This talk was originally delivered at the DECODE Symposium in Barcelona on October 16, 2018, as part of a session called “Taming the Tech Giants: Responses to Digital Trade Wars and Monopoly Power”. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

My contribution to this panel will be less about the details [of how to tame the tech giants] and more about the bigger picture of what’s wrong with the way things are. I don’t know a lot about trade policy or international regulation. Instead, I’d like to take a step back to analyse the [broader] problems with the increasingly dystopian world we live in today. And in this analysis, I see the problems with the tech giants as requiring larger structural transformations [than merely “taming” the tech giants]. Transformations that require changing the way this discussion is framed altogether.

There’s a tendency, in the discourse around technology regulation, to implicitly accept the terms that these corporations set. We buy into the narrative that they want us to believe¹: that these corporations are the only possible stewards of innovation, and so deserve to profit handsomely as a result. This creates a situation where even if we try to rein in their worst excesses, rarely do we doubt their right to exist in the first place.

And I think this constrains our imagination. It limits possible solutions to things like codes of ethics², more taxation, more consumer rights. But rarely do these solutions go beyond cosmetic tweaks. The underlying causes of the problem - their accumulated power and their role in propping up an increasingly lopsided economy - remain untouched.³

So what’s actually happening, behind the scenes? These companies have made use of technological advances - often funded ultimately by the state⁴ - and capitalised on them, quite literally. Through a combination of early mover advantage, network effects, and zero marginal costs of production, they’ve established themselves as middlemen to the digital realm. They dictate our terms of access in a way that has proven extremely lucrative, accumulating not just wealth but also power. Over users, over competitors, over whole industries. And they’re pouring their massive resources into developing technology not according to social need, but according to what they think will eventually make them money.

What makes the situation even more complicated is the transnational dimension, making it hard for any one nation state to tackle it effectively. The problems with taxation are already well-established, resulting from these companies being able to shift their immaterial assets according to wherever they get the lowest tax rate. But that’s just a symptom of a larger phenomenon of globalised capital. The wealth that fuels Silicon Valley, through venture capital and subsequent stock market holdings, isn’t bounded by national borders. Though a lot of this money was originally American, mostly due to the United States’ outsized role in the global economy post-WWII⁵, increasingly it’s been coming from everywhere else (e.g., sovereign wealth funds from Norway to Saudi Arabia - often the result of oil money⁶).

Now, if we consider why this global capital is flowing into Silicon Valley - why so many investors think that investing in technology will bring returns - then Silicon Valley’s role in the contemporary economy becomes quite clear. It is a way to make returns to capital on a macro scale at a time when the rest of the economy appears increasingly lethargic. Even if that’s not what the founders or employees of these companies want or even realise, that is the role that Silicon Valley has taken on: that of advancing the interests of capital. If, as David Harvey says, we can think of neoliberalism as a class project⁷, then Silicon Valley is, in a way, the industrial manifestation of neoliberalism applied to technology. It’s the digital embodiment of neoliberal governance and ideology⁸. Which means that Silicon Valley, too, is fundamentally a class project. Its goal is to increase returns to capital while simultaneously disempowering labour.

And so if we use the term “Silicon Valley” as a shorthand for this class of corporations - who hide behind the mask of technological innovation as a cover for exploitation - then we can’t just stop at trying to reform Silicon Valley, by breaking up a few companies and implementing some new regulations. Tackling the problem at the root requires that we abolish Silicon Valley⁹.

Now, I know that’s a provocative statement. And it’s admittedly not a small project. It requires a fundamental transformation of the way technology is developed so that it’s done for the public good, not in a geographically-concentrated way for the purpose of generating shareholder value. Any sort of technology that has the ability to mint a trillion company¹⁰ is too powerful to be left to corporate control. We know the dark costs of that - we know that the profits accrued through deploying this technology don’t just materialise out of thin air. As much as Silicon Valley likes to market itself as digital and virtual and immaterial, it’s ultimately still rooted in material conditions - that is, global value chains of commodity production.

After all, iPhones don’t make themselves; they require coltan miners in the Congo and factory workers in China.¹¹ And when it comes to advertising-based companies like Google and Facebook - who love to act as if their profits come from thin air, through their sheer innovative brilliance - well, their profits come from getting a cut of the costs of commodities that are actually being sold. Which means they are as complicit in these global neo-imperialist chains of commodity production as companies they like to think of themselves as morally superior to. They may not have been originally responsible for creating these global value chains, but by virtue of their position at the top of these chains as gateways to digital advertising, they have become embedded in them, and are profiteering from them in a way that entrenches them.¹²

What this should remind us is that when we talk about taxing these companies fairly or regulating them better, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just thinking about consumers.¹³ We also have to think about workers¹⁴, including those who are employed in nonstandard relationships¹⁵ or who are only indirectly employed through these global value chains. Often we’re used to a very narrow conception of “tech worker” as the software developers or managers involved directly in the production of technology at these companies, but such a view is reductive and ultimately misguided.¹⁶ Anyone who works in the industry - from highly-paid software developers, to bus drivers and security guards, to Amazon warehouse workers, to Facebook’s content moderators in the Philippines - is involved in the creation of value, and so their labour is being exploited by these tech companies, directly or not. As a result, they deserve decent working conditions, collective representation, and a say in how their labour is used.

This is a crucial point that I find is often neglected in the discourse. If Silicon Valley is a class project, then tackling it - abolishing it - means changing the balance of class forces, tipping it away from capital and in favour of labour. That’ll require an ecosystem of different tactics and approaches: we’ll need worldwide labour movements to build worker power from below, pushing for democratisation of the industry from the perspective of workers in order to challenge the current system where an executive in California makes product decisions to maximise shareholder value and not social value. At the same time, we’ll also need policy responses to slowly start taking lucrative technologies out of the capital-accumulation process,¹⁷ through whatever means and locality necessary, and building public, democratically-controlled alternatives on a municipal, national, and international level.

Overall, I think the only way to understand Silicon Valley is through a structural analysis. The problems we’ve seen in Silicon Valley are not necessarily unique to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley may have its own peculiarities stemming from its ideological and geopolitical underpinnings, but ultimately, it’s exposing problems with the corporate form itself, as the virtual structure of capital. Capital’s destructive tendencies are simply magnified and accelerated by these technologies now available. The people who manage to make money in this field aren’t uniquely evil - in fact, you could say that many of them are more idealistic than people who work in finance or similarly high-paying industries. The point is that the sector is, as of now, structurally set up to quash any idealistic notions.

Part of this has to do with the way Silicon Valley is entwined with the financial industry. More generally, it’s about serving capital through the shell form of a corporation. Technology that could potentially have had emancipatory potential is instead being made the servant of the corporation, enabling capital’s need to monopolise and commodify everything it touches.

Consequently, challenging this state of affairs requires more than replacing some CEOs or adding some more regulations - which, after all, these companies are structurally incentivised to get around¹⁸. Tougher regulation without a change in the balance of class forces - and an alternative economic and social landscape - isn’t enough. Any movement to hold these companies to account, to really tackle the problems at the root by diminishing their power, needs to be about class struggle.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the current system, which benefits the owners of the platforms a lot more than it benefits everyone else, is sub-optimal. And just as in any hierarchical and unfair system, those on top need to make us believe that they are needed. Unfortunately, in our current ideological landscape - where private enterprise is glorified and public services are constantly being attacked - it’s an easy argument to make. Capitalist realism¹⁹ tells us that there is no alternative to exposing every aspect of our lives to the vicissitudes of the market, to tolerating the growth of a few mega corporations over whom we have no democratic control. We start to believe its central premise: that agency is only possible on the level of the consumer and not as a collective.

There are times when it’s hard to imagine an alternative, because our present socioeconomic landscape feels eternal and unchangeable. But, to paraphrase a quote from the late science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, so, too, did the divine right of kings. Feudalism had similar patterns of wealth distribution, if slightly less social mobility than the state we’re in now. Today’s economy - call it surveillance capitalism²⁰, or platform capitalism, or just plain old capitalism - is governed by different principles, of meritocracy and myths of wealth creation rather some divine birthright. But ultimately it’s just as suspect, and its moral justifications are starting to come apart.

So what’s the alternative to this current system of corporate monoliths who use technology that should belong to us in common for their own profit? What should we be aiming for instead? For me, the answer has to involve democracy. We need democratic control over this technology in a way that cannot be done in the current conception of these corporation - in a way that is deliberately not permissible within these corporate structures. This means freeing the means of development of technology from corporate fetters and returning it back to the public realm where it belongs - where it can be democratically governed and used for social good.

We can’t let these companies commodify more and more of our lives in exchange for creating some mostly subpar jobs and boosting GDP. We need to fight our way to a world without them.