Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Billionaires Think They’re Better Than You w/ Rob Larson

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Rob Larson to discuss how tech billionaires use philanthropy to massage their images, how they're creating a world that leaves nearly everyone else worse off, and how we need to respond with an online socialism to bring tech platforms under worker control.Rob Larson is the author of “Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley” and an economics professor at Tacoma Community College. He also recently wrote about how billionaire-funded philanthropy is a public-relations scam for Jacobin and how the tech platforms are on their best behavior during COVID-19 for Current Affairs. Follow Rob on Twitter as @IronicProfessor.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

Who cares what these idiots think is going to happen? Who cares what they wrongly believe is going to take place? Well, we have to care because they're powerful and they control platforms and they're the billionaires of today, you know? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders why the press is so ahistorical about Bill Gates. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Rob Larson. Rob is an economics professor at Tacoma Community College in Washington State and the author of Bit Tyrants, the Political Economy of Silicon Valley.

You can follow Rob on Twitter, where he tweets as at ironic professor. Today, we're speaking about billionaire philanthropy, their response to COVID-19, the political economy of Silicon Valley and how tech firms got to be the way they are, and how we can move toward an online socialism. If you like our conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as at TechWon'tSaveUs. You can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. Enjoy the conversation.

Rob Larson, welcome to TechWon'tSaveUs. Thanks, man. It's my pleasure to be here. Great to speak with you. So I wanted to start, obviously, you wrote this recent book called Bit Tyrants, the Political Economy of Silicon Valley. That is really fantastic and kind of goes through each of the major tech giants, how terrible they are, how they became the giants that they are today. So I wanted and obviously you have this particular focus on the tech billionaires who built them. So I wanted to start by asking, you know, what are you seeing

these tech billionaires up to right now with the COVID-19 pandemic kind of going on? Like, how are they reacting to it? Who is getting credit that they really don't deserve? I'm sure there's many of them, but maybe for once, though, like some of them are actually getting the anger that they also rightfully deserve. But yeah, once, though, like some of them are actually getting the anger that they also rightfully deserve. But yeah, so what do you see in there? That's a great question. There's a lot to look at there. I mean, obviously, these tech billionaires are, you know, they're coming from this position of incredible wealth and economic power because of the huge growth of their tech platforms and the economics of that, which we can chop up in good time. But having

those resources, it ends up, yeah, really chop up in good time. But having those resources, it ends up, yeah, really mattering whether these guys feel like helping or not, or just a tiny bit or what. Individuals, they play a role. But when you're super powerful, or when you're a CEO of a big platform, or you're in the ruling class, your actions end up really mattering and can shape the lives that people have. So it's interesting. We're seeing a variety of ways that everyone's adapting to this. I was just writing for Current Affairs the other day about how the platforms themselves are kind of on their best behavior during the virus. Everyone's kind of aware that Facebook played a role in 2016 that ended up helping get the current administration by paying no attention and not wanting to spend money moderating

their platform. So you get a lot of goofy potential interference there. And YouTube has a similar reputation. And right now they're filled with CDC recommendations and nice boring posts from them. They're on their best behavior. They don't want to look like they're making this worse. Even, of course, as the quarantine makes us just more dependent on them than ever. Facebook and YouTube have watched and used times way up. We're using the cloud more for Amazon and Microsoft. That's one of their big business segments. So there's a ton of money flowing to these guys. It's true. And you take a look. I mean, there's a variety of responses. Some of these billionaires are

barely public figures like Larry Page at Google, who comes out sometimes. But of course, Bill Gates is the one that everyone thinks of when we talk about the virus now. And usually for one of two reasons. One is the reality, which is that his foundation is one of the larger global philanthropic institutions, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which just puts a lot of money into a lot of important enterprises around the world fighting diseases and trying to rebuild war-torn areas and stuff, which is very valuable. And so that is sort of the real reaction. We should mention, too, a large number of people are getting into more and more feverish conspiracies. There's definitely already happening. It's gotten worse with this new public health crisis. So people think that Bill Gates Foundation is injecting that people with COVID-19 on purpose,

so the government can justify locking us up. And it's all part of the new world order that George Soros is causing, because he's a billionaire who's a liberal. So he must be responsible for all this. Exactly. But people should hate Bill Gates for the right reason. That's a concern I have now. So a little while ago for Jacobin, yeah, I had an article just looking at the Gates Foundation and its role globally, dealing with public health and other public goods. And what you discover pretty quickly is that these foundations, and Gates has one, many of these billionaire families have them. What it comes down to is they do give money to people who are doing important work,

but always on an extremely inefficient basis, on a basis that satisfies the foundation rather than being based on what the need is. And when you dig into it, what you discover pretty quickly is that these foundations tend to be reputation laundering for these billionaires. So I mean, Gates, just to stick with him, people don't remember this. Back in the 90s, Bill Gates was not this revered grandfatherly figure. Back then, he was on the news every night because his company was on trial. This was during Microsoft's antitrust trial, because there was, by that time, very good evidence that Microsoft had used its Windows operating system monopoly, which it got because

of the economics of network effects. They were using that monopoly to take over and monopolize other industries, in particular, web browsing. this was in the 90s, back when web browsing was this huge new thing. And you could use it to look at the 30 different sites on the web. Very exciting. It was a very big deal then. And he was on TV every night. News channels would show his video deposition, in which not only is he a giant smug prick, but also as soon as the company's documents were entered into the record, it became clear he had lied all the way through his deposition. So in the 90s, people like me are old enough to remember this. Back in the 90s, every night he's on TV being a smug lying jerk,

who's bullying little tiny industries with this giant corporate monopoly power, which is all accurate. And so it's at that time when he's looking like crap in the press, that's when he made all the big billion dollar scale donations to what became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was mainly at that time to shove his reputation over from being an ugly Rockefeller monopolist, ruthlessly crushing people, being full of it, making insane profits, and just dominating a new industry, computing, which was brand new back then, and shove that over into, well, I give, but I use my evil money to help poor people fight cholera and so on.

So you take a look, that's the timing of those donations. And I think that's the key thing. No one's trying to say, these days, it's the internet. People see articles on social media, and they see the title, and then they comment, and then they move on. No one reads the article. It's a great way to humiliate yourself online, is to just read the titles and comment. It's very popular. People are like, oh, I guess you don't want him to help those poor people with malaria. You're showing your privilege with that. No, of course we want that. We should get that by taxing Bill Gates' money and letting the United Nations World Health Organization operate this, who have an actual policy goal of helping everyone in need, rather than if you can submit 15 audited financial

reports to my foundation, which I will then have my accountant look at, then we'll give you a small amount of money. If you know people who work in philanthropy, they will happily tell you the amount of time and energy that they spend jumping through hoops so they can get a couple million bucks from some foundation run by some ruling class scumbag, just so they can get that money. That money should go through public sources so that we at least can see what's going on and we have some role in that policy decision rather than having it be a way for Bill Gates to get his feel-good factor up. So it's kind of an ugly scenario there, but that's one. These billionaires, they are putting some dollars into funding COVID, fighting the virus and dealing with that. We should realize even, this is from memory, but a senior figure at Gates Foundation, I think this is when she made this comment during the Ebola outbreak, a different public health pandemic or epidemic at that time. And she said,

all of our giving, and again, they give millions and millions every year. She said, all of our giving is a drop in the bucket compared to the government's responsibility. Like they're even acknowledging, like even if we actively gave out this money and weren't insisting that everyone get vetted so we don't get cheated out of a dime, we still couldn't come close to meeting this need. But anyway, we should have our taxes cut, which of course happened three years ago. So it's a happy ending. I remember that piece of your book when you had that quote. And I was like, okay, so they even admit it, yet they still go around trying to get the governments to cut taxes and to privatize services and to kind of let them take over it.

Right. Yeah. They talk out of both sides of their mouth in a pretty shameless manner. But that's just the modern era. Everyone does that. Totally. And I even saw earlier today as we're recording that apparently Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, has made an agreement with the Gates Foundation to develop some new education portal for COVID-19. Yeah, great. And of course, Gates has been one of the major founders of privatizing education over the past decade in the United States. And people should realize how slimy that is. at age, the late 1800s, the early American capitalist industrial revolution after the

Civil War, back when we have Rockefeller and Carnegie and their big monopolies in oil and steel. Now we have monopolies in software. So it's a completely different era. Ever since that era, billionaires and back then multimillionaires have always had a special interest in taking over schools. And sometimes that means actively starting them, and Carnegie did a number of those. It's nice. They felt like when these guys do positive things, it's nice. We should realize kings and dictators do things that are nice. Some kings are benevolent, and they'll build fine roads and do public works that benefit

the people. And then they die, and their piece of shit kid takes over, and they cut off everyone's head today. Or the dictator has a stroke and now he's a bad dictator. Like we don't want these guys to be so powerful in the first place that they have this decision making role. But they have always had that interest in the schools. And you can understand why. I mean, schools is where we send our super curious, big brain, little human offspring to have their heads filled with basic skills like writing and adding numbers, and also where they learn about the basic landscape of the world and who's big and who's small and who does what for who. If you're a billionaire, why wouldn't you

want to control that? What's that thing the Jesuits say? It's give me a man for the first 10 years of his life and you can have him after... I'm fucking that quote up. They have a famous quote about how if you have access to people when they're really young, you can shape what they know and what they understand. And now Cuomo, who, I mean, people are so delighted with him because he's smarter than Donald Trump, which is all it takes now for liberals to kiss your ass. If you're smarter than dumb TV clown fascist, well, it's like, oh, maybe he should be the president based on no votes. How exciting. And yeah, he tried to give Bezos money after the deal fell through for them to put their Amazon headquarters there. And then, of course, they built out a ton

of office space anyway, because it turns out you don't have to give them billions of dollars. His whole record is like this, trying to cut down on hospital space, cut Medicare funding during the crisis, for God's sake. Cuomo is a classic, what they call neoliberal scumbag. He's like Clintonite Democrats who basically have Republican economic policy views, deregulate Wall Street, hooray for Silicon Valley, let's never put a single regulation or limit on their power. And so of course, yeah, now Cuomo is saying, Gates, you should run our schools. Let me tell you all, I'm an educator. I teach at a community college, but it is still education. And I can tell you, going online, all my classes, of course, like most instructors, are online now,

and that'll probably go on through the summer at least. I sure hope we come back in the fall with imbecilic governments reopening early, as is happening right now today. I kind of don't have high hopes for coming back. I expect we'll have a second bad wave and clamp down again. We'll all be surprised together, I suppose. But I can tell you, online education, which is what all of this, of course, is tending toward, fewer teachers, less in class time, more online. I've taught online for years. I do believe in it. A lot of people can't get to a class. They have kids, they have jobs, they work nights. People are in the armed services. I work in a fairly military town. So that's so important for so many people. Online education is positive. but I really would

say you tend to benefit more when you're in a physical classroom environment. So for all of our, and again, I support them, but for all of our online software learning tools and so on, and of course, Gates and these other privatizers of education are all about fewer teachers, fewer classrooms, more online. So you are learning on your laptop at home or on your phone. God help us. So many of my students I found out lately are using their phone to do their studies and to do their quizzes and their homework, which it's not a substitute for a good in-class environment where you've got your peers there. You have other young people there. Students don't usually give a shit

about how you, the teacher, sees them, but they really care how their fellow students see them. And are they going to be able to flirt after class? But now they can't because they embarrass themselves. It makes you more present in the classroom. At least I personally really think as an educator that that makes a big difference. So I'm kind of bummed out to see, yeah, the rising influence of Gates and the whole charter school movement, which is we continue as taxpayers to fund the schools, but now Bill Gates and his friends write the curriculum, and we'll have a non-unionized workplace, and we take the best facilities away from the public schools, which makes them shittier when you take their facilities away that the students enjoyed. So it's a pretty bad train wreck.

Yeah, in Cuomo, you couldn't have a better picture for how shallow our political discourse is that this person has talked about as someone who could step in for that walking corpse Joe Biden when he drops dead in 45 minutes. You know, this guy has been in the pocket of Bezos and Gates and all these other guys for so many years. But the Trump era, if you can string three sentences together without having two lies, people are pretty excited. You're a shoo-in. Yeah. You talk about how they're privatizing education, trying to reduce the number of teachers, but that's for everyone else's kids, right? It's not for theirs.

That's a great point. Because, of course, Gates and many of these other tech billionaires, they went to private schools. You'll go to a private academy. Zuckerberg. Gates himself comes from the ruling class originally. He came from a rich family. His mother is on the board of several large entities. He grew up knowing the governor of the state of Washington where I live. That is not common, turns out. So it's true. Yeah, this is all for education for the masses. My kid will still go to Exeter.

Yeah, it's wild, you know. And and as you describe like the situation that Gates was in in the 90s at the time that he set up his foundation, as you were kind of big philanthropist right now, but I can certainly see him like heading in that direction to massage his image and try to maintain the hold over his monopoly, right, in the future. It's true. And I think what you discover is only a few of these super elite people really have like the give back instinct in a meaningful way. And some clearly do, you know, you're Warren Buffett, you're Carnegie in the way and some clearly do you know you're warren buffett uh you're carnegie in the previous monopolist era you know like it clearly came from the heart because they did more than they had to do and when you read about their lives you can see like okay this is something they actually feel they should give back gates bezos do not give a jolly good

fuck about anyone else but it's like big gates didn't move until he was in prime time eating shit day after day it took that to move his hand and now of course like that's his whole like now he's just a secular saint who see you know he left microsoft's board recently he's just you know that's that's his whole identity bezos i think is just like that like he's a classic twitchy eyed lex luther libertarian scumbag but lately as he's he's looking more, he's more and more dogged in a press which has celebrated him for years and years. Again, you can't really claim these guys get rough press. They've had their balls fondled by the commercial media for decades now. But as you're firing people who lead walkouts because they're scared of COVID-19 and

you're not spending enough to keep them safe, That looks bad. And as many other moves to crush other firms and is being investigated in the European Union like most of these firms are. So lately, just lately, he started to budge a little bit, giving a couple million bucks to a bipartisanship nonprofit here, a climate change awareness-raising nonprofit there. Pennies, especially compared to what gates is already doing but you're gonna see i think more and more of that these guys you know they talk to each other they watch each other uh you know these guys are in a tiny sphere of super elite billionaire families you know so it is like a small social circle which means they're kind of prone to

you know gossipy competition and backbiting and stuff like, oh, you did that. Well, okay, I'll respond by doing this. As he looks worse and worse, I bet we'll see Bezos make more moves in that direction. And other platforms like Google and Facebook are taking some similar steps. But again, no corporation ever gives an anonymous donation to a nonprofit. You always make sure that gets a nice big announcement there. What's the point if it's not going to be on primetime? Exactly, exactly. And Bezos clearly has this like really libertarian ideology. And so that's something I wanted to talk to you about, because it was something that stood out to me while I was reading your book. Because you wrote that Bezos's father was an oil engineer in Batista's Cuba

before the Cuban Revolution, and obviously kind of built some of his wealth in that way. And we know that when Bezos went and set up Amazon, he got, you know, a fair bit of cash from his parents to help him out when he was getting started. But so you talk about how his father was like this resource engineer in colonial Cuba. And then I was also like, holy shit. Like I've heard of other tech billionaires who have a similar story, right? So Peter Thiel, his father was a chemical and mining engineer. They're from Germany. They moved to apartheid South Africa and were there for a little while. And then they finally moved to California in 1977. And of course, Peter Thiel was with them when they made those moves. He was already alive.

Finally, I also saw, well, and of course, many people know this, that Elon Musk, of course, grew up in apartheid South Africa. His father owned part of an emerald mine in Zambia. And of course, he led this really wealthy childhood as a result. But then the story of how they got to South Africa is also interesting because his grandfather was in Canada. And so this is all in Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. And Vance writes that Musk's grandfather, who Musk looked up to and kind of idolized. While he was in Canada, he rallied against government interference in the lives of individuals. He forbade swearing, smoking Coca-Cola and refined flour at his house. Great choice. Yeah, exactly. And when he moved to South Africa in 1950, he contended that the moral character of Canada had started to decline. I wonder what was really annoying him about Canada at that time, you know?

Yeah. To move to apartheid South Africa. Yeah. I think there's some really serious questions. So obviously, like, I see these similarities between these tech billionaires who push these really libertarian ideologies. And I'm just thinking, like, do you think that there's any connection between, you know, how they grew up and sort of those influences and then what they believe today

with these really kind of right wing individualist kind of views that really privilege wealthy people like them? And, you know, in the case of Thiel, you know, he doesn't want women to be able to vote, really loves monopoly capitalism, like all these kind of crazy things, right? That's a really interesting question. Yeah. Yeah, I should say in my book, in my own research, I was pretty focused on like those five mega cap companies, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. But Teal and Musk are fascinating bastards in their own right. I have a little bit about them in the book. That kind of background is fascinating. You know, like, yeah, South Africa, I mean, people should at least be basically familiar with that.

Like, that's one of the great world historical stories of, you know, elite privilege and white supremacy. You know, black people, you're inferior, so you have your own separate space. We're wonderful, wonderful white people. Obviously, we are so much better i mean who could possibly deny that uh so it's true anyone who comes out of that i kind of doubt that they would avoid being tinged even if they're not like outwardly racist although who knows with these unstable coke snorting billionaire bastards i wouldn't put anything past them definitely not but uh like their basic underlying yeah worldview of you know, we're the great people.

And that may be based on like elitism, you know, like is the story of the modern period. You get the modern states and modern industrialism. People become huge in government or corporation, corporate, you know, commercial power. They all have some elitist way of justifying their sleazy power mongering bullshit, you know. And it may be, yeah, you know, we're the states. And so, you know and it may be yeah you know we're the state and so we guide history we'll decide like that's very popular among people who get government power if you're an elite out of the business world or just being rich then it's well there's some people are better there's different levels of people and who knows which one you're in obviously

no one ever says that there are different levels of people and they're on the shitty level. And one who says that, like, and I, of course, am the amazing one. You people were born to be road. I'm born with spurs to ride on your, you know, fascinating. So especially those two characters, like Teal and Musk, like they are kind of like more than like Gates or Zuckerberg or something. They are like a little more like personally unstable. I mean, Musk now, Musk is one of those figures that, you know, personal friends of mine who are not super radical, but hate Donald Trump would say, well, I'm glad for Elon Musk and George Soros because we have horrible right-wing billionaires like Trump and the Koch brothers. So we need some liberal billionaires to fight them. So that's a

good thing. I just tell them, you don't want other princes to fight the prince you don't like. We shouldn't have these scumbags in the first place, like Musk in particular. I mean, now I find fewer and fewer of my liberal friends are willing to point to him as something favorable because he's clearly a coke-snorting, unstable weirdo who crashes his firm occasionally with dumb Twitter remarks that drive its stock price down or shoot it up and then turns out it was a lie and the sec formally penalizes him for lying in a public forum as a corporate officer you can't just do that uh it's fascinating to me and then teal is also intriguing because he's less like moment to moment unstable than musk but he also has this horrible

the man's a horrible libertarian douchebag. I mean, I at least appreciate that he openly says, yeah, monopolies, it's great. In tech, we have network effects and platform economics, and that leads us to have monopolies. So you don't want competition, you want monopolies, they're great. I have one, so I think they're wonderful. Exactly, yeah. But then also, what was it, a couple years ago, was that Gawker, I think, that outed him as gay? And Hulk Hogan, the prominent, the equally prominent wrestling figure, sued them for a sex tape or some other bullshit gossip reason, who cares? But then Teal secretly funds Hogan's lawsuit for some time, and eventually it came out that his money was behind it. And they

sued them in a way that meant they couldn't take the debt to someone else. It meant specifically that Gawker would close. And of course, that did happen. And they got this gigantic multi $10 million judgment that no online publication is going to be able to pay. Especially with Google and Facebook capturing all their ad revenue, right? It is true. And that's something that we have a lot of research on now. They really have sucked up the margins of the publishing industry, right when it would be nice to have well-funded news entities like this in a time of crisis. Not so much.

So even the relatively stable ones are horrible, power-mongering scumbags. And maybe it's wrong to out someone, you know, fine. But then you're going to destroy a news outlet and ruin all those people's jobs. Like, this is what happens. These are the stakes of real power. And I had a debate with Libertarian a couple weeks ago where we really got into this. This issue is still very much in my brain. But the fact is, you don't have to be in the government to be powerful.

You can just be super rich or have a platform like Google and decide what gets upranked in people's search results for a certain idea and what gets downranked and no one sees it. And it's tremendous to me. If you go to court and you can crush a news outlet and destroy it, you have some power. It's a real, true reality truth. And the economics of tech tend to be producing a lot of these guys, but we've had them since we've had industrial capitalism. And there's a reason I think so many people, especially younger people and people who aren't so privileged, people who aren't white, and just people who are young and watching what's happening to the world, it's not surprising that these people are very excited about,

you know, figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders and Corbyn. All the support for these figures skews young. Big surprise. Like, the kids are the ones who are going to live out their lifespans in this twisted dystopia we've allowed to be created. And this was all before the current virus, you know. So you could see why there's building support for doing something about getting rid of billionaires and monopoly platforms, because they're scumbags that ruin our lives. And that's, you know, that's avoidable. Definitely. And even when you say like how they really have this focus on

you know how they're kind of at the top right you also see that in their visions for the future you know like when you look at what jeff bezos has proposed for the future of humanity when we move into space and all that sort of stuff he talks about how there's going to be like these colonies that the images show to be like some kind of like medieval europe or something like it's really weird um but then he says that at the same time the population is going to expand to a trillion people so that we can remain uh growing and dynamic or some bullshit like that but then it's like okay so where are all those trillion people gonna go because you're only really focusing on like where a small number of people can live, right?

So it really kind of sounds like this sort of like Elysium, like that film where, you know, the rich people are in their colony up in space and everyone else is like on the ground, sort of like suffering in this really kind of like post-apocalyptic scenario. Or Bezosos of course also says that there will be a lot of industrial activity happening in space so maybe that's where he's going to send us i don't know right that's great i what this is so fun since we're making up the future based on nothing i think the future will be populated with uh free-range blowjob machines as long as there's as long as we're making up anything we can think of

it's true. We have to care. Who cares what these idiots think is going to happen? Who cares what they wrongly believe is going to take place? Well, we have to care because they're powerful and they control platforms and they're the billionaires of today. So who cares what Stalin or FDR think? Well, you have to because they're powerful. The same is true in the economic setting. I mean, libertarians can resist this until they're blue in the face. They're not convincing anyone but themselves. If I have the kind of power these guys have, and maybe just to fit a little economics in here so I can feel like I've done my job.

Yeah, go for it. Like in tech, technology markets, a lot of people have noticed they're especially prone to super concentration of market share and monopoly, we have one firm that runs everything. Or sometimes oligopoly, it's a term we use for when you've got like two or three or four giant companies. So monopoly could be like the EpiPen or something like that. And oligopoly would be like the cell phone carriers. There's three of those, you pick one and there you are. Well, many capitalist industries have that history because of things like economies of scale that favor big concentrations in big companies, and they tend to end up

dominating their markets. But in tech, it's interesting because most of the tech markets are mediated through networks. So I want to share this video with people. I want to share this social media post with someone. I've made a piece of software, like a video game or an application, and I want people to use it. Well, that means it's distributed through networks, and that means it has unique economic effects. If you buy a sandwich or some sneakers, it doesn't affect anyone else particularly. But if you get a smartphone, or let's say you get an Instagram account, you start posting on Instagram, You just made Instagram slightly more useful to everyone else who's on it because it's distributed through a network. When there's one more person on it to view posts and to bring their own content, it makes access to that network more useful than

it was before you joined. It's just the weird nature of markets that have networks. It's like phone access. When new people join or more businesses join the network, the access to it gets a little more valuable to you, even though you didn't do anything. We call that network effects in markets. It makes them even more prone toward monopoly than all of our other industries are. And again, most of the economy already is prone to monopoly with capitalism. We had Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, for instance, in the 1800s. And there's no networks, particularly, that are super relevant to his monopoly there. Then he branched into railroads, which are based on networks, but that's another part of his story.

So you take a look, that's why these platforms are so dominant. What do you want to do? If you have a video you've made, if you have a podcast or an online show you make, do you want to put it on Vimeo? And look, I love Vimeo, but it's mostly used for people who are into video and kind of want to get away from the noise of YouTube. If here's something you want people to see, you're going to put it on YouTube. Why? Because that's where all the audience is. It's got an audience of a couple billion people. Well, that audience attracts more video creators. That richer video supply attracts more viewers, and that attracts more creators. So you get that positive feedback cycle. That's what drives these network effects markets. And you end up with

gigantic, super hyper dominant hubs in those markets. And we call those things platforms, where the whole point of it is to bring together creators and consumers, maybe of social media posts, maybe online video, maybe applications like games for your phone, because operating systems for your phone are platforms themselves. So that's why we end up with these monopolies and these insanely big fortunes that these billionaire scumbags then have that they can use to come after us and reshape education and transform the society while we're all stuck locked down in our apartments because they also wanted us to cut funding for things like the CDC, which South Korea is well on the other side of their curve with this crisis because they fund their CDC that they have,

the Korean CDC, Centers for Disease Control. And they were able to scale up quickly for testing, which is apparently we're never going to get to that point here in America. And they had people in Beijing watching emerging viruses there, because there's some history, some of our current historical epidemics, although certainly not all of them, originate in central China. And so they had people there, like advanced spotters. We had that and cut it around the time we passed that tax cut, which cut a couple trillion dollars off the tax bill, mostly for the billionaires, and especially for the tech platforms, because it gave them an amnesty, a super low one-time tax rate for their overseas cash hordes, which for some of these companies

was in the many hundreds of billions of dollars. And they got to repatriate it, bring it home and take a profit on it with a one-time super low tax rate. That's what the state's priority is, the Trump tax cut. I mean, Mitch McConnell wrote it, let's be realistic. But that's the tax cut that we did, was cut funding for things that could have helped us at least be in front of this epidemic instead of constantly reacting to it, kicking our asses. We cut funding for that because we're cutting the taxes coming in. So the economics of the industry is behind all of this train wreck. I just want to get that in. Totally. And I'm sure Mitch McConnell was more than happy for Trump to put his name on it just to get a pass and help his wealthy donors, you know? Oh, yeah. There's no problem to him. Yeah. And for all the Republicans wringing their hands

about Trump's constant racism and his horrible sexist history, and just his unpredictability and his trade war starting, like rich people don't like that. But they do like huge tax cuts that go to them. The rest of us got tax increases, which is kind of amusing. And also packing the judiciary with right-wing douchebags. And of course, massive deregulation, especially on things that involve the environment. So they're getting enough from him that Republican support, even among elite rich Republicans, is still relatively strong because for all of the buffoonery and unpredictability and constantly changing positions on Iran, on trade, on the virus even, they're still getting the main goods because McConnell is using his control over the legislative process behind

the dumb Trump scenes to get it done. So we'll see what happens this November. I don't know if you can beat Trump with a walking corpse, though. So we'll all find out together. We will. So I wonder as well, like, because you talk about how these platforms have gotten so big and obviously the Republicans are not going to really want to touch that other than try to privilege right wing views on the different platforms. So there's been this push in recent years for there to be like antitrust and for, you know, tech to be broken up. And obviously, you push back against that in your book and say that that is really not enough, right? Simply breaking up tech is not going to solve this larger problem,

because it doesn't kind of change the fundamentals of the industry and how it all works, right? Instead, you propose this idea for an online socialism. So do you want to explain why antitrust really is not enough and just breaking up big tech alone is not enough and what your kind of ideas for the alternative, for a socialist alternative to that would look like? Yeah, for sure, man. So antitrust, folks may not have a huge amount of familiarity. Antitrust is America's anti-monopoly laws. And most developed countries have these, you know, in the European Union, they call them their competition laws, right? But they're anti-monopoly. In the US, they come from the 1890s originally. And back then, that was before

big firms were organized into corporations, which kind of comes at the turn of the century. So back in Rockefeller's standard oil monopoly, it was called a trust because you would conquer or buy up your competitors. And technically, they wouldn't become part of your company, but you would control them because they're part of this trust system is how it worked back then. So antitrust law made certain kinds of monopolies illegal, and made it illegal to use an existing monopoly to take over another industry and monopolize it. And this is America. We have a very commercially dominated society, very hyper-capitalistic. So even our anti-monopoly laws allow a number of kinds of monopoly. It's only certain kinds that aren't allowed,

right? So of course, if you have a patent on a drug, I mean, that's a government-granted, time-limited, but still real monopoly. Obviously, that's exempted. But Microsoft, for example, to go back to them and Bill Gates, they had their monopoly on computer operating system software for decades. These days, it's a little less important because we compute so much with mobile. But again, you only have two operating systems there. There's the iOS on iPhones and the various forms of Android, which Google produces for all the others, which is much more dominant. We'll take a look at that operating system. It wasn't illegal for Microsoft to have a monopoly for all those decades in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, monopoly and how computers work and what apps can

run on it, extremely powerful monopoly. They never got in trouble for that. People should realize this. They never got in trouble for having that monopoly because they got it through what is considered legitimate economics. They got it through network effects. They were the operating system on that first big PC that came out in the early 80s, the IBM PC. And because that PC became super dominant, because IBM had the super trusted brand name then, and because there were a lot of clones, because IBM kind of rushed it, so it was all off the market parts. So you had all the IBM clones, from all the companies we have today that make laptops. They all ran Windows though. So they got that through network effects and platform economics, never got in any trouble for that, which is interesting.

And it's worth noting, of course, as you say in your book, that Gates And it's suggested by some of the biographers of Microsoft and Gates that that was how his completely unknown little tech company was able to land that huge contract with IBM, was that connection, which is certainly plausible. We don't have direct information on that, or at least I haven't seen it, so I don't want to make that clear, but it's pretty plausible. I mean, this is often how decisions get made, is who knows who in these elite circles of power like boards of directors are the ultimate example of that but they never got in trouble for their monopoly on operating uh systems it was when in the 90s they used that to take over the adjacent market for web browsing uh which again was a very important thing you know now and certainly then

and you had netsetscape Navigator, and they put their really shitty Internet Explorer browser that Microsoft uses and that no one ever chooses unless you happen to be doing a search on a PC because you're at work probably, and it will automatically boot that and take you to Bing for your search engine. These are things no one uses except they're part of Windows,

which has, to this day, a pretty sturdy PC operating system monopoly. It's not quite as important as it used to be, but still very, you know, most of us go to work, we use Windows PCs, you know. So that's how they got in trouble, was not having a monopoly, but for monopolization, for taking over that thing. When they put Explorer on their super dominant Windows operating system, everyone started using that, and Netscape just disappears. They were completely crushed by that. That's how they got in trouble with antitrust. So the first thing to realize is antitrust is kind of limited.

It does do other stuff. The main thing it does now is block mergers that would lead to monopolies. So go back to the cell phone carriers, right? We had four of them only, classic oligopoly. So Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Well, T-Mobile and Sprint, the smaller ones, have tried a couple of times to merge. And each time, the Justice Department would block them or would threaten to take them to court. They actually have to go to court and convince a federal judge. They don't just get to snap their fingers

and block your merger. But they said, we'll fight you on this because it's too much concentration. There's already only four of you, and you're already a bunch of power-mongering, government-lobbying scumbags. People hate your service. So we're not going to let you merge and get even more powerful and few in number. And they won twice. And then this third time, Sprint and T-Mobile last year decided, no, we're going to go to court. And they did win. They won under a nice, as I recall, a Bush-appointed conservative judge who let them through and let them merge. So now there's just three of those guys. So antitrust now is less about breaking up monopolies, even in the rare circumstances when they did that, and more about trying to block oligopolists from

merging or from doing active colluding, which is an issue. Antitrust hasn't broken up a company in the US since 1982, when they broke up AT&T, which used to issue. Antitrust hasn't broken up a company in the US since 1982, when they broke up AT&T, which used to have a nationwide phone monopoly, which, again, that's about as powerful as it gets. This is before the internet. So that's antitrust. It's pretty limited in the modern period since the Reagan revolution in the 80s. It doesn't really break up big firms. It sometimes fails to keep them from merging, you know, even. So pretty limited. And again, you know, it's government policy. We used to enforce it more aggressively. Now corporations are more dominant. So it's gone. Like you can't count on it. So I think we need, we should consider more fundamental changes to our economic system.

And I think we should be looking at things like worker control. I think a lot of us are sick of going into our jobs and we do the work and people's bosses tell them what to do. They keep all the information that's important to themselves and they don't do anywhere near the work you do, but they'll tell you what to do when things go wrong. They don't take the blame. People get sick of that stuff. And that's when they think, I wish we just ran this place ourselves. Why do we have to have management installed by some investor or some CEO somewhere telling us what to do? And so we look at more classical ideas like worker control. And there's different forms of that. Co-ops work on small scales. I'm a fan of those. But for the big economy, for oil

refineries and palm oil plantations and the giant data centers that these companies have to keep our YouTube latency times low. These aren't things like you can run with like a little co-op. Like these are major industrial and agricultural capital. And there you have to accept that we need big installations. If without them, we can't have the economies of scale that make modern goods relatively affordable for all of their problems. Like there's value there. So if we talk about worker control, it can't just be a co-op. We need a worker control-based process where you go to work, you and your co-workers have the information, management usually keeps to itself, and you talk and work it out together what the decisions will be. And you will send your own

representatives to talk to other worker-run workplaces where we're going to figure out what the plan will be. We'll supply you with this material, and then we'll send it on to these assemblers or whatever. We take a lot of work. But if you have representatives that the workers pick in each workplace, subject to recall if they get too big for their britches and start ignoring what the workers are saying, they can get pulled back and put back on the line and put up someone else who's more honest. That's what we talk about with worker control. That's the traditional socialist idea, is worker control of the means of production. And there's a lot of different ways we can imagine the details being worked out there.

Frankly, I think we should have an experimental approach. Different industries, they vary a lot. And different countries, people, the way that they interact socially does vary significantly. We should have a variety of approaches there, like a one-size-fits-all totalitarian thing is not so good. But worker control, I think, is something we can look at very favorably. And so looking in particular then, to answer your question, at these online platforms, there we would look at a form of online socialism and having the people who actually write the code and do all the software engineering and put in these psychotic hours

and these 90 hour a week grinds when you're close to launching a new product or a new software update or something. These are white collar workers who are paid well and some of them get stock options, but they're still capable of being overworked and exploited. That is a thing that occurs. They should have some of the say in controlling the firm,

but also like all those low paid content moderators. My God, you read about these people a thing that occurs. They should have some of the say in controlling the firm, but also all those low-paid content moderators. My God, you read about these people. So mostly contractors hired by a third-party company, by Google for YouTube or by Facebook. These people's existences is arguably worse than what people are going through in healthcare right now. Because these people, your job is to content moderate the worst shit that people put online so it's a recorded murder and here's child soldiers and here's a war atrocity and here's a rape that people have uploaded like people upload your animal abuse like the most twisted evil things you can imagine these people's jobs is to watch that for like an eight second clip because you know someone's flagged it on facebook or whatever or instagram or something and your job is to look at it decide what level of sanction it

gets does it get banned or get a warning put on it or what and you got seven or eight seconds to look at it and now you're off to another clip of someone being sexually abused or killed in a mass shooting or something and then you rate that and then that happens for your whole shift and that's your career j Jesus Christ, those people should have some say too, because those people are making a sacrifice for all of us, cleaning up those platforms that you and I wake up and use every damn day. So they should be part of that decision-making process. And then finally, the last thing I say in that part of the book is we users are a big part of the workforce for these companies. In these companies' financial

filings that they have to put in because they're publicly traded firms, they file these 10K forms and others with the SEC, which have a lot of juicy material in them. They talk about how much value is created just by the posters. People putting up these Twitter and Facebook posts and the YouTube videos and so on, and people creating these simple apps to put in the app stores for your smartphone. We users who do that creativity, we're part of this process too. Without us, there's no websites for Google to index, and there's no posts for Facebook to curate. So we users should play a role in socializing these platforms. And exactly what that would

mean, we should be talking about that and trying to work that out among us. And everyone should be thinking about this and trying to troubleshoot different scenarios and propose different sort of vague blueprints or general blueprints for how this sort of thing could be done. We should realize we're not going to figure it out perfectly on our first try. This is all about an experimental approach. But that could be beneficial too. These are a little less life and death industries than oil refineries without which we can't ship food to your store. Maybe we start out on these online platforms and learn our lessons and do our little screw ups there where it's okay, I fucked up the video platform today.

We'll fix it tomorrow. Now we've learned what works okay for organization and what's too much feedback or too much iteration decision process. It should be a fertile ground for socializing the rest of the economy so that we don't have figures like Mike Bloomberg, who can take one 64th of his fortune, which is a billion dollars. He got $64 billion, peels off one billion bucks. That's what he spent, we are now estimating, on his presidential campaign, which of course went down in flames and he was humiliated on TV by Elizabeth Warren, and I'm delighted by that. It's the last thing she did in the campaign that was any good, but God bless her for it. But so why should he have the

power to put his name and his bullshit ads on every screen in America and every commercial break on cable for the boomers and every YouTube pre-roll ad for the millennials. We couldn't help but see Mike Bloomberg ads. If there's no power in that, I'll eat my hat. That's hilarious. These scumbags shouldn't be in charge. Bill Gates shouldn't be deciding who gets their funding to fight malaria. There's no reason for us to keep deferring to these ruling class elite scumbags and telling us how they're going to run the society. This is where it leaves us. They end up gutting public services so they can have tax cuts. And now some pandemic comes, South Korea, which is a developed economy, but tiny and much poorer than us. They're a well

on the other side of this pandemic, and we are on our asses and will remain that way for some time. I, as an economist, am not sure how much of our economy is going to be around on the other side of this by the time we have a vaccine in a year, because we're doing everything wrong. We're not giving people a universal basic income so they can survive in their homes. The businesses are all getting bank loans, but we let the banks, the same banks we bailed out 12 years ago, are running the small business loan program. To my amazement, entities we bailed out 10 years ago are running the bailout, and they're not giving money to people who don't already have nice commercial relations with the banks, like larger firms that have enough money at stake to be worth the bank's attention. We're fucking up every part of this response. And of course, we're reopening

half the country. This shows what happens when you have an elite ruling class of private sector wealth running the society. It's a goddamn train wreck. And with different forms of socialism, and maybe starting with an online socialism, we could try to look at moving past that because this, I mean, this is not tenable. We're seeing it more clearly now than ever, I guess. Well, Rob Larson, I certainly hope you're right. And I certainly hope we move toward online socialism very soon in the future. It's been fantastic speaking with you today. Thanks so much. Right on, man. My pleasure. Thanks a lot. Rob Larson is the author of Bit Tyrants, the Political Economy of Silicon Valley.

It was published by Haymarket Books, and you can buy it at haymarketbooks.org, your local bookstore or library, or anywhere else that sells books. If you like this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and you can follow the podcast on Twitter at at TechWon'tSaveUs, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. Thanks for listening.