Anatomy of the Tech-Industrial Complex

In the news this week, there is a lot of controversy over the US House of Representatives voting on Bill HR7521 which gives the Executive Branch of government the power to control and/or censor the content on websites and apps that are considered to be foreign-owned.

The public debate centers around the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, which collects massive amounts of data and has remarkable influence over American citizens, especially kids. Proponents of the bill argue that TikTok is a danger to our sovereignty as a country because of its foreign ownership.

On the other hand, critics of the legislation assert that the bill enables the largest control grab since the Patriot Act, empowering the president with unilateral authority to determine which businesses are permitted to operate in the US.

As the TikTok question is taken up, it is timely for a review of the origins of our major tech platforms and an examination of their troubling interconnectedness with the federal government.

Over the last few centuries it has been widely understood that power was generally acquired by leveraging rich natural resources, money, and/or a strong military. As globalization has evolved and humans across the planet have become interconnected with access to an unprecedented amount of information at their fingertips, one can make a case that the control of this information has become the most important weapon in the power arsenal. Whoever controls the narrative, sways public opinion, guides individual and group behaviors, and paves the way for powerful institutions and individuals alike.

As the TikTok debate highlights, it’s evident in the Information Age that no one is more capable at framing and shaping events and ideas from a particular point of view or set of values than the large tech companies. These entities possess a worldwide audience of billions of people every minute of every day.

Many, including me, have completely morphed their media habits over the last couple of decades and now look to social media as a guide for world events instead of reading newspapers. Cognitively, many of us know that in order for tech to provide personalized experiences that may seem more convenient in the short term, they may make ethical compromises related to transparency, data collection, privacy, user autonomy, and other exploitative practices designed to manipulate us.

Nevertheless, in aggregate, we tend to ignore these trade-offs. Whether it’s swaying elections, pressuring for the mass experimentation on humans with novel drugs, or denying biology as a mere construct, given the sheer size of their audience combined with algorithmic and other technological capabilities, it is indisputable that Big Tech plays an outsized role to socially engineer our society.

Sometimes this stewardship comes from directing our attention to so-called experts whom we are supposed to follow for guidance. In other instances it’s merely lying by omission by presenting only one side of the conversation to give the illusion of consensus. Recent examples include Covid, climate change, gender-affirming care, and a number of other social and political issues.

One might argue that if there really were legitimate dissenting views on any of these controversial topics, investigative journalists would surely be exposing the truth to us. After all, it is the sacred duty of the Fourth Estate to provide citizens with information to keep the power structure in check. I used to think that.

Even if there are assiduous reporters working at large news organizations, it is obvious to anyone who’s been watching the rampant censorship within Big Tech over the past few years that the institutions who distribute the stories to the public are subject to the oversight and control by the United States Government.

The prevailing wisdom in dissident circles is that social media platforms’ censorship of voices unfriendly to government narratives represents some sort of recent institutional capture. But what if the oversight or pressure from the government to “content moderate” is not a result of recent capture and not a new phenomenon? What if it is a manifestation of a longer-standing government plan to fund the start-ups of these powerhouse companies with a view toward making nefarious use of them later?

If you think this sounds too far-fetched to be true, consider that the federal government that was recently found to collude with Big Tech to interfere with free speech is the very same institution that ran Operation Mockingbird, a covert CIA project designed to bribe individual journalists and worldwide media organizations in order to affect public opinion through the manipulation of news reporting.

In an investigative analysis by Carl Bernstein in 1977, the CIA admitted that at least 400 journalists and 25 large organizations around the world had secretly been bribed to create and distribute fake news stories on behalf of the agency. Since then, the technology that can be used to modify and even control our thinking has become orders of magnitude more powerful, refined, and sophisticated. Keep this in mind as we go through a quick thought exercise.

Before we do, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that even the mere possibility of the web being a trap hits close to home because not only do I absolutely love the Internet, but this field is how I’ve supported myself and my family since I was a young man.

When I started doing this work in the mid-90s, I thought I was a cynical person who asked critical questions, but in reality, I was a youthful wide-eyed optimist. I genuinely believed in the earnest notion of combining hard work with luck and in the idea of founders building independent world-changing companies.

In fairness, I do know many people who did just that. However, an exploration into the major tech companies which make possible the web’s superpowers raises some questions about their roots, and whether their meteoric rises were in fact organic.

Let’s start with Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston (L.P.) Gise, was Director at the Atomic Energy Commission, and helped to form the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), from which ARPAnet evolved. During his tenure, Gise approved and provided funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – which would eventually invent the Internet.