At its very beginning, capitalism was underpinned by faith in competitive markets. In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers labored within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running. This in turn provided us with our daily bread, ale and meat.

Then came the second industrial revolution and the conglomerates whose market power would make Smith weep with joy. This was the era of Big Business and the “robber barons”. And so another — neoliberal — fantasy was created, to justify the new big beasts that were now monopolizing almost every market that mattered. Joseph Schumpeter, a former Austrian finance minister who made America his home, was the new creed’s most effective advocate. Progress, he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development, for new machines, new product lines and all the paraphernalia that helps innovation take root? To monopolize markets, conglomerates need to dazzle us with remarkable new products that kill off the competition, like Henry Ford’s Model-T or Apple’s iPhone. Should we worry about all that concentrated power? No, Schumpeter reassured us. Once they reach their pinnacle, these monopolies get flabby and complacent and, eventually, they’re brought down by some upstart: one example being Toyota’s toppling of General Motors.

More recently, Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, said something that many thought was a restatement of Schumpeter’s dictum: “Competition is for losers!” While the pioneers of Big Business like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford would have agreed wholeheartedly, what Thiel was implying went beyond their wildest imagination. It went much further even than Schumpeter’s pseudo-Darwinian idea that progress comes through the rise and fall of monopolists in an endless struggle for existence.

What Thiel was saying is that today, winners do not just kill off the competition to monopolize a market. No, they keep going until they kill the market itself and replace it with something quite different: a kind of cloud fief that lacks all of the ingredients of a proper market — indeed that lacks all of the advantages that liberals and neoliberals alike recognize in the machinery of decentralized markets. In fact, today’s winners —the Magnificent Seven, plus Thiel’s own Palantir — are reviving an economic model that all of us thought dead and buried after the fall of the Soviet Union: economic planning systems that match buyers and sellers outside anything that can be usefully described as a market. 

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Europe’s century of humiliation

By Yanis Varoufakis

Gosplan was the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee, the engine room of its command economy. Its remit was to match the supply and demand of critical resources (oil, steel, cement) but also consumption goods (food, clothes, appliances), without using market prices. Once buyers and sellers were matched, prices were assigned with a view to achieving political and social objectives (such as to ensure basic affordability, or subsidize certain industries) — not to balance markets. 

Gosplan was disbanded immediately after the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin on Boxing Day of 1991, but it is now back. Where? In the algorithms powering Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and the rest of Big Tech’s digital platforms that pretend to be, but are not, markets.

Before you protest the audacity of my claim, think of what happens when you visit Amazon. Unlike when you visit a shopping mall, either with friends or mingling with strangers, the moment you follow the link to amazon.com, you exit the marketplace and enter a space of pristine isolation. It’s just you and Jeff Bezos’s algorithm. You type, say, “espresso machines” into the search box and the algorithm matches you with a number of vendors. However, to achieve what it was coded for, the algorithm had started working months, even years, earlier. 

Over that period, you will have revealed to it many of your whims and desires through your searches, purchases, clicks and reviews. Using these cues, as well as data from other sources, the algorithm has trained you to train it to know you even better, enabling it to advise you on what books, music and films to buy. It has already won your trust. So, now that you are in a hurry to replace your broken espresso machine, the chances are that you will choose one of the top search results it has given you. 

The algorithm knows your spending pattern. It knows how to guide you to the espresso machine with the highest price you are prepared to pay, all in order that Amazon can collect up to 40% of it the moment you click the purchase button. It is an extortionate cut, but the espresso machine’s makers tolerate it, because they know that if they don’t, their company will never appear in the top search results of anyone prepared to pay for their product. As AI improves, this power to manipulate your behavior increases — and this is why Big Tech’s valuations are going through the roof.

This is nothing less than a capitalist, privately-owned, super high-tech reincarnation of the USSR’s Gosplan. Amazon’s software matches you with particular vendors and bans you from talking to any seller or even from observing what other buyers are doing — unless of course it calculates that it serves its own purposes to let you see a small selection of them. As for the price you pay, this follows (rather than precipitates) your being matched with a seller. Rather than being the variable that equilibrates demand with supply, prices in Amazon fulfill another role: that of maximizing Jeff Bezos’s cloud rents.

In this sense, prices in Amazon and other Big Tech platforms function in a manner far closer to Gosplan than to any farmers’ market, money market or shopping mall you have ever experienced. In fact, had the Soviet leaders lived to witness the workings of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech, they would be kicking themselves, lamenting that it was American capitalists who perfected their Gosplan model, complete with a surveillance system that would make their KGB henchmen green with envy. 

Gosplan failed to turn into a success story as it lacked Big Tech’s greatest weapon: cloud capital, that is, the algorithms, data centers and optic fiber cables working as an integrated network to train you to train it. As you impart your data, cloud capital learns how to input desires into your mind and then satiate these desires by selling you stuff within its privately owned version of Gosplan. 

But, is there really a difference — I hear many of you ask loudly — between Thomas Edison and Jeff Bezos? Are they not cut from the same cloth of megalomaniac monopolists seeking to dominate markets and our imagination? Yes, despite their similarities, there is a difference — and it is gigantic. Edison’s and Ford’s capital was productive. It produced cars, electricity, turbines. Bezos’s cloud capital produces nothing, except the enormous power to encase us in his cloud fief where traditional capitalist producers are squeezed for cloud rents and we, the users, provide our free labor. With every click, like and review, we enhance the power of cloud capital. 

Once upon a time, an old Trotskyite told me that the Soviet Union, in the name of socialism, had created a form of industrial feudalism. Independent of whether he was right or not, his comment is pertinent today in relation to Big Tech. Come to think of it, while the trading process on platforms like Amazon is reminiscent of the USSR’s Gosplan mechanism, it is also the case that the enormous sums that Amazon, Uber, Airbnb etc, charge the actual producers of the goods and services peddled on their sites are akin to the ground rents that the landed gentry used to charge their vassals — except that, here, they are cloud rents that accrue to the owners of cloud capital. So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets. 

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Why Britain should be more Soviet

By Joel Day

The parallel extends to the state. The USSR was meant to be a workers’ paradise in contrast to the USA whose raison d’être was to be a haven for capitalist producers. It turns out that both promises were false. As Big Tech’s cloud capital accumulates and concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, states are becoming dependent on corporate techlords. By outsourcing core functions — archives, health data, even military software — to rented cloud infrastructure, governments lease back their own operational capacity from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google. This dependency enables a new dimension of technofeudal power.

From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state, with repercussions that extend to every realm of state activity, including health services, education, the tax office, our borders and faraway battlefields. 

In Ukraine and Gaza, and along our militarized borders, cloud capital is trained to extend its reach. Amazon’s AI tool Rekognition is used by law enforcement, including ICE, while Palantir’s vast surveillance software runs on Amazon’s cloud. Through Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google provide the Israeli military with advanced cloud and AI capabilities, reportedly enabling rapid, AI-driven targeting in Gaza with minimal human oversight. 

Let us briefly return to the comparison with the early 20th century’s original monopolist capitalists. Whether we admire or abhor the Magnificent Seven’s stock market valuations, it is helpful to keep this in mind: the old capitalist giants, the “robber barons”, actually produced things. The new technofeudal lords produce a new social order. They have replaced the invisible hand of the market with the visible, algorithmic fist of the cloudalist. 

Free-market enthusiasts have nothing to celebrate and much to regret. But it will take a brave soul amongst them to stare reality in the face. Just like pro-Soviet Marxists remained in denial that the Soviet experiment had failed for many years after 1991, so  free-market ideologues refuse to see that capitalism begat a form of capital — cloud capital — that replaced markets with something out of the Soviet past. In the process, it has killed capitalism. 

Venice is a fishing village founded by people fleeing the Germans after the Roman Empire fell. If it looks improbable, it is: a city in the middle of a lagoon covered with marble when cost allows. She lies at the head of the Adriatic, where the trade routes meet — a wise investment in the crusades. Now a party town, a whore in brick and marble, Venice flaunts itself for Bezos’s wedding and attendant festivals. This is its expertise: this is what it lives for. Here be Trumps, Kardashians, the Queen of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom, plus Oprah Winfrey: a guest list conjured by AI because, like actors in a play, they do not know each other. They were not invited to this wedding, but cast, and stalked to a shallow lagoon by the world’s press. It is an ancient display of power and control, so expensive no one can say what it costs: all of Bezos’s childhood dreams of being.

It is the final reveal — the unboxing — of the aesthetic of the age, and this also suits Venice, which loves aesthetics as much as it loves power, though it has more of the former than the latter these days. Theirs is a populist aesthetic, and at least — the bar is low here — it is honest: the most honest thing about oligarchy is its clothing. Vulgarity is always honest because it doesn’t want to be any thing else. At least it is not Cottage Core, which exists for rich Liberals to lie to themselves, and everyone, about how good they are. That is an aesthetic of denial. This isn’t.

This is the aesthetic of the Age of Trump: lewdness, power, rot and color blocking. It is pornographic, of course, and thrillingly unreal. The faces and breasts are augmented and shiny: not good enough as they are — for this is an aesthetic of anxiety, too — they must be renewed. They are gaudy frontage, like Venice herself, and the aesthetic mirrors Trump, made more for TV than for life. I think it is, essentially, a cry for Mama in the dark — tits, tits, tits! — and a cry for Dada too: bring me the diamonds! Will that make you happy, children afraid of the night? Of course not, but it’s worth a try.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is dissembled by these crazed exhibitionists: it is almost touching. And yet it is also costume. Kim Kardashian, all snakeskin and breasts, a hundred feet tall, reminds me of the vast Madonna on the walls of the Torcello cathedral in the Venetian lagoon, surrounded by fields of gold mosaic. I imagine her cracking from the walls and walking across the lagoon for a prick of Ozempic at the wedding, though the Kardashians might think her understated. Sánchez, who usually dresses like a Real Housewife of An Apocalypse Bunker, had multiple costume changes over the weekend, like a woman who does not know who she is and is now so rich she never will. She was a lampshade, Audrey Hepburn, and Princess Grace of Monaco, with graceless cleavage. She blew kisses to the media because that is easier — it has more reach — than speech.

What do they do? Not much, and it doesn’t matter here; it would be odd if they did, and we would be unable to project onto them so happily. Sánchez was a TV journalist: now she is a picture caption. Bezos sells things to people who confuse TV with life. Kardashian is in Reality TV: she does the same. DiCaprio sank with the Titanic. Orlando Bloom played an elf of Middle Earth, which was far less weird than this.

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By Tanya Gold

But no one will say it — this wedding is weird, a royal wedding for commoners, a carnival made for press attention — because where there is power, there is tribute. Anna Wintour, the former editor of Vogue, gatekeeper of global style, prostrated herself before the couple, apparently offering them space in her magazine: I never pitied high fashion until now. Is Lauren Sánchez stylish if she appears in Vogue? Of course not: even I know not to wear a camisole to a presidential inauguration. Rather, Vogue is shameless to have her: it is taken over, colonized by the money it follows, another estate fallen to ruin.

There is more tribute from protestors who threatened to jump in canals with inflatable alligators to force Bezos out of Venice because they are exhibitionists too. No oligarchs welcome, they said, which means they do not understand the city they are in.

It is true that Venice was, until Napoleon, a Republic: of oligarchs. They wrote their names in the Golden Book, their Debrett’s Peerage; they power-boated in gondolas; they built a ship while the King of France was having lunch. All of Bezos’s tinny excess fits with Venice. I fantasize that he will insinuate himself into Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari. They might let him if he fixed the roof. Venice will do almost anything for a price. That’s its charm.

Above all, Venice fascinates because she works as metaphor. She was once everything humans were capable of, and she exists in peril from the sea. Daily jeopardy, then, but for what now? Very little. No wonder Bezos chose Venice for his fete: if futility were a city, this is it. Nothing besides remains.

These flights do not go into orbit. Instead, they briefly pop above the atmosphere to give the crew a short period of weightlessness and a fantastic view. The flights therefore might seem, in the grand scheme of space exploration, trivial. Yet they are a sign of revolutionary change. Humanity has worked out how to make rockets reusable, enabling massively better cost-effectiveness than could the single-use rockets of yore. This cost-effectiveness has resulted in an explosion of commercial space activity, of which the Katy Perry flight happens to be the most publicly visible part. As well as celebrity flights, reusable rockets have enabled more serious private missions, like the Fram2 mission that flew a crew into polar orbit last month. This is a feat that has never been accomplished by a state-run human spaceflight program.

All this means that our species is picking up where it left off a half-century ago. When the Apollo Moon landings ended in 1972, humanity’s space exploration was cut short, despite our having the technology to continue it. NASA shelved its plans for longer-duration Moon missions that would have used variations of the hardware that had already developed. The agency had hoped to build a permanent base that would then support expeditions to Mars, but the thwarting of these plans meant that the Moon, until recently, has been left largely untouched.

In the past few years, though, the Moon’s quietness has been once again disturbed. A flurry of unmanned probes have been sent to our nearest celestial neighbor, and both the United States and China plan to emulate and improve on the Apollo missions. Whichever of them is most successful will likely get to dominate the onward expansion of humanity into the solar system: Mars and beyond. As Jeff Bezos would probably agree, this would be a far more consequential development than this week’s New Shepard flight.

China’s lunar program, Westerners ought to note, is going very well. In 2007 and 2008, China put spacecraft in lunar orbit. Since then, it has launched four surface probes, all of them landing successfully. These missions have enabled some impressive achievements, including an operation on the dark side of the Moon as well as the return of two lunar samples to Earth. In order to both increase the size of samples returned, and to demonstrate their space technology, the Chinese selected a more complex mission plan than the one used by the Soviets for the same purpose in the Seventies. It requires a craft to enter lunar orbit, send a separate lander to the lunar surface, rendezvous with the lander’s sample-bearing ascent stage, then return to Earth for re-entry and safe recovery. In the entire history of spaceflight, there have been only nine rendezvous performed in orbit around the Moon. Seven of these were Apollo lunar modules meeting their mothership after completing their missions; the other two were those modern Chinese missions, Chang’e 5 and 6.

The next step from here is an attempt to repeat the maneuvers, but with astronauts involved. The CCP aims to get Chinese astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade. Given the numerous delays to the Artemis program, the Chinese have a good chance of being first, and might start by putting boots on the valuable lunar South Pole. Here there is water ice that can be used as a resource for further expansion. The Chinese astronauts will travel on the Long March 10 rocket. This craft, whose first test flight will be next year, has a conservative design that reuses tooling and engines from the already-flying Long March 5. Prototypes of the capsule it will carry have already been tested in space, and many of the technologies needed for the mission have already been mastered through the unmanned Chang’e program. If successful, China will build a lunar research station with partners such as Russia.

It is unfortunate, then, that NASA’s proposed Moon rocket appears not to be up to the task. The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is known, costs $4 billion per launch. Because it lacks the power to carry a lander alongside the capsule, it can take humans only to a Moon orbit rather than onto the lunar surface. And before doing any of that, SLS has to get off the ground. It has been in development since 2011 and has only achieved a single launch in that time, one that resulted in worrying damage to the heat shield of the capsule. Nevertheless, NASA intends to use the rocket to send a crew on a single loop around the Moon by April of next year. A landing is penciled in for 2027, but experts doubt this will be feasible.

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Elon Musk just wants to go to space

By Gerard DeGroot

The only clear advantage the US has at this point is in its commercial sector. It was private companies that built and launched the two Moon landers that touched down earlier this year, with the government acting merely as a customer. All in all, the frivolity of the Katy Perry mission should not be taken as being representative of the industry as a whole. In fact, it is a sign of confidence and health. Note that Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ fiancée, was on board. What was once highly risky is becoming more routine. Blue Origin once again demonstrated its safe handling of liquid hydrogen — which is the rocket’s fuel — and its ability to bring a booster back to Earth under its own power. Both of these are technologies transferable to the company’s forthcoming lunar lander.

Launches will continue to multiply in number, principally because of the cost-effectiveness of reusable rockets. Already, the results have been spectacular. Over the past two years, the rate of mass being sent into orbit has accelerated by a compounding rate of 57% per year. This would represent an almost 10-fold increase in the next five years, and a 90-fold increase in the next 10 years. It is a trend comparable with the rapid rate at which transistors have been added to microchips over the past few decades — a key driver of the computer revolution.

SpaceX is upping the ante with Starship. Elon Musk envisages launching thousands of these enormous rockets every year. Even so, the trend cannot continue forever. Ultimately, there will be a practical and an environmental limit to how much we can launch from the surface of the Earth. The critical metrics will remain the amount of mass we can put into space, and the cost of putting that mass into space. In order to keep the revolution going we will need to start deriving our payloads from materials elsewhere in the solar system.

This is why the Moon is so important. There is a rather dry space industry acronym — ISRU — that refers to in-situ resource utilization. Do not be fooled by the dryness; ISRU will be transformative for our species. The shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole contain water ice and other volatile elements we can use to create rocket fuel akin to the hydrogen fuel used by the Katy Perry mission. Similarly, the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere can be used to produce fuel — but Mars, being on a solar orbit of its own, is accessible only once every 26 months. The Moon, although less hospitable, is a more convenient base for our species’ expansion. The stuff of science fiction can be made real, and it starts with collecting and processing rocks.

One of the first people to grasp this was the Princeton physics professor Gerard O’Neill. He and his students studied space colonization from a scientific perspective, and came to the conclusion that planets were not the place to be. No other planet in the solar system has ideal conditions for humans, and the scope for expansion is limited to perhaps twice the surface area of Earth. They instead designed vast cities in space, cities that would take the form of rotating cylinders up to eight kilometers in diameter and 32 kilometers in length.

Being that large, the cities would have a mass of billions of tons. Even then, it was clear to O’Neill and his students that it would be impractical to send construction materials from Earth. With this consideration in mind, they devised a way of flinging lunar rock into space. A long series of magnetic coils, they forecast, could be used to fling lunar regolith — the dust and rocks on the Moon’s surface — into the region between Earth and the Moon. Here it would be caught by a similar coil mechanism, and subsequently broken down and used to build the city. The idea enraptured many young space enthusiasts, including a Princeton undergraduate called Jeffrey Bezos.

The example of the privately-operated moon landers, and the work of pioneers like O’Neill, show us the way. Space agencies should set objectives which private companies are free to pursue how they wish. These objectives should have, at their heart, the goal of rapidly developing the resources of the Moon and other celestial bodies. NASA, and similar agencies, should fund this work generously.

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And it is imperative that they do so. Whether the critics like it or not, humanity will populate the Solar System. What’s more, the sheer scale of the Solar System’s available energy and resources will mean this extraterrestrial population will be thousands of times larger than that of Earth. The population will descend only from those who go into the frontier, establish sustainable bases, and grow their population.

Those who stay behind will not have any input on the kind of civilization that our descendants go on to build. Earth itself will be as irrelevant in the larger scheme of things as the tiny spot in Africa where Homo Sapiens first evolved is to modern geopolitics and culture. Are the people who populate the solar system going to believe in democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech? Or will they live under an autocratic system?

In 1576, Queen Elizabeth’s court astronomer John Dee made the case for colonization of the New World. It was not an obvious economic priority for Tudor England. But it is partly because of Dee that the United States today speaks English and operates legal and political systems derived from our own. The decisions made by the Elizabethans now shape our world in the 21st century, and likewise the decisions we make now regarding space will have ripples through the coming millennia. If we lose the race to the CCP, we might have reason to reflect on one Katy Perry song in particular: “The One that Got Away.”

Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimize their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.

In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.

Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Cape Town tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.

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Trump reclaims the Jacksonian spirit

By Travis Aaron

Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalize the races; Churchill statues were vandalized. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.

In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.

Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.

The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favor of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.

Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?

The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.

The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.

There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.

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Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

By Travis Aaron

As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative license that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.

Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.

It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.

But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.

Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.

Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.

Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.

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How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Travis Aaron

Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.

Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.

Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.

Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.

Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.

In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realize that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.

In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.

All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.

The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.

In 2021, PayPal blocked GiveSendGo, an evangelical crowdfunding site, after it helped raise money for January 6 defendants. In Canada, truckers resisting Covid vaccine mandates faced similar bans. Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage was debanked. As Chopra told me, “just because someone disagrees with corporate executives, that’s no grounds for losing their fundamental rights”.

Chopra also spearheaded Team Biden’s crusade against corporate “junk fees” (ordering a concert ticket online? That’ll be a $5 service fee, plus a $15 processing fee and a $3 convenience fee). He also sought to wipe medical debt from credit records and to protect veterans’ privacy against data brokers. Trumpian America would have been the chief beneficiary of these measures: lower-income consumers with little to no bargaining power against Big Finance and Big Tech.

Yet in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, powerful tech barons vented rage at Chopra’s agency. Most notably, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg — who previously oversaw the censorship of pro-Trump content on Facebook but is now making nice — complained about CFPB oversight on Joe Rogan’s show: “We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up.”

Elon Musk was more forthright: “Delete CFPB”, he posted on X on 27 November. That seems to have done the trick. As of last week, visitors to the CFPB website encountered a “404: page not found” error. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is dramatically remaking the federal government, gloated about the agency’s apparent demise with a tombstone emoji, adding: “CFPB RIP”.

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By Saturday, Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he would be taking over as acting head of the CFPB. Given Musk’s “RIP” message, however, and the sheer power he wields in the new administration, the future of the agency is far from certain. CFPB lawyers have been ordered to stand down in all lawsuits, including one challenging financial institutions’ right to debank Americans. “Oh, and Musk now has access to all this confidential CFPB info about his competitors”, a current CFPB staffer told me.

Less than a mile away, in Washington, the National Labor Relations Board, another agency tasked with leveling the economic playing field, is in similar disarray. Last month, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the board, and Jennifer Abruzzo, its general counsel. While Abruzzo’s dismissal was no surprise — Biden did the same thing to Trump’s NLRB general counsel upon taking office — Wilcox’s firing is a different matter.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the president can only remove a member of a bipartisan board like the NLRB for good cause, such as neglect or malfeasance. The National Labor Relations Act, the law that created the NLRB, likewise requires notice and good cause for removing board members. Wilcox received no notice, and by all accounts, she has a sterling record (whether Team Trump disagrees with her views on labor law is irrelevant).

Wilcox’s removal might be a first step toward overturning the high-court precedent that limits presidential power over bipartisan, multimember boards, a question over which reasonable people can disagree. But it also deprives the board of the quorum needed to uphold collective-bargaining rights. That has the effect of “creating chaos and disruption and making this agency inoperative”, said Wilma Liebman, who served 14 years as a member of the board under presidents of both parties, the final two as chairwoman.

Rendering the NLRB inoperative in this manner serves the interests of pro-Trump tycoons, Musk foremost: even before the election, he filed a lawsuit attacking the constitutionality of the New Deal-era board. Now, it seems, Musk the efficiency czar has achieved what Musk the employer had long desired. Said Liebman, “The fact that it is Musk is glaring”.

Unless Team Trump changes course, the plutocratic, self-dealing policy choices will become impossible to ignore. And the Trumpians will end up betraying the millions of working-class and union households who pulled for them in last year’s election seeking immigration sanity and economic protection — not to make it easier for Big Finance to surveil and debank them, or for Musk to use his new government job to stymie organizing efforts at his firms.

So far, the GOP’s activist base feels no danger, only joy. (This, even as Musk’s influence on Trump has already become much less popular, even among normie Republicans.) Among Right-wing activists and intellectuals, the mood is retribution, and TrumpElon the avenging dagger. As one Right-of-center operative told me, describing an attitude he himself disavows, the thinking is: “Now it’s our dicks that are hard, and we’re gonna f–k you in the ass.”

It’s understandable. Who on the Right could have lived through the political and cultural turmoil of the recent past, and not feel some version of the same sentiment, even if expressed in less vulgar terms?

From the #Russiagate hoax to Trump’s first impeachment on the flimsiest grounds; the Big Tech suppression of the lab-leak theory to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop; the pandemic-era banning of Catholic masses and Jewish funerals (even as George Floyd protests were encouraged) to the unlawful altering of election rules in Pennsylvania in 2020; the winking permission granted to Left-wing rioters setting fire to a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., compared to the hammer dropped on Right-wing rioters who stormed the Capitol; and so much more besides — Democrats and their allies in the media, Silicon Valley, and the security forces subjected the other half of the country to a lot of mishigas over the past decade.

As I say, who on the Right — or even the non-woke Left — could have lived through all that and not feel a jonesing to burn down all their works?

Then again, politics isn’t only about enmity and payback, even if it would be foolish to deny a place altogether to these primordial urges in the affairs of fallen human beings. Politics is also the art of prudence, especially when dealing with a state apparatus as large and complex as the federal government, overseeing an even larger and more complex society and economy.

It shouldn’t require the insights of Aristotle or Weber to know that the state isn’t a tech startup. The danger in unleashing Musk and his team of Groyper whizz kids is that, in slashing and burning, they might bring about not just efficiency and an end to DEI nonsense, but careless enshittification.

If some drug-approval process is short-circuited, and lots of people end up being harmed; if critical entitlements payments are withheld from senior citizens needing medical care; or if some official unit gets axed whose job it was to alert decision-makers to this or that natural or manmade hazard, and something somewhere goes boom; or if… In any of these scenarios, it won’t be Musk left holding the bag, but the politically accountable men who empowered him. Musk insists he is the soul of caution, of course, and so far nothing of that sort has taken place. But these things take time to ramify through a delicate system.

Then, too, the slash-and-burn mentality represents a reversion to the neoliberal model that Trumpism promised to counter. Recall that Trump won the first time around by rejecting the GOP’s Reagan-Bush-Romney orthodoxies. He pledged to protect social insurance, and he even hinted at a public option in health care. The 2024 Republican platform reiterated his entitlements pledge.

Musk, meanwhile, has vowed to trim as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of total outlays. There simply aren’t enough silly expenditures — programs funding research into transgender monkeys or musicals about Ireland’s black roots — to get him to that amount. If Musk really means it, and if Trump isn’t prepared to restrain him, then entitlements will end up on the chopping block. An eccentric billionaire cutting Grandpa’s Social Security payments: the 2026 and 2028 electoral kill shot Democrats are rubbing their hands for.

And what about state capacity? Trump won in 2016 and then again in 2024 by promising to restore the battered manufacturing sector. Tariffs are one important tool for doing so, with origins in the American tradition going back to Alexander Hamilton. But a manufacturing revival also requires a competent workforce and long-term research and development on a massive scale — tasks that have proved too big for any entity but the state.

None of this is to defend waste or entrenched bureaucrats who’ve grown accustomed to defying the president’s will, especially when the president happens to belong to the Republican Party. But de-Baathification is unlikely to work any better for the US state than it did for Iraq, and the Right, especially, should be wary of Year Zero delusions: the utopian dream of starting totally anew, unencumbered by the past — heedless of why our institutions took the shape they did.

Which brings us back to those crippled agencies, the CFBP and the NLRB. Both emerged in the wake of market emergencies: one fairly recent, the 2008-2009 financial crisis precipitated, in part, by banks’ risky home lending and the securitization of those loans; and the other much older, the Depression, brought about by a demand crisis in the economy resulting in turn from a brutally lopsided distribution of the social income (low-paid workers unable to afford the goods they produced).

Trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the imbalances. A regulation such as the CFPB’s anti-debanking rule is the best defense against people being arbitrarily cast out of the financial system, whether it’s over a belief that there are only two sexes or 107 genders. Likewise, collective bargaining, upheld by the NLRB, gave rise to the American middle class and such blessings as paid vacation time, health insurance, disposable income, and, yes, a measure of protection for what workers think and say off the job.

Is it not telling that, say, Jeff Bezos — who, three years ago, marched at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter column — has now joined the anti-woke ranks? Is it not obvious why the Amazon boss, notwithstanding his ownership of an anti-Trump #Resistance newspaper, The Washington Post, has teamed up with Musk in challenging the existence of America’s basic labor law? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg has undergone a profound change of heart about online censorship, now that a new administration is prepared to remove barriers against his power in the name of owning the woke?

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There is no denying that parts of the federal government fell in thrall to the same wacky and unpopular ideologies taken up by professional classes in the private sector. But abuse doesn’t negate the proper use of something. And as time goes on, it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.

The cynic might respond that the American state has always sought the favor of the rich: better to get rid of the meddling institutions of the New Deal and have the class antagonism out in the open. The successor state is here. Get with the times.

Maybe that’s right. But the populist Right should be clear that this could entail enormous pain for the working and lower middle classes and galling self-dealing by Musk & Co., the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late 19th century. Once the dust settles, and the next reforms take hold, the political rewards will redound not to the neo-Gilded Age party and politician — there is a reason Trump had to drag William McKinley out of obscurity — but to the transformative reformer.

If Trump himself wants to earn that mantle, it behooves him to apply his signature motto to Elon Musk: You’re fired.

Beyond the question of legality, the move is a big favor to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two Trump-friendly oligarchs who’ve filed suit to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Crippling the agency is the second best option: if Trump doesn’t fill the vacancy, the board would lack quorum to intervene in labour disputes. The National Labor Relations Act — the cornerstone of the New Deal — would effectively become a dead letter.

The decision radiates cold air toward the labour movement. Populist conservatives and some labour figures — most notably, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — had hoped that Trump could bring about a rapprochement between the GOP and the unions. A welcome early move came in the form of a surprisingly pro-union nominee for secretary of labour. But the new administration can’t pursue much by way of pro-worker reform if it collapses the entire labour-law architecture.

Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The 45^th and 47^th president is a mercurial creature, to be sure, but the real reason is structural. To wit, Trump can’t deliver on his Gilded Age political economy — defined by tariffs and a labour market protected from immigration — without simultaneously empowering employers relative to employees domestically.

It is this structural reality that should shape the labour movement’s response to Trump’s encroachments: if he wants to upset the labour peace achieved by the New Deal, then labour leaders, too, can let it rip.

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There is no denying that Trump’s big pitch to the working class paid off politically. He argued that workers’ wages and living conditions had been sliding as a result of too much foreign trade and too many foreign workers. He promised to build walls to protect American jobs. Trump’s narrative, which echoes that of many populist leaders worldwide, has a lot of truth to it.

Since the 1990s, blue-collar workers have witnessed the offshoring of high-wage jobs to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Automation accelerated these losses. At the same time, and inspired by the same political theory, workers from all over the world came to the United States in large numbers. In 2023, more immigrants entered the US homeland than at any other time in American history, and the share of foreign-born residents rivaled that of the 1890 peak.

For many consumers, the result was cheaper goods and services, and this is exactly why highly educated, white-collar workers, who now form the base of the Democratic Party, welcomed waves of immigration as an unalloyed good. Mass immigration allows these professionals to live like a neo-gentry on the cheap, thanks to a pliant, desperate foreign labour force for child care, dry cleaning, dining out, and home improvement.

But for those native-born workers who happen to find themselves in low-skilled construction or service jobs, the new arrivals depress wages. The refrain from employers, lately echoed by some progressives, has been that Americans simply “won’t do these jobs”. What they mean, however, is that Americans won’t do these jobs for serf-like wages and conditions.

Black and Latino voters are much more likely to compete directly with immigrants for scarce jobs, which is big one reason why many of them pulled for Trump in the last election. While liberals were focused on “the wages of whiteness” as an explanation for What’s the Matter with Kansas, voters in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were far more concerned with the wage suppression wrought by decades of globalisation and immigration-driven labour arbitrage.

Trump promised to bring back high-wage manufacturing jobs and to kick out low-wage immigrants. But there is a catch. You can’t really have capitalism in one country. If the United States were to forswear all the benefits of trade and immigration, it would face a staggering economic contraction. Some economists estimate that a whopping 3% of GDP would vanish if Trump made good on his promise to deport all illegal immigrants. And if he succeeds in implementing the kinds of tariffs he called for on the campaign trail, prices would rise much faster than wages.

Put another way: Trump’s dream of ringfencing America’s home market, including its domestic labour market, comes with the risk of massive inflationary pressure. How, then, did Trump convince his billionaire donors and the business-friendly GOP to go along with his plans? The current drama around the NLRB provides a clue. As UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari argued in November, the flip side of Trump’s external protectionism is internal libertarianism.

That is, Trumpian Republicans hope to fatally weaken labour as a countervailing force to the power of big business. If they succeed, whatever economic benefits Trumponomics might yield would accrue mainly at the top. Sure, workers may no longer have to worry that their wages are being undermined by immigrants, but they would have no means to protest their wages being suppressed by employer collusion, their work being automated by the latest technologies, or their being fired for no reason at all.

Without the right to form unions and the right of those unions to strike, the corporate powers that control the commanding heights of the American government would be free to tear up all their contracts with workers to pursue profit with reckless abandon.

For union members struggling to respond, it’s important to keep in mind that we have been here before. Lately, Trump has taken to comparing himself to the Gilded Age President William McKinley (a lover of just this combination of tariffs and a boss-friendly labour regime). The analogies are apt, and will become more so if Trump’s attacks on organised labour escalate: Before the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — the law the NLRB is charged with enforcing — the United States was an employers’ paradise: business had all the rights, and labour had none. The union movement was in its infancy, small and weak. But what it lacked in size and influence, it made up for in the clarity of its moral appeal and the courage of its members.

This was a labour movement that could strike, even when no one authorised industrial action.

While Grover Cleveland, another Gilded Age president, was able to shrug off Coxey’s Army—a ragtag group of unemployed workers who came to Washington to protest his economic policies—he wasn’t able to ignore the Pullman rail strike. A wildcat action launched by 4,000 workers in Chicago soon ballooned to include some 125,000 railmen across the country. Among them was Eugene Debs, the future socialist presidential candidate whose ideas would later inform the American labour law. Cleveland brought out the Army to suppress the strike, but with it, he crushed his own political fortunes; his party, the Democrats, would be discredited and kept out of power for years.

Today’s labour movement ought to approach Trump’s policies with the same fighting spirit and sense of political independence. If the NLRB has been unlawfully neutered, well, the unions ought to renew the tradition of sympathy and wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts, and other means of exercising strength — especially regarding corporate behemoths such as Amazon.

Labour still commands a great deal of power, if it can wield it. The ports, logistics hubs, and quite a bit of critical manufacturing could be held up in the name of labour’s fight for its life. If the White House feels no need to respect labour law, then the unions ought not play the role of lawful lambs waiting for slaughter.

At the same time, politics must not be forgotten. Militancy will come to naught if it’s paired with a political message that fails to reckon with Trump’s appeal among working-class voters. Labour needs to organise new units and strike for better conditions, but it also needs to become reacquainted with its political interests. For too long, the unions have neglected to put forth a political vision of their own. Many union leaders shrink from talking about politics with their members. Others have too often swallowed the shallow liberalism of the professional left. The failure to develop and defend labour’s distinct political interests made it too easy for Trump to appeal to union members even as they knew he was no friend to their movement.

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Nor must leaders shrink from the opportunities presented by this confused and seemingly hostile conjuncture. The new labour law being hammered out between the Teamsters and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — with apparent support from the likes of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers—opens space for reform. But labour must assert its voice to ensure the reform doesn’t compromise on non-negotiables, such as its independence and the freedom to take industrial action.

Labour has a duty to reimagine what an independent working-class movement might look like. That will take investments in organising and in education, it would mean a lot of work for union officials to educate their members, to drag them into meetings, to set up strike schools, to ensure that committees are formed for raising funds etc. It will not be easy. But to fail to do so will be so much harder.

I’m a space sceptic — rockets don’t move me. Back in 2006, I explored the seedier side of America’s lunar mission in my book, Dark Side of the Moon. It sparked outrage among those space enthusiasts who still cling desperately to Nasa’s glorious myths. And so I concluded that the world is roughly divided into two groups: there are those who care passionately about space and those who don’t give a fig. Men are prominent in the first group, women in the second. Go figure.

Being a space sceptic is a niche profession. This means that my phone rings whenever something important happens in space. Thanks to Musk, it’s been ringing a lot lately. And with the sixth launch of his Starship rocket yesterday, it’ll continue to do so. I care about space — in the sense that I believe that the dangerous fantasies of space moguls need to be exposed. And I still adore the old astronauts like John Glenn, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, all enormously brave men. But I recognise that they were mere pawns in a pointless political battle.

The recent exploits of Musk and Bezos fit into a longer story about celestial utopia. In 1869, Edward Hale published The Brick Moon, a short novel about a massive brick spaceship that is conceived as a navigational aid for those on earth. But a harmonious community, distinct from anything earthbound, quickly evolves within. Gravity was a cruel tyrant that prevented man from achieving true spiritual enlightenment.

President Ulysses Grant called the Brick Moon “the biggest thing since Creation, save for the invention of Bourbon whiskey and the Havana Cigar”. He was probably joking. Exactly 100 years later, President Richard Nixon described the Apollo 11 mission as “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation”. He wasn’t joking. Mature, otherwise intelligent men genuinely believed that Armstrong’s small step was a “giant leap for mankind”. Armstrong himself expressed surprise that the lunar landing didn’t immediately bring the Vietnam War to an end.

According to this gospel of space, if man escaped Earth’s surly clutch, his soul would likewise soar. Earth was, some said, a “lousy planet”, a drag on human fulfilment. The idea was eventually taken up by physicist Gerard O’Neill who in 1981 predicted that a giant community orbiting in space would usher in an age of “perpetual plenty”, eradicating war, famine and poverty. Nasa paid him a large amount of money just to dream of utopia.

This brings us back to Bezos and Musk. Wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Occupy Mars”, Musk is a man who has everything but now wants a planet. It’s not yet clear what deal he has made with Donald Trump in exchange for support during the election — yet my guess is that it involves rockets.

Musk first set out his vision in an article in New Space in 2017. Rather than a serious discussion of interplanetary migration as Musk intended, it reads like a comic book. If you’re seeking profundity, look away now. “It would be quite fun to be on Mars,” he writes, “because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.” He admits that Mars “is a little cold”, (it has a median temperature of -65°C), “but we can warm it up”. And don’t worry about those windstorms that can last for months and which have the abrasive effect of shaving with a power sander. He’s going to fix all that. Musk aspires to be both a 19th-century imperialist and a god. “On the fifth day, Elon created an atmosphere. And it was good.”

Bezos thinks Musk is crazy — for the Amazon founder, turning Mars into a liveable planet is pie in the sky. He prefers instead an expanded version of O’Neill’s vision, with thousands of people living in an “Orbital Reef”. This would eventually expand into a vast conglomeration of connected tubes where trillions of people would live, creating the statistical probability of “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins”. When it comes to dreaming, these guys don’t mess around.

All this might seem exciting to space nuts, but life would have all the romance of a transcontinental flight, except with no destination and no ETA. Reality would be much more mundane than the paradise promised by Musk and Bezos. Residents would breathe recycled air, drink recycled urine and live in perpetual fear of a catastrophic decompression caused by a collision with space debris. Featureless aluminium walls would drip with condensation and the air would smell of Dettol.

Bezos has gone a bit quiet of late, or rather Musk’s exploits with SpaceX have hogged the limelight. And with the latter’s proximity to Trump, we should probably concentrate on what he has in mind. He’s promised to resettle a million people on Mars by 2050, with the first settlers arriving by 2030. Since Mars and Earth are in close synchronisation only once every 26 months, that means that there are only 10 windows of opportunity between 2030 and 2050. He claims that his Starship reusable rocket will be able to transport 100 people or 100 tons of cargo at a time. That suggests 10,000 flights in 10 months, just for the human passengers. Added to that would be an equal number of cargo flights necessary to construct a city on Mars. So, we’re talking roughly 20,000 flights over about 300 days.

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In addition to miners and rocket scientists there would be doctors, lawyers, accountants, sewage workers and pizza chefs. There would also be criminals, since that’s statistically inevitable. Musk figures that a ticket to Mars would initially cost around $500,000, decreasing to $100,000 over time. This could be paid for with a loan underwritten by SpaceX and paid back by working on the Red Planet. In other words, Musk wants something similar to the 19th-century American company town. His version of utopia consists of a million people in a state of perpetual indentured servitude, paying him for the houses they live in, the air they breathe and the water they drink. I’m reminded of the song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford:

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.

One wonders what type of person would want to sacrifice Earth’s rich bounty for a life on desolate Mars. The idea would probably attract people either hopelessly deluded or bitterly unhappy. Neither seems like the raw material of a stable community.

At first, these Martian residents would only be able to venture outside their enclosed shelters in spacesuits. Musk plans to fix that, however, by “terraforming” Mars, that is, turning it into an Earth-like environment. By using nuclear explosions, he’ll release the carbon dioxide frozen in the polar regions and, hey presto, there’ll be a weather system, breathable air, oceans, lakes, flora and fauna. Technically, the task might be feasible, but solving climate change on Earth would be a doddle compared to terraforming Mars.

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The big question, it seems, is: what’s the point? Why build a colony on Mars if Earth’s environmental problems could be fixed for a fraction of the cost? Musk claims that humans need to become interplanetary in order to survive as a species. “I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself… there’s always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!” That’s certainly true, but I’m sure there are deeper, more personal motives. One senses that Musk shares that mistaken belief that gravity is a tyrant, that a different world will produce a different human.

That vision seemed preposterous, but rather harmless, when described by Hale. Expressed by Bezos and Musk it seems downright frightening. We know them; we’re familiar with their rapacious labour practices. Tesla and Amazon are not good blueprints for utopia. What these billionaires seem to have in mind is an idiosyncratic paradise free from the laws that constrain them on Earth. They want King Leopold’s Congo, but in space.

When I was a boy, astronauts were my heroes. Their exploits carried me through a difficult decade of riots and war. My dad contributed to the space adventure by making components for the Saturn rocket that took Armstrong to the moon. But then he died an early death, killed by the carcinogenic chemicals he’d once handled. After I became a historian I discovered just how cynical the space race was, how good people were exploited to win a Cold War pissing contest.

Space travel has always been an ego trip; but at least back then there were real heroes who made it fun. Nowadays billionaires, not nations, are at the helm. The once heavenly realm has become an arena of greed and power. The lustre is lost. Musk’s version of utopia is not just cloud cuckoo land. It’s also a nightmare.

Home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of scientific talent, Altos Labs is pursuing a lavishly funded quest to unearth the secrets of ageing. The Stanford-meets-Soho House décor is enough to show that here, health is wealth. But even in the notoriously well-compensated field of biotechnology it stands out. Last year, the Silicon Valley venture revealed it had raised $3 billion from investors, making it one of the best-financed start-ups in history.

Its mission? Depending on who you ask, anything from reversing chronic diseases and deferring the helpless twilight of old age to cutting the keys of eternal youth and creating a race of immortal supreme beings. This furrow of science, which piques our hardwired anxiety of ageing and fear of death, has always been accompanied by disproportionate incentives for hype. Nor has it been helped by wealthy obsessives, who in recent years have very publicly taken their own anxiety to macabre new heights, such as the software entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who injected himself with his son’s blood and spends $2 million a year in the hope of achieving the body of an 18-year-old.

Altos’s leaders, however, are in the business of managing expectations. Hans Bishop, the president, has said his focus is on increasing “healthspan” rather than lifespan, and that any extension in longevity would be “an accidental consequence”. The idea is that, by focusing on “reprogramming” cells with various proteins, Altos can find medicines that treat many diseases at once by targeting the underlying problem: ageing.

Bishop and his co-founders Rick Klausner and Yuri Milner are late entrants in the arena of anti-ageing research. Calico was set up a decade ago by Google co-founder Larry Page, though it has yet to unveil a product. Other players include Unity, BioAge, BioViva and AgeX Therapeutics. Billionaires — including Milner himself, Page, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel — are regularly glimpsed behind the scenes.

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So what makes Altos stand out? Again, that war chest is immense. Its team is a fleet of Nobel prizewinners, lured from governments and top universities with the promise of “sports star” salaries. As for famous backers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself is believed to be one of Altos’s investors. When rumours of Bezos’s involvement broke in 2021, fellow billionaire Elon Musk quipped: “If it doesn’t work, he’s gonna sue death!”

Altos is global, with two hubs in California, one in England near Cambridge, and one in Japan led by famous stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka. Given that all my imaginative efforts to visualise these mines of youth ended with giant brains in tanks, I am intrigued to be offered a tour of the UK hub by the building’s owners. My goal is to peer a little closer through the hype and see what $3 billion gets you.

Upstairs in the Cambridge branch, I am taken past rows of brand-new labs and a sterile area named the Science Kitchen, where some of the 160 scientists prepare for experiments on, among other specimens, mice and fruit flies. (You may recall from biology lessons that drosophilas are ideal for research since their rapid life cycle allows multiple generations to be bred in a single day.)

A vivarium, for raising and keeping animals, is being built downstairs, but I am refused entry as it is still undergoing environmental testing. It must be signed off by the Home Office, the facilities manager explains. Of all government departments, why that one? An answer is not forthcoming.

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Science is a power-hungry enterprise, as evidenced by the colossal HVAC system out back, almost the size of the lab itself. The whole building is kept on backup power so that if there is an outage on the National Grid, Altos can continue to keep its industrial-strength freezers at -70°C. As we pass a room of these freezers, I point out that they are conveniently human-sized. “Is Walt Disney in that one?” I ask. No one laughs.

The superlative sci-fi element, however, is “Ken’s Egg”: a wood-panelled, 130-person lecture theatre on the ground floor named after Dr Ken Raj, one of the principal investigators. “I felt the egg was good,” Raj says. “What the auditorium is for is to bring our ideas, to give birth to life.”

Those ideas continue to advance. Raj, alongside his colleague Steve Horvath in the US, is an expert in epigenetics, measuring how molecules called methyl groups attach themselves to our DNA as we age. Most people’s DNA methylation age corresponds accurately with their chronological age, but those with diseases such as Parkinson’s have an older epigenetic age.

A couple of years ago, the big question was whether the methyl groups are driving the ageing process, or merely a consequence of it. Now, we know. “We can see now that yes, the methylation is actually the driver,” Raj tells me. “Not all of the methylation that happens in your genome drives ageing, but there are methylation genomes that actually do the driving.”

Some aspects of the science being pursued at Altos are more controversial than others. Charles Brenner, department chair at City of Hope medical centre in Los Angeles and a vocal critic of lifespan-extending hype, tells me that there is “a cart-horse problem” with DNA methylation. “There’s no evidence to my knowledge that a change in [epigenetic clock] means that a person is going to live longer,” he says.

Brenner says that epigenetic resetting “is real and will certainly turn into real medicine”, such as when your cells are used to create a tissue that has an exact genetic match for, say, your damaged liver. In vivo “reprogramming”, however, is in his opinion “unlikely to ever be tested in humans” because “everyone who works with these genes knows that they produce tumours and teratomas in the process of producing well-behaved stem cells”.

At conferences, Brenner shows his audience a letter from an anti-ageing scientist who claimed: “We can control ageing at our caprice… it’s going to revolutionise everything.” It was written in 1990. “It arguably could have been said by any anti-ageing biotech guy in the last 33 years,” he says. “And they were all wrong.” Despite this, Brenner expects that the “excellent scientists” at Altos will still “discover useful things”. However, he says, “it’s not obvious to me what new technologies would making drugging the ageing process to achieve lifespan extension suddenly possible. I suspect that some of the investors were sold a bill of goods.”

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The political and ethical questions around Altos Labs are equally unsettled. The debates are familiar by now. Proponents see the quest for longevity as morally noble, arguing that it will eventually benefit all humanity. Detractors say there’s no evidence to suggest the benefits would trickle down to the non-billionaires.

David Sinclair, chief executive of the International Longevity Centre UK, tells me the key challenge is “helping us live better now rather than longer, and that is arguably a policy issue as much as a science issue”. The cynical view of Altos and its ilk, he says, is that there are “quite a lot of men in their 30s who want to live forever, and that they’re throwing lots of money into this. Actually, if you asked their 95-year-old mums, what would they say? Would they say you’re much better off making sure you’re doing it well, rather than living longer?”

Sinclair believes the investment in Altos is useful, but suggests policymakers will have to tackle the increased inequalities that might result from the science. “The people who will have access to it first are the people who are already living longer and are going to be wealthier,” he says. At the same time, “once you have new medications that work, it’s very difficult for governments not to offer them.”

Is it safe to say these companies have an image problem? Scepticism comes naturally in the field, ever since Herodotus lied (or, if you’re being charitable, was duped by a myth) about people bathing in a fountain of youth in the fifth century BC. It also strikes me as noteworthy that so many cultural depictions of eternal life and the quest for immortality, from Gilgamesh to Indiana Jones to Dr Manhattan, are cautionary tales.

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Professor Tom Kirkwood, head of the department of gerontology at Newcastle University, tells me that research on ageing “is at quite an exciting stage” but sometimes the enthusiasm for innovative treatments “doesn’t pay sufficient regard to what we know already about the complexities of the ageing process”. It’s a great deal easier to alter the life history of short-lived animals such as fruit flies and mice than to alter the lifespan of humans, after all. As for Altos, Kirkwood believes it has the potential to be “slightly disruptive”, but, he says, “it would not surprise me if it should turn out that for all the investment that’s made, the breakthroughs prove to be elusive”. Yet he points out that researchers will continue to make bold claims in order to have their work recognised by the capricious attention of the media.

The wacky Bay Area sheen doesn’t help either. It brings to mind “transhumanists” such as Zoltan Istvan, who ran for US president in 2016 promising to conquer death, and philosopher Ingemar Patrick Linden, who calls the suggestion that everyone should die at a natural age “appalling”. Super-rich investors may not use this precise language, but there is undoubtedly a grain of transhumanism in their thinking. As he stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, Bezos urged shareholders to stay nimble, quoting Richard Dawkins: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at… If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Altos’s scientists are all in, obviously. “This is what the world needs,” Raj says. Bezos and the rest have created lavish sanctuaries for these talents to thrive. And many would see nothing wrong with that. There are far worse ways to be a billionaire: look at Philip Green.

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Yet the furtiveness with which he conducts his involvement (his investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, has still not commented on the Altos reports) speaks volumes about his self-interest. There are plenty of simpler ways Bezos could improve the lives of others. Let’s be clear: he really does want to be immortal. And I’m not sure there’s anything noble about that.

Surprisingly, one of Bezos’s fellow tech titans articulated a very different philosophy of ageing. In his 2005 commencement address to Stanford graduates, Steve Jobs reflected on his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and offered a powerful rebuke to Silicon Valley-style transhumanism. “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there,” he said. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

But that is as it should be, he said, because “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

On 17 January, 1912, Scott and his men arrived at the South Pole — only to find that Roald Amundsen had got there first. Turning back in defeat, they perished on their way home.

Let’s wish Jeff Bezos better luck, because next Tuesday he, too, is making a perilous journey. On that day the richest man in the world — net worth $177 billion — will zoom into space aboard his own rocket. But, unlike Scott, he sets off knowing he’s been pipped to the post, the Amundsen in this tale being Britain’s beloved train controller Richard Branson, just back from a jaunt to the cosmos on his Virgin Galactic spaceplane.

Except that Blue Origin, the Bezos space company, isn’t having it. They say that outer space starts at the Kármán line — an altitude of 100 kilometres. Because Branson didn’t go quite that high, his trip doesn’t really count. 

The Kármán line, though, is arbitrary; the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t suddenly stop at a suspiciously round number, it fades out. One can set the boundary a bit lower (as the US Air Force does) — in which case Branson did go into space. 

If this spat looks like a “pissing contest” (as a Virgin Galactic test pilot put it in a since-deleted tweet) then that’s because it clearly is. Space travel is becoming the ultimate positional good — and space ships the playthings of billionaires. With the relative decline of nation-states and the rise of the super-rich, perhaps this was inevitable; after all, people have often described the wealthy as seeing the world from 30,000 ft, so why not 300,000?

It’s significant, however, that Bezos should be the one leading the way, not just because of his vast riches, but for the means by which he made them. The immense gulf between him and his deunionised, demoralised workers has now acquired full physical expression.

It’s not just Bezos and Branson duking it out. The second richest man in the world, Elon Musk — worth a mere $150 billion — also has a rocket ship venture, SpaceX. Musk has been admirably frank about the whole thing, telling volunteers that a few of them may die in the process, although Elon also hopes to send a million people to Mars.

Even this parade of egos is humble compared to the man really responsible for the space race, Donald Trump, at least in his own mind. “I made it possible for them to do this”, the former president modestly observed in a recent interview. He has no plans to go into space himself, however. 

Space tourism dates back to the year when hyper-globalisation began, 2001. It was then that Dennis Tito became the first to pay his way to the stars, hailing a ride with the Russians. But with Branson’s successful flight, space tourism is now set to become a growth industry; Virgin Galactic is said to have pre-sold 600 seats, and prospective passengers reportedly include Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber. 

All rockets have a Freudian quality, due to the very nature of physics, but the shape of the New Shepard is so rude it could have been designed by Joe Orton.

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For all the theatrics, however, this isn’t just billionaire boys and their toys — they’re actually making important breakthroughs, especially on cost. The key challenge with space is not how far away it is, but that it’s directly above us. Lifting mass against the gravitational pull of the Earth requires a huge expenditure of energy and therefore cash. 

A key metric is how much it costs to lift one kilogram into low Earth orbit (LEO). According to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy analyst, the “cost to LEO” between 1970 and 2000 was about $18,500 per kilo, while America’s Space Shuttle was even more expensive at $54,500 per kilo.   

However, the new generation of privately-developed space vehicles has brought costs tumbling down. A paper by Harry Jones of the NASA Ames Research Centre quotes a figure of just $2,720 per kilo for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In other words, the billionaires are transforming the economics of spaceflight, and if this trend continues it will indeed be affordable to, if not the many, then more of the few.

That’s so often the way with private enterprise. While it’s become fashionable to emphasise the role of the state in getting new technologies off the ground (literally in this case), it takes the discipline of the bottom line to turn expensive inventions into affordable products. 

One can always complain about the how the rich got rich, but if they use their wealth to achieve something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise then perhaps it’s worth the injustice.

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And there’s much more at stake here than opening-up space tourism to mere millionaires. This really could be one giant leap for us all. Space-based internet services like StarLink and OneWeb are already launching, and before long, nowhere on Earth need be offline. Looking further ahead, we can see exciting possibilities for space-based solar power, zero-gravity manufacturing and asteroid mining. Without even leaving our solar system, we can dream — realistically — of a new age of abundance.

However, that depends on getting one thing straight: space is no place for people. The solar system may be full of natural resources, but from a human habitation point of view it is, quite frankly, a shithole. Think of the least hospitable place on the planet: Antarctica. Unless you’re a scientist, you’d be mad to want to live there. Yet, compared to everywhere apart from Earth, it’s really quite cosy: there’s air, water, temperatures that won’t kill you instantly, and a lack of deadly radiation. Luxury.

So if we can’t imagine the large-scale colonisation of Antartica anytime soon, then we can forget about Mars or the Moon — where the difficulties are multiplied a million-fold. Inevitably, humankind will get its grubby mitts on the solar system’s resources by sending up robots instead.

The greatest danger of the Branson and Bezos space race is that by putting themselves front-and-centre of space exploration, they’re actually slowing down our progress to the stars. Heroic, but essentially pointless, trips are a distraction. We’d do much better to concentrate our efforts on deploying machines that can keep going without air, gravity, sleep or publicity. That doesn’t mean that we cut ourselves out of the picture completely, but we need to work from home on this one. 

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The alternative is that, over the decades, we build-up a human workforce in Earth orbit and beyond. Given the cost constraints, the bare minimum will be done to make their lives tolerable. Indeed, the economic incentive to immiserate the space-based working class would be overwhelming.

Throughout human history, the taming of frontiers has involved exploitation, sometimes extreme and vicious. Examples include the Trans-Atlantic slave trade; the transportation of convicts to Australia; and the use of indentured labour in the American colonies. For a modern-day example look at the international shipping industry — the worst parts of which are notorious for the maltreatment of crew members. Lying beyond national jurisdictions, the High Seas are the closest Earthly equivalent to outer space — and the most plausible model for a spaced-based economy. 

The sheer luxury of space tourism is a false dawn. As a source of income, it may help sustain the spaceflight industry and its progress on costs — but that’s just the trouble. If we make it economically viable to transport workers instead of tourists we can be sure that they’ll be exploited. Utterly dependent on their employers for their most basic needs and with no way home, they’ll be in a uniquely vulnerable position as corporations turn the heavens into hell. If you thought workers’ rights were bad under globalisation, wait until we let the billionaires have the entire solar system.

A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.

Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.

That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.

Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.

Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:

“Nah, don’t tell anyone about it, bro.”

Wow, just wow. I mean, he paid for that (allegedly). Yet perhaps I am being unrealistic, and even unfair in my expectation that Bezos be all will-to-power all the time. Love can make fools of kings, as the philosopher Bryan Ferry reminds us. Besides, even that interpretation may be jumping to conclusions; Bezos’s consultation with the psychic may not have been the consequence of an otherwise rational mind scrambled by love.

Who is to say that he doesn’t visit psychics regularly to consult on all manner of things? He wouldn’t be the first powerful person to do so. The Reagan White House had a secret astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was sought on far more consequential matters than running a retail empire, while Hillary Clinton roamed the halls having conversations with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt, although she claims it was a psychological exercise. And what about that time T. Blair and his wife Cherie smeared fruit over each other in a replica Mayan pyramid as part of a “rebirthing” ritual? A trip to the psychic seems pretty tame next to that.

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Meanwhile, Bezos’s behavior is not necessarily an outlier among his peers in the tech world. Many of these hi-tech oligarchs have an interest in the spiritual side of existence. Steve Jobs was a big fan of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi (also the inspiration for the ultra-proggy Yes LP Tales from Topographic Oceans) and also retained a Zen master to serve as his spiritual adviser.

Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, is a devotee of self-actualization and yoga. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter spent a recent birthday on a 10 day silent meditation trip to Myanmar. And Anthony Levandowski, an engineer central to both Google and Uber’s self-driving car programs established his own church (of AI). I could go on, but you get the picture.

It also turns out that my somewhat down-at-heel conception of what a consultation with a psychic looks like is less than accurate, at least when it comes to the super-wealthy. Roadside mediums are for the proles; Bezos’s psychic is reported to have cost “thousands”. In fact, those with a talent for talking to the dead or revealing the future can make good money if they can nurture the right kind of clientele.

For instance Laura Day, a “financial psychic” who advised both Wall Street bankers and the CEO of data storage firm Seagate Technology, charged $10,000 a month for her services, and that was back in 2008. Branding is important with this elite audience; for instance, Robert Ohotto, an astrologer whose clients are reported to include Google executives, describes himself as an ”intuitive life strategist”; David Zarza, who, like Amazon, is based in Seattle, describes himself as a “psychic medium and intuitive life coach.”

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Indeed, the mystic offerings on offer in today’s America have proliferated like the varieties of kombucha on offer in Whole Foods (acquired by Bezos in 2017), as entrepreneurs of the $pirit world have sought to establish a presence in this increasingly crowded marketplace.

A quick Google search for metaphysical services in my local area turned up such options as “profound reading and instant healing”, an “eclectic intuitive”, varying takes on astrology, “wise women holistic services”, “angel readings”, “aura readings”, “intuitive-angelic-reiki readings”, an “intuitive tune-up” consultation, “throat chakra clearing”, “spirit whispering” and “Akashic record readings” based on “theosophy and anthroposophy.”

Thus the language of mediums merges with the language of wellness, a crossover exemplified by episode six of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, currently streaming on Netflix and which I absolutely do not recommend unless you are writing an article about psychics for UnHerd and need to do some research.

And even then, I do not recommend it. In this episode, the queen of this notorious wellness/lifestyle brand (valued at over $250 million) dispatches her millennial, (mostly) female employees to discover their inner mediums by participating in assorted exercises aimed at channeling the dead with a certain Laura Lynne Jackson. What was most striking to me was how aggressively boring the show was; there was no spooky music, no crystal balls, nothing morbid.

The studio was tasteful and brightly lit, some of the activities took place in a lush garden, the graphics were straight out of a lifestyle magazine, the millennials were all young and upbeat (bar one sceptic, who even so still smiled a lot), and the language was of “energy” and “connection” as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter — a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.

This was the world of psychics gone fully mainstream, but it doesn’t end there. For those who like a dash of intersectionality with their “mystical services”, there’s always Chani Nicholas, the subject of one of the most eye-wateringly terrible articles published in the last decade, on the website of the perennially-straining-to-get down-with-the-kids Rolling Stone: “Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology”. And no, that’s not a Titania McGrath spoof.

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As organized religion declines in the US, this all comes with a certain dreary predictability; I am reminded, once again, of the observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Nature abhors a vacuum and today’s spiritual entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the gap. Indeed, according to one report, the demand for “psychic services” in the US is growing steadily and the market is worth around $2 billion.

Little wonder, then, that Venture Capital is trying to get a slice of the action. Want to know what the stars have in store for you? There is an app for that; more than one, in fact. For a mere $19.99 a month Sanctuary  will provide you with birth charts, opportunities to talk to professional astrologers and promises “weekly cosmic insights sent straight to your inbox.” Meanwhile, Co-Star promises “hyper-personalized, real time horoscopes” and claims to utilize an AI that “merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers”. Both have attracted millions of dollars in Venture Capital, according to The New York Times.

But that gives me another thought. What if Bezos is not, in fact, a fool for love, nor as keen on metaphysics and mysteries of the soul as some of his tech oligarch peers? Could it be that his interest in the psychic realm is actually part of his plan for world domination, and that this most relentless of tycoons has his eye on the growing market for spiritual services?

Could spirit mediums and astrology soon join keto-friendly organic kelp granules, data storage and the Washington Post on the ever growing list of products and services owned and/or supplied by Bezos? Will Amazon Prime soon include insight into our fortunes alongside movies and free two-day shipping?

Psychics of America, gaze into your futures. Bezos is coming.

Who knows if this superb story — which appeared in a Taiwanese newspaper — is true? Certainly, the British executive was performing well in his job before being suddenly forced from it after just two years. And his resignation, which followed Beijing pressure that airline staff be stopped from joining protests after the high-profile arrest of a pilot, was first announced by China’s state-run television station before the company itself made a statement.

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By Bill Hayton

The claim has led to Hogg being hailed as a hero by pro-democracy activists in the region. It would be nice to think this is a true tale, a businessman’s defiant stance reflecting the bravery of the protesters I have seen out on the streets demanding freedom and democracy in the face of Chinese autocracy. For we need corporate icons at this time of immense change. And it would also make a welcome contrast with all the grubby kowtowing seen by other Western business leaders before the Chinese authorities, toeing the Beijing line to preserve their flow of profits.

Their tawdry behaviour has been highly depressing, a reminder that capitalism and morality are not always natural bedfellows. Now we hear of a climate of fear among staff at Cathay Pacific, warned they could be fired if they “support or participate in illegal protests” in a disgusting betrayal by their bosses, who are, admittedly, under fierce assault from Beijing. Unions are urging the company to end “white terror” (acts that create a climate of fear) after the dismissal of the head of a flight attendants’ association. Staff must also endure Chinese searches of electronic devices for evidence of joining demonstrations.

This is an alarming capitulation to political pressure from an autocratic regime. Yet the Cathay Pacific firm is far from alone. Jardine Matheson is a British-listed company run by a billionaire British dynasty that enjoys the fruits of our freedoms, yet it rushed out a statement echoing the Beijing line of condemning violence while praising the police whose brutal response inflamed unruly events on the streets. PwC issued a contrite statement after employees of large accounting firms publicly backed protests, while luxury fashion houses Coach and Versace prostrated themselves in apology before China’s communist rulers after implying Hong Kong is a country.

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How long can Hong Kong hold out?

By Fred Attewill

These firms might say their duty to shareholders and staff is to make money — and that China is a vital and fast-growing market. As Milton Friedman argued, the social responsibility of corporations is to increase profits since, as the Nobel-winning economist argued, free-market capitalism ultimately made the world a better place.

As he wrote in his 1970 New York Times essay: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Even half a century ago, this was a controversial theory; it has since sparked ceaseless debate and rebuttal. I have sympathy for his view of capitalism as an inherently progressive force. Yet now Friedman’s stance — echoed by all those panicked firms doing Beijing’s bidding — is being challenged from within the world of commerce. For the chief executives of 181 major companies, including many of the world’s best-known brands, are seeking to redefine the role of a corporation.

Their pitch, made in a statement through a group called Business Roundtable, is that business must seek to serve not just shareholders but the wider community, arguing that it should improve society as well as maximise profits. So they talk of fair pay for staff, fostering diversity, dealing ethically with suppliers, protecting the planet and supporting local communities.

Great stuff. Few would quibble with these firms doing more to hire black and disabled workers, improve staff pay among lower ranks or soften the environmental impacts of their massive global operations.

Yet we should judge them by their deeds, not their smooth words. The average chief executive in America takes home 280 times more than their workers, a grotesque imbalance that seems unlikely to change fast. In reality, the statement looks like a fearful response to rising concerns over capitalism — with one billionaire financier saying inequality poses an “existential threat” to the United States — as well as the issue playing a key role in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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By Justin Webb

In Britain too, we have seen loss of trust in capitalism. But when you look at many signatories on this document, it is hard to see it as more than a glib public relations effort designed to diffuse public anger.

After all, is the head of aircraft maker Boeing really the man to lecture the rest of us on protecting the environment? Are the bosses of banks the best people to talk about ethics after their greed caused global fiscal meltdown, and they have shown so little contrition? How can the chief of Walmart boast of supporting communities when his firm — recently described as “the largest retailer of firearms in the world” — refuses to stop selling guns despite the plague of mass shootings tormenting the United States? Should the chief executive of Lockheed Martin pose as a moral paragon when her firm is selling missiles to barbaric nations such as Saudi Arabia?

Then there is tax. For if the likes of Jeff Bezos want to show they care about communities, there is a simple way to do this by starting to pay fair taxes. This is, after all, how our society collectively funds public services such as schools and hospitals, care homes and police forces. Instead, Bezos has become the world’s richest man, able to build his vast business and indulge his ideas for space travel, by using sophisticated financial trickery to flip Amazon’s digital profits and evade traditional tax collection methods. The same goes for the companies such as Apple and Oracle.

The more you delve into the list, the more it reeks of hypocrisy. It includes pimps in pin-stripes fostering tax-avoiding practices at accountancy firms and financial houses. There are two airline and one oil company chiefs claiming to protect the environment, the boss of a fizzy drink and crisp firm ignoring the obesity crisis to pontificate about respecting communities, another major weapons-maker talking about letting people lead lives of “dignity and meaning”.

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How the Right lost faith in capitalism

By Giles Fraser

This is a shame. Capitalism does need to clean up its act and there is much to admire in the sentiments set out by these corporate titans and multi-billionaire tycoons. But this smacks of all those bogus mission statements, the thin veneers of greenwashing, the tiny nods towards corporate social responsibility proclaimed as transformational. The truth is that until such people start showing genuine desire to practise what they preach, even if it impacts on their bottom lines, then the clamour to control capitalism, check its dynamism and stifle competition will only grow.

Capitalism has transformed our world and the experience of humanity for the better, and business can be a highly progressive force, whether by accident or design. Just looks at the numbers being lifted from poverty around the planet, the pace of innovation in medicine, the advances in communication and connectivity. But we live in a time of incredible technological change that is disrupting work and societies with unprecedented speed, while leaving politicians paralysed in the face of its strength — and this is shaking faith in the invisible hand identified by Adam Smith.

Businesses transform society by being dynamic and open. Yet they need to start displaying social responsibility and stop undermining wider well-being before they are shackled by their foes and we all suffer the consequences. Unfortunately we have seen a glimpse of the prevailing corporate ethics exposed by the submissive behaviour of Western firms towards China’s communist rulers, not in this week’s shallow stunt from a bunch of over-paid corporate panjandrums in the US. Whether the Hogg story is true or a flight of fancy, we most definitely need corporate heroes prepared to place morality before money.

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Why business must break the curse of short-termism

By James Kirkup

It’s not that video door entry systems are anything new. They’ve been available for decades. The Ring system, however, is easy to use and pretty affordable. It’s also fully digital – on your smartphone or tablet, you can look at what your doorbell sees and have the footage stored online for a modest monthly fee.

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The irresistible rise of the machines

By Libby Emmons

In America, a Ring doorbell can be yours for as little as $99 – or nothing at all if your local police force is giving them away to residents. The New York Post reports on the cops’ enthusiasm for these gadgets:

“…as more police agencies join with the company known as Ring, the partnerships are raising privacy concerns. Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. Police say the cameras can serve as a digital neighborhood watch.”

We’ve come to think of CCTV as a top-down intervention – the province of law enforcement agencies and security services. Indeed, the spread of CCTV networks conjures up the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian state has its citizens under continuous surveillance, not least through the ubiquitous Telescreens.

However, unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the reach of CCTV in the real world is limited. Indeed, the state sometimes struggles to fund installation, maintenance and monitoring – leading to cuts in coverage. But rather than celebrate their liberation from the all-seeing-eye of the state, local people tend to react with dismay: never underestimate the popularity of security.

The technology is advancing – becoming cheaper, smaller and smarter. With Amazon and other providers developing video surveillance as a mass consumer product, the old top-down model of deployment and control is giving way to something more decentralised and, some might say, insidious.

Back in 2017, I speculated that it might not be long before ordinary members of the public start creating their own surveillance networks – and joining them up through social media:

“Access to existing CCTV networks is generally controlled by private businesses or public bodies… however the ultra-cheap (and therefore widely owned) internet-connected sensors of the future may operate on a different model – feeding information into a shared system in much the same way that we currently feed our photographs into Facebook and Instagram.  

“Whichever website does the best job of integrating data from the ubiquitous sensors of the near future will become the dominant digital platform of the 21st century.”

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Kiss your privacy goodbye – CCTV is just the beginning

By Peter Franklin

In 2019, the age of bottom-up, citizen-led surveillance is well-and-truly underway. It’s not a surveillance state we’re building, but a surveillance society, catered to by a surveillance market.

A particularly interesting feature of the Ring system is the Neighbors App. It is mentioned in a report by Wesley Dockery for the International Business Times:

“One of Ring’s services, Neighbors, allows members of a community to share safety information and suspicious footage captured on their Ring doorbells in a shared network, akin to Facebook’s news feed.”

It’s easy to see the direction this technology is going in.

As it becomes ever cheaper, more homes will use it, and each home will have more cameras creating a bubble of surveillance around each property. Surveillance social media will become more sophisticated, with neighbours granting each other access to their camera feeds. The individual surveillance bubbles will thus merge – to cover the whole street and, in time, the entire neighbourhood. The police, community groups, landlords and insurance companies will encourage the process.

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Inevitably, artificial intelligence will be used to integrate and analyse camera feeds, thus eliminating the need for constant monitoring by human eyes. If surveillance bubbles are merged across wide enough an area then AI-powered image recognition of faces, objects, number plates etc. will allow users to locate, identify and track an individual or a vehicle through a neighbourhood, town or city.

So, good luck being a burglar in 10 years’ time. In fact, good luck doing anything you might get in trouble for, because within a surveillance bubble, it’s not going to go undetected. Burglars, muggers, car thieves, vandals, truants, under-the-radar adulterers and secret smokers should all beware: the streets will have eyes.

As well as looking around you for doorbell cameras, don’t forget to look up. Because, as Bobby Allyn of NPR explains, Jeff Bezos is leaving no angle unexplored:

“Going on vacation and want some extra security around your home? Someday you may be able to call Amazon’s drones.

“The Seattle tech giant is moving closer to making that scenario a real possibility after winning approval from federal officials this month for a patent for ‘home surveillance’ drones.

“Company officials stress that the plan is still in its infancy, but the patent papers describe a future in which Amazon customers order drones to hover around a home and scan for things such as a garage door left open, a broken window, graffiti or a fire.”

Ever wanted to call in a drone? One day, Amazon might be able to arrange it for you – though I imagine missile strikes won’t be an option.

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Elon Musk's extra-terrestrial threat

By Peter Franklin

The company is well placed to succeed in the surveillance society to come. It’s not just the Ring system or the Neighbors app or the vast door-to-door distribution network – or even the plans for an aerial drone delivery service. More important than any of those will be the ability to store and process the overwhelming quantities of visual data thus collected. As luck would have it, Amazon also owns AWS – one of the biggest cloud computing companies in the world. So, if anyone ends up hosting a live video feed of the entire planet, it’ll be Amazon.

In thinking about what is already possible – or soon will be – one can’t help but be impressed. That said, when one contemplates the implications for privacy, one might also feel an uncontrollable urge to sit down and cry.

But make sure you do your crying behind closed doors. You wouldn’t want the neighbours to see.

Or Jeff.

Today, the $740 billion former bookseller’s tentacles stretch far beyond e-commerce: into bricks-and-mortar retailing, air cargo, cloud computing and AI – technologies that are, or will become, the backbone of countries such as the USA and the UK. It has combined traditional market dominating techniques with an unrivalled understanding of its customers’ online behaviour, to awesome effect. And concern about monopolistic behaviour is increasingly being voiced.

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Can't we stop data monsters from devouring their rivals?

By David Morris

Everyone used to understand what a monopoly was, and nearly everyone, other than monopolists themselves, understood that it represented the failure of capitalism rather than its apex. When one company dominates a market then the good things that come from competition between producers, such as quality, variety and innovation, are likely to come to an end. Without competition, there’s little incentive to do any of these expensive things, and both consumers and the wider economy loses out.

Then in the 1970s a new idea emerged from America’s law schools that turned this thinking on its head. The size of the company no longer mattered: the only criterion by which it should be judged, or a takeover blocked, was consumer welfare. To put it crudely, a firm like Amazon could be as big as it wanted as long as it kept prices low. Today to be concerned about the ‘bigness’ of companies is to go back to the popularist goals of the past, argues Professor Daniel Crane of the University of Michigan.

By the second decade of the 21st century, that reinterpretation of the law has had – if you are cynical – its intended effect. We are living in a new age of concentration, where a few corporate giants like Amazon dominate the economy. The ratio between the cost of a good or service and its selling price in the wider economy – often seen as evidence of market dominance – has risen in advanced economies by 43% since the 1980s.  The combined revenue of the tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – is larger than the GDP of more than 90% of the world’s nations. Start-ups are even founded with the sole purpose of being acquired by one of these Big Five.

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Who commands the internet?

By Carl Miller

Then, in 2016, an unknown law student decided to dust down some forgotten textbooks hidden away on the top floor of her university library. Early in 2017, Lina Khan published ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ in the Yale Law Journal. The one word that Big Tech didn’t want to see in the public conversation – monopoly – was back, and at the worst moment. For the first time, Big Tech was caught in a bipartisan squeeze in Congress as real political pressure built up over the abuse of customer data and fake news.

Khan’s argument was simple. Once laws that were designed to prevent one company controlling a market had been pushed to one side, companies like Amazon were able to gain market dominance through anticompetitive practices. This gave them control of the infrastructure that many businesses and other parts of the economy depend on. Khan suggests that either Amazon should be regulated more forcefully to ensure competition – or that it should be recognised as a natural monopoly like the water or gas supply, and run as a publicity utility.

Now, Amazon, Google and the other modern monopolies have a battle on their hands. Worryingly, it looks like they have a formidable range of weapons to fight it with – and Khan and her allies have already been labelled as “hipster radicals.”

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How the big tech companies are eating free markets

By Charlotte Pickles

Big Tech’s lobbying dates back 20 years, but the scale of it has grown significantly. In America, five years ago Amazon spent $3.5 million on lobbying, last year they spent $13 million. In just a few years, Amazon’s lobbying operations have gone from almost nothing to rival Google. To defend its sprawling empire from the politicians that are circling the tech giant has assembled the biggest lobbying team of any tech company in Washington: 28 in-house lobbyists, compared to Apple’s and Facebook’s eight. 

Perhaps more disturbing is the influence that companies like Amazon and Google have that you can’t see. Both regulatory capture, where the regulators identify too closely with the companies they are trying to control, and policy capture, when commercial interests so infiltrate governments that they can affect the design of measures relevant to their activities, should concern us.

Since 2005, concern has grown over Google’s political influence after research showed that it had poached at least 65 government officials from all over the European Union. During the same period, 15 ‘Googlers’ have been appointed to government positions in Europe, thus penetrating to the heart of the decision-making process. In the UK, Google has targeted for recruitment civil servants from key parts of the government machine like the Treasury and No. 10. This revolving door between politics, tech and regulators is a key characteristic of crony capitalism.

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Then, of course, there is the ‘dark money’ – the think tanks, research institutions and publications who enjoy their journey on Big Tech’s gravy train and can be used to shape the debate. Last year a critic of Google was fired from the New America Foundation, when he posted an article in support of the European Commission’s antitrust regulators. The think tank has received over $20 million from Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google, his family trust and the company itself.

Then in July 2018, US activists really woke up to the power of Amazon, and the damage it could do to democracy, when the company used its influence to repeal a law passed by its home city of Seattle that imposed a small employee ‘head tax’ on large corporations. The purpose of the tax was to fund affordable housing in a city whose horrendously high costs are partly down to the very same tech companies. Many were left with the feeling that Amazon was too powerful to tax and regulate.

If politicians can be persuaded to act, the big question is how to tackle the problem. The traditional anti-monopoly medicine would be to break up these large conglomerates into their smaller component pieces. Amazon could easily be split into retail, cloud, logistics and video production. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) could be broken up into divisions such as Google Search and YouTube.

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How to bring the tech giants to heel

By Mat Lawrence

Others are thinking about an updating of the vision behind the BBC. In Britain, the think tank IPPR argues that the digital economy should be reorganised as a “digital commonwealth”, to be an open, collective resource for the common good. The major digital platform companies would be regulated like broadcasters and mobile providers. Where large digital companies have the advantage of existing data when moving into a new market, such as banking or mobility, they would be compelled to open it up for others to use. And a new public service corporation would ensure that public data is widely available for innovation and public good.

This is already being done in other industries. In the energy industry, consumers who share their data with new firms such as Switchd can already get better access to cheaper prices, and the process will only get better, faster and more automated as energy suppliers share more of their data digitally. Banks and other financial institutions are also opening up their data for others to access, use and share. Customers are doing something similar by sharing data from their accounts with third parties they trust.

In the end, the convenience of Amazon’s platform has turned us into lazy consumers who would give up almost anything in return for same day delivery. But if we are not careful it won’t just be the High Street that we have abandoned. Big Tech has the will and the wallet to bypass traditional regulators, and that leaves few options other than to turn them into social enterprises that serve the common good.

In 1911, the breakup of John D Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil Company prevented one man from having a stranglehold on the fuel that America depended on. If data is the new oil, then perhaps it’s time we stopped a handful of men from controlling the lifeblood of every advanced nation.

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Time to topple the technopoly

By Charlotte Pickles

It is hard not to be cynical about such an initiative, not least because it comes on the back of a deluge of criticism directed at Amazon for its aggressive tax avoidance and exploitative treatment of warehouse workers. Bezos’ generosity looks an awful lot like an attempt to distract from those brand-damaging facts.

It is also an exercise of power, as philanthropy often is. Some philanthropists, such as Microsoft chief Bill Gates, seem genuinely to want to make a difference in the world. Others, however, are demonstrating that they have the power to dole out money on a whim – Bezos is the only American among the world’s five richest people to not join the Giving Pledge.

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By James Bloodworth

This attitude to philanthropy was summed up well by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who viewed the “man of wealth” as “the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren.” The philanthropist, he went on, should use “his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” to help the poor and needy because he is able to do so “better than they would or could do for themselves”.

Grasp this pseudo-paternalistic view of humanity and you begin to understand how the super-rich are able to rationalise their tax avoidance and reconcile it with care in the community. Men like Jeff Bezos view it as their job, rather than the job of the democratic state, to distribute their vast riches. In pledging a fraction of his wealth to assist the poor and needy, Bezos is flaunting the power that only unimaginable riches can bring – the power to dodge the full force of the tax man, dole money out on a whim and be applauded for it as a munificent philanthropist.

There is particular effrontery in adopting a lofty philanthropic air when you can’t seem to find the money to make life bearable for workers in your warehouses. I have written many times about my experiences working in an Amazon warehouse back in 2016. Workers were urinating in bottles because they were afraid to take toilet breaks (a recent survey by Organise found that 74% of Amazon warehouse workers in England were scared to go to the toilet because of productivity targets), and disciplinaries were given out by management for taking sick days, regardless of whether they have a doctors note. The agencies Amazon used to employ workers in the warehouse frequently underpaid people – one young woman I interviewed was paid 62p an hour by one such agency, and it took six weeks for her to claw back the money she had earned.

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Our broken tax system is threatening the free market model

By Charlotte Pickles

Bezos may see his philanthropy as ‘giving back’– the cliché deployed by every self-important philanthropist – but his company was giving very little back to the community of Rugeley, the town in which the warehouse I worked in was located. Every job as a picker or packer in the warehouse was temporary and lasted for nine months, providing little stability.  “Be under no illusions, this is a temporary job,” we were informed on the first day. And despite being the biggest employer in the town, few local people worked at Amazon. Instead the warehouse relied on an army of Romanians bused in predominantly from neighbouring areas – apparently the only people economically desperate enough to put up with the Victorian working conditions.

This state of affairs exists because companies like Amazon are run like dictatorships. A cult of personality prevails – witness the army of sycophantic Twitter users who turn up under any article critical of Amazon to blast out positive statements about the company. One of these paid-up brand ‘ambassadors’ seems to turn up whenever I tweet about the company these days. Within the warehouse, language is distorted in an Orwellian fashion. If you lose your job at Amazon you are not sacked or fired, but, euphemistically ‘released’.

Workers’ representation – through forums such as trade unions – are all but non-existent. Those on the shop floor at Amazon are, as Carnegie put it, subject to the “superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” of higher ups like Jeff Bezos.

Last year Amazon trebled its UK profits yet paid less in tax than the year before. If Bezos really cared about the lives of the poor he would use some of that profit to pay his workers a decent wage – enough, perhaps, so that they do not have to sleep in tents, as has been reported in Scotland. The billionaire may believe he is better able to spend the money generated by his workforce than they would or could do for themselves, but his charitable initiative, based in the US, will do nothing for low income families outside of North America.

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Amazon: the new Victorian workhouse

By James Bloodworth

Bezos has said that his new network of pre-schools will “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” Yet it is precisely Amazon’s intense customer obsession that has led to such detrimental workforce conditions. If a 24-hour Amazon Prime delivery requires an army of downtrodden workers, hidden away in vast warehouses where they are afraid to take a toilet break, how are those who work in Amazon’s network of pre-schools going to fair? If “the child will be the customer”, as Bezos puts it, is the teacher going to be the professional equivalent of the warehouse skivvy peeing in a bottle?

Charity is inevitable in any society. It is foolish and utopian to believe that the state can provide cover so comprehensive that nobody ever slips through society’s cracks. But the increasing reliance, particularly in the United States, upon mega-rich givers reveals wide economic distortions – the 1% are getting ever richer partly because of the low wages that mean ordinary workers are struggling to make ends meet. Before rushing to laud Jeff Bezos for his generosity, we should judge him for the exploitative treatment of workers in the company that has made him so wealthy.

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