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Chapter 11
After the Horsemen
In a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the
continuing vitality of a free people.
—Louis Brandeis
THE FOUR MANIFEST
god, love, sex, and consumption and add value to billions
of people’s lives each day. However, these firms are not concerned with the
condition of our souls, will not take care of us in our old age, nor hold our
hand. They are organizations that have aggregated enormous power. Power
corrupts, especially in a society infected with what the pope calls the
“idolatry of money.” These companies avoid taxes, invade privacy, and
destroy jobs to increase profits because … they can. The concern is not only
that firms do this, but that the Four have become so good at it.
It took Facebook less than a decade to reach 1 billion customers. Now it’s
a global communications utility, with a nose to becoming the world’s biggest
advertising company. It’s a company with 17,000 employees valued at $448
billion.
1
,
2
The riches flow to the lucky few. Disney, a hugely successful
media company by traditional standards, commands less than half that market
capitalization ($181 billion), but employs 185,000 people.
3
,
4
This uber-productivity creates growth, but not necessarily prosperity.
Giants of the industrial age, including General Motors and IBM, employed
hundreds of thousands of workers. The spoils were carved up more fairly
than today. Investors and executives got rich, though not billionaires, and
workers, many of them unionized, could buy homes and motorboats and send
their kids to college.
That’s the America that millions of angry voters want back. They tend to
blame global trade and immigrants, but the tech economy, and its
fetishization, is as much to blame. It has dumped an enormous amount of
wealth into the laps of a small cohort of investors and incredibly talented
workers—leaving much of the work-force behind (perhaps believing the
opiate of the masses will be streaming video content and a crazy-powerful
phone).
Together the horsemen employ about 418,000 employees—the population
of Minneapolis.
5
If you combine the value of the Four Horsemen’s public
shares of stock, it comes to $2.3
trillion
.
6
That means our 2.0 version of
Minneapolis contains nearly as much wealth as the gross domestic product of
France, a developed nation of 67 million citizens.
7
This affluent city will
thrive while all the rest of Minnesota scrounges for investment, opportunity,
and jobs.
This reckoning is happening. It’s the distortion created by the steady march
of digital technology, the dominance of the Four, and a belief that the
“innovator” class deserves an exponentially better life.
It’s dangerous for society, and it shows no sign of slowing down. It
hollows out the middle class, which leads to bankrupt towns, feeds the angry
politics of those who feel cheated, and underpins the rise of demagogues. I’m
not a policy expert, and I won’t weigh down this book with a lot of
prescriptions I’m not qualified to make. However, the distortions are visible
and disturbing.
Purpose
How are we using our brain power, and to what purpose? Think back to the
middle of the twentieth century. When it came to computing power, we were
impoverished. Computers were big primitive tabulators, with transistors
gradually replacing vacuum tubes. There was no artificial intelligence, and
search took place at a snail’s pace, in libraries, through something called a
card catalogue.
Despite those handicaps, we tackled huge projects for humanity. First,
there was the race to save the world, and split the atom. Hitler had a head
start, and if the Nazis got there first, it would have been game over. In 1939,
the U.S. government launched the Manhattan Project. Within six years, some
130,000 people were mobilized. That’s about a third of Amazon’s workforce.
Within six years, we had won the race to the bomb. You may not look at
that as a worthy goal. But it was a strategic priority to win that technology
race, and we mobilized to do it. We did the same thing to reach the Moon, an
endeavor that, at its peak, involved 400,000 workers from the United States,
Canada, and Britain.
Each of the horsemen dwarfs both the Manhattan and Apollo projects in
intelligence and technological capacity. Their computing power is near
limitless, and ridiculously cheap. They inherit three generations of research
on statistical analysis, optimization, and artificial intelligence. Each horseman
swims in data we hemorrhage 24/7, analyzed by some of the most intelligent,
creative, and determined people who have ever lived.
What is the endgame for this, the greatest concentration of human and
financial capital ever assembled? What is their mission? Cure cancer?
Eliminate poverty? Explore the universe? No, their goal: to sell another
fucking Nissan.
The heroes and innovators of yesteryear created, and still create, jobs for
hundreds of thousands of people. Unilever has a $156 billion market cap
spread over 171,000 middle-class households.
8
,
9
Intel has a $165 billion
market cap and employs 107,000 people.
10
,
11
Compare that to Facebook,
which has a $448 billion market cap and 17,000 employees.
12
,
13
We have a perception of these large companies that they must be creating a
lot of jobs, but in fact they have a small number of high-paying jobs, and
everybody else is fighting over the scraps. America is on pace to be home to
3 million lords and 350 million serfs. Again, it’s never been easier to be a
billionaire, but never been harder to be a millionaire.
It may be futile, or just wrong, to fight them or blanket-label these
incredible firms as “bad.” I don’t know. However, I am certain that
understanding the Four gives insight into our digital age and a greater
capacity to build economic security for you and your family. I hope this book
helps with both.
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