Is Big Tech Heading for a Wall Street-Style Meltdown?
New books examine capitalism-gone-wrong and whether Silicon Valley is too big to fail
The atmosphere for Big Tech could hardly be worse: Two years into a plunge in public favor, the companies are threatened with higher taxes, regulation, a breakup, and strict new geopolitical borders in which they can operate. If one or more of these punishments actually materialize, they are in for a huge financial hit... and so are their shareholders.
But they have brought it on themselves, morphing from cool tech inventors that gave us ways to find friends and search for low fares into surveillance companies that manipulate, package, and sell our behavior, and undermine trust in capitalism and democracy.
Lock ’em up.
Yet, are we truly prepared to shred a tech ecosystem that many people find inextricable from their very selves? We have been here before, and, though it seems like ages, pretty recently: Just a decade ago, the abuse of fancy derivatives by bankers had put the global economy on life support, and the consensus was that the financial industry was headed for a return to stiff, New Deal-style regulation. Instead, Congress passed watered-down legislation, and last year diluted it further.
“I think there is going to be an ‘occupy Silicon Valley’ when the crash comes.”
With some trimming here and there, this is where Big Tech would like its current transatlantic imbroglio to end up, too, and the companies are paying tens of millions of dollars in a massive campaign to get there.
This drama is the central issue of our times, Rana Foroohar, the Financial Times’ global business columnist, writes in Don’t Be Evil, her new book, out yesterday, as the swelling of Big Tech’s reach is “changing the nature of liberal democracy, of capitalism, and even of humanity itself.”
Foroohar fully expects some form of regulation, and advocates a 50% tax on digital revenue. Already, the global economy is splitting in two, one led by China and the other by the United States. As a result, Foroohar expects the share prices of the tech companies, known collectively as FAANG, to tank…
