yahoo news | The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy

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yahoo news | The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy

In January 1994 the author attended Vice‑President Al Gore’s keynote at UCLA’s Information Superhighway Conference, surrounded by media titans such as John Malone, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Gore framed the nascent Internet as a “public utility” that would be built by private investment and kept open by competition. At the time the promise sounded almost naïve: a lightly guided market would create a new civic commons, with the state supplying only the rules that would prevent bottlenecks and private toll‑roads.

The optimism quickly gave way to a very different reality. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, and especially its Section 230 provision, granted the platforms that would dominate the next two decades an almost unprecedented liability shield, allowing them to grow without responsibility for user‑generated content. Over the ensuing years a handful of firms—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and later the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg— amassed market capital in the trillions, compressing the public sphere into a quasi‑monopolistic digital oligarchy. The author describes this shift as “techno‑fascism,” a convergence of nostalgia for a supposedly stable past and a progress‑driven faith that technology can solve every problem, leaving democracy increasingly vulnerable to corporate control.

Today the article warns that the original promise of a shared digital commons has become a landscape of surveillance and AI‑driven governance. Edward Snowden’s revelations exposed how the same infrastructure meant for connection also enabled mass monitoring, while recent moral battles—Anthropic’s refusal to weaponise its models versus OpenAI’s Pentagon contract—show how quickly corporate principles can be sacrificed for power and profit. The author calls for a re‑imagining of the system: humanity must reclaim authorship of its own story, perhaps through mechanisms like a sovereign fund funded by AI revenues, and by recognizing the essential role of artists and human judgment in navigating the “maelstrom” of our own technological ingenuity.

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/rise-digital-oligarchy-ai-era-1235534437/

#algore #telecommunicationsact #section230 #google #facebook