The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes)/ Adolph Menzel - Eisenwalzwerk /Wikimedia/Public Domain Foreword: Sometimes, one advances a proposition that is, on first reading, hopelessly unrealistic and impractical. This is not necessarily done for the purposes of proving (or even disproving) the proposition itself, but as a kind of thought experiment to stress-test or expose some of the technological, societal or political assumptions under-pinning the proposition. The intention then is to contribute to a constructive, nuanced debate about a socio-technical trajectory; although the suppression of any opportunity for constructive, nuanced debate is really one of the assumptions being implicitly addressed herein. There might be others.
In the process of digital transformation, a very few privately-owned, commercial organizations have come to dominate online services, in particular those provided by digital social media platforms (SMPs) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). These organizations are commonly referred to as Big Tech, stereotypically staffed by a brand of toxic masculinity referred to as Tech Bros. The social, psychological, legal, economic, and political problems caused by Big Tech domination of online service delivery have been well analyzed, argued and documented (e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], and [6]). However, given legal moves in Australia to ban access to SMP for under-16s, the U.K.’s online safety bill, and the EU AI Act, alongside other initiatives intended to regulate Big Tech, perhaps it is not unreasonable to propose the abolition of all Big Tech organizations? The mere fact that Big Tech organizations exist today is not in itself a sufficient reason for them to be preserved. The justification required is to prove that they do enough good, or contain enough goodness, to compensate for the damage they cause, and so make their preservation desirable.
To be fair, this demands that we first establish a criterion or criteria for goodness (also bearing in mind the qualification “goodness for whom,” since it is often the case that technological advance is not always to the benefit of disadvantaged groups (e.g., exacerbating the “digital divide” or marginalized communities [7]). One reasonable criterion for goodness is not profit margin but public interest [8]. Contrary to widespread belief, the U.K. Companies Act 2006, for example, does not put CEOs or company directors under any legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Instead, they are required to exercise sound judgment in promoting the success of the company, which can include contributions to prosocial outcomes in the public interest. If this establishes a legal framework for evaluating CEO decision-making within this framework, then what should have been a force for “good” and the betterment of humanity has actually developed into quite the opposite. Despite self-righteous lip-service to sustainability, it is questionable whether some decisions are in the public interest; and the law itself serves no purpose as there is no accountability and no redress.
For example, one such prosocial contribution could have been the improved quality of decision-making using SMP and AI, especially if the underlying principle is consensus to be achieved through democratic deliberation [9]. It has been shown that one of the key qualities that underpinned the success of the classical Athenian city state was the effectiveness of its decision-making with regards to resolving public action problems [10]. In the same vein, Condorcet’s Jury Theorem proves that given a set of independent jurors with a better than half-chance of reaching the “correct” decision, adding more jurors increases the probability of reaching the “correct” decision, and that probability approaches 1 as the size of the jury increases. Moreover, relaxing the assumption of independence enables experts to exert social influence to inform and shape discussion. This can improve some individual probabilities of getting the “correct” answer and so increases the collective probability of getting the “correct” decision [11].
Therefore, based on Condorcet’s Theorem, a Big Tech organization that makes SMP available to universal participation to increase the probability of correctness in outcomes of decision-making, should, in principle, be a contributing to the public good, by enabling a valid expression of the general will [12], rather than having the silent majority or the will of the people appropriated by political malefactors without the encumbrance of evidence. It could re-admit the classical Athenian process of thorybos [9], taking the place of proedroi sampling the mood of the crowd. This would overcome the pretense that the present political system is “democratic” since it occasionally allows people to express their judgment on their rulers, and instead enfranchises people with a continuous opportunity to express their judgment on the main problems of public life. Instead, the actual workings of SMP turn out to be infested with AI slop, bots arguing between themselves, and troll factories creating disproportionate support for dubious propositions; and are rife with disinformation and conspiracy-theoretic grifters. Some platforms have dismantled or abandoned moderation altogether with specious arguments about free speech.
Some platforms have dismantled or abandoned moderation altogether with specious arguments about free speech.
In fact, three conditions need to be satisfied to apply the general will. First, people should be able to express their will regarding the problems of public life, and not just choose between more or less irresponsible people, or worse, more or less irresponsible organizations in candidate elections (although comparing, for example, Swiss and British political systems suggests that civic education and civic engagement are both instructive in how to behave in pluralist referenda). Second, when people become aware of their own intention and express their individual and collective will, there must not exist any form of collective passion; in particular a passion just to be on the “winning” side, irrespective of any objective judgment, moral integrity, or the consequences of the outcome [13]. Third, it should not be possible for an individual to expropriate the general will as an expression of personal prejudice.
Therefore, a critical issue is that when problems of public action are presented to the decision-informing populace, how do we prevent their judgments from being affected by collective passions that can lead to “incorrect” decisions—bearing in mind that the Condorcet Jury Theorem works both ways: if the independent jurors have a less than half-chance of reaching the “correct” decision, adding more jurors only decreases the probability of making an “incorrect” decision (and this probability approaches 0 as the number of jurors increases). It remains necessary to find a balance between epistemic expertise and majority preference [14], and there is also the risk that deception through mis- and dis-information can increase the probability of producing the “incorrect” answer. However, social influence does not necessarily correlate with expertise: wilful deception [15], confirmation bias [16] and algorithmic bias [17] can be significant factors in opinion formation over social networks, based on framing (e.g., the normalization of extremism by incrementally shifting the Overton window) and in-built (or built-in) skew due to training generative AI on biased datasets. Augmenting SMP with a data-extractive but error-prone technology can be even more problematic, in terms of bias, lack of human moderation, and the infiltration of AI-generated content causing epistemic fragmentation and other unintended consequences [18]. These problems are not necessarily addressed by simply throwing more resources at them [19].
This is not a matter of setting up a straw man for unattainable goodness that Big Tech would inevitably fail. Instead, it establishes a putative framework for a cost/benefit analysis to evaluate the extent to which Big Tech organizations and their SMP meet the criterion of serving the public interest and observing such situations with disinterest? To undertake such an evaluation, we first identify three critical characteristics of a Big Tech organization.
- The first objective and also ultimate goal of any Big Tech organization is its own growth in pursuit of building an empire, without limit, headed by a single individual, the seemingly charismatic Tech Bro CEO as sovereign “emperor.”
- The second objective is to ensure that that the Tech Bro CEO’s opinion is quantitatively dominant, to exert collective pressure on the minds of all subjects of the empire, and to recognize and celebrate the Tech Bro CEO’s (supposed) wisdom and genius.
- The third objective is to generate collective passion in favor of the Tech Bro CEO’s preferred outcome and to direct that collective passion in pursuit solely of achieving that outcome, irrespective of civic values like truth, justice, conscience, dignity or the public interest.
This is different from “traditional” or “legacy” media, leveraging preexisting trans-national scale and dubious practices (such as buying political influence) but ably abetted by algorithmic intervention. This is underpinned by deliberate attempts to suppress dissent masquerading as the name of free speech. Public debate, dialectics and discussion are abandoned to collective passions, which can be officially, systematically and algorithmically inflated, inflamed and polarized by a SMP/AI factory. Moreover, the absence of thought (driven out by the passion), replaced in particular by grievance (driven in by the algorithms) ironically creates a permanent sense of impotence even, or perhaps especially, amongst the most passionate.
Therefore, the ostensible purpose of a Big Tech organization is to provide a service or product that serves a certain conception of the public interest, but any notion of the public interest invoked is actually a fiction [20]. The actual intention is much darker, and to serve this intention, the Big Tech organization must have a vast amount of power; but no finite amount of power will ever be deemed sufficient. Consequently, every Big Tech organization is totalitarian, not just by potential and aspiration, but also totalitarian by intention according to an underlying political ideology [21]. This is a reversal of relation between ends and means: the accumulation of wealth and power for one side, and cruelty, exclusion and denigration of the other. This is the point: power seeks power.
The institutions that regulate the public life of a country always influence the general mentality: such is the impression of power.
Digital SMPs, originally portrayed as a social good, have morphed into platforms for surveillance capitalism and intelligence tools; and from there into systems that are algorithmically designed, openly and officially, for the purpose of killing critical thinking, nuance and compromise in public and democratic deliberation. “Noise” is not converted into a useful socially-constructed conceptual resource [22], but amplified instead by bots, mercenaries or self-appointed online guardians. The effect is to suppress dissent; while that which cannot be eliminated by virtual volume is intimidated by disturbing threats of physical violence (cf. [23]). Thus, collective pressure is exerted and collective passion is aroused essentially by means of propaganda—providing the irony of people using technology to spread ever more imagined science- and evidence-denying conspiracy theories, while being used by Big Tech organizations as unwitting tools of an actual policy to replace liberal democracy [20].
However, when a nation-state has SMP controlled by a trans-national organization, eventually it becomes impossible to participate or intervene effectively in public affairs without signing up to a platform and joining the “sport.” It becomes an obligation on people that they need to be on social media in order play any part, let alone an effective part, in public affairs. But SMP on a national scale but without national control, whereby it becomes susceptible to both Dark Money-funded single issue pressure groups and competitor state-funded bot armies, ensures that not a single independent mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is moral, just, true, balanced or proportionate.
The institutions that regulate the public life of a country always influence the general mentality: such is the impression of power. In particular with SMP, the exercise of power through charismatic domination [24] speciously justifies the algorithmic mechanics of coercion, control and conformity. That the universal forum established by human innovation could to such a large extent thus stifle the collective creativity and innovation of humanity itself is, in fact, another tragic irony. Although there are proposed alternatives, for example focusing on self-organization from the grassroots [25], [26], [27], given other anti-social side effects of toxic technology, futural appropriation and modern indentured servitude [28], [29], [30], abolition of such disruptive institutions would appear to be most direct, effective and preferable solution.
Meanwhile digital enterprises have become increasingly monopolistic, individualistic beyond narcissistic to the point of lamentably solipsistic, devastatingly careless of human potential, and environmentally wasteful.
In several important ways, the emergence of Big Tech organizations and their Tech Bro CEOs has much in parallel with, or analogous to, the robber barons of the 19th century [31]. In particular, these Tech Bro CEOs have more or less unwittingly occupied leading roles in the age of unprecedentedly fast digital transformation: in terms of exploitative practices and political influence used to accumulate wealth, it took perhaps only a decade to achieve what it took the robber barons of the gilded age nearly a century to do, and even then the disparity in wealth distribution was nowhere near as disproportionate as the present situation. The Tech Bros personal foibles have been exposed in film and literature, while their awkward gestures at public events, unscheduled commercial misadventures, and petty in-fighting (dismal squabbles to be settled by preposterous suggestions of cage fights) have become part and parcel of the historical narrative, fanboy folklore and the foundation for charismatic domination layered on preexisting sovereign and bureaucratic domination.
In the hands of the Tech Bros, the re-making and re-shaping of socio-economic and socio-political life has proceeded remorselessly and relentlessly: large-scale platformization and competitive self-promotion has replaced community-rooted and essentially cooperative living within the Dunbar number. Meanwhile digital enterprises have become increasingly monopolistic, individualistic beyond narcissistic to the point of lamentably solipsistic, devastatingly careless of human potential, and environmentally wasteful. For all that their revolutionary “move fast and break things” zeal is branded with the ostensible motives of freedom and liberty, the reality is private profit and unrestricted individual sovereignty for themselves, but techno-feudalism and modern indentured servitude for those deemed, damned and doomed as other or surplus. This is the ultimate expression of techno-colonialism: it is not enough just to play, or even to win, and be insouciant and indifferent to the consequences, especially for those deemed “others.” It is beyond even Foucault’s “calculated technology of subjection” [32], it is a calculated technology of cruelty and suffering. The point is to be the jackboot, stamping on a human face, forever.1
To extract, exploit and deplete the intellectual resources of homo sapiens on a planetary scale…
…To regiment its imagination and creativity into an unthinking homogenous horde of addled and addicted digital content doomscrollers…
…To accumulate and withhold the wealth which national governments could use for the common good of their citizens, or to fund international institutions able to coordinate collective action against climate change, pandemic mitigation or refugee crises…
…And to do all this only for the sake of an uncontrolled jockeying for position at the top of some arbitrary and meaningless rich lists, or obstinate refusal to accept their own mortality, as a way of avoiding accountability to this or any other generation…]
…This is the fundamental inherent contradiction of the Tech Bro brolligarchy, because of whom so much misery is being caused for so many for the benefit of so few.
This is an intellectual leprosy. It originated in the programming laboratories of Silicon Valley and has spread to every corner of society, contaminating all forms of civic relation and thoughtful interaction. This leprosy is killing us, and it is doubtful that it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all Big Tech organizations.
Afterword: Some readers might have noticed the deliberate allusion, in motivation, structure and content, to Simone Weil’s remarkable essay “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”[33]. If such inter-textuality via statistical optimization might be good enough for an LLM, it might also be good enough for current purposes. Except, while ostensibly calling for a nuanced debate about the good, or otherwise, of generative AI and SMP for society and humanity, there is herein an oblique sub-text. Sometimes, technology and ideology are fellow passengers: the political ideology provides the ends for the technology, the technology provides the means for the political ideology. “Follow the money” remains sound advice: to understand why some powerful and influential people who, should humanity and history survive, will be judged as kindly as the robber barons of an earlier age, are trying to accelerate the collapse of an old “world order” seemingly against their own better interests, one needs to understand what vision of “new order” they want to replace it with[34], [35], [36].
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is particularly grateful to colleagues who commented to excellent effect on this manuscript, and the anonymous reviewers and editors who provided outstanding feedback and commentary. All have substantially improved this article, but any expressed opinions remain those of the author.
Author Information
Jeremy Pitt is a professor of intelligent and self-organizing systems in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, SW7 2BT London, U.K., where he leads the Self-Governing Systems Laboratory. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic and their application in self-organizing multiagent systems for engineering cyber–physical and sociotechnical systems, wherein sustainability, justice, collective action, civic dignity, and the asymmetric distribution of legitimate political authority are central issues.
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