. In Washington, corruption is often a family affair. When they can’t buy a congressman, they oftentimes buy the kids or spouse. A lot of members have adult kids working for the tech companies, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughter Alison works as project manager for Facebook. Facebook has donated hundreds of thousands to and through Chuck Schumer, who worked with the company to stop regulation.
Bobby Goodlatte is a left-wing venture capitalist who praised the FBI agents who worked to overthrow the results of the 2016 election, calling Peter Strzok “a patriot.” Bobby’s father—Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia—stopped meaningful tech regulation when Republicans were in the majority. That wasn’t good enough for his son, who endorsed and raised $40,000 for the Democrat seeking to replace his own dad in Congress.
“The way you raise money on the Judiciary is by playing the tech companies and the content publishers against each other,” Chairman Goodlatte told me in my first year. How degrading.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (R-Establishment) seems resigned to defeat in the battle against Big Tech. Or is her acceptance of the status quo an obvious signal she is on their side? Her tweet was like a white flag of surrender: “Censorship by tech companies, esp censorship of conservative opinions, violates the spirit of the law & the 1st Amendment. But more regulation would go too far in the other direction,
