Knowledge predators
By the Editor
In the hands of US tech corporations, the rapid spread of AI and other digital technologies is changing the shape of our societies. It is fuelling geopolitical tensions, challenging democracy and threatening to worsen the climate crisis while inflating what is increasingly seen as a vast and wasteful investment bubble.
“The Rulers", a new book by Cecilia Rikap, offers a deeply-researched, timely and readable analysis of what the power of the giants of Big Tech actually consists of.
It has become common for multinational corporations to create "knowledge monopolies" by turning knowledge into proprietary “intangible assets” and exploiting them for profit. The masters, however, are the "cloud giants": Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
IBM and other corporate giants of the past sought to dominate their industries by bringing the creation of knowledge in-house. Rikap shows that the cloud giants have taken a different approach: all three have created "ecosystems" of smaller entities which they do not actually own, but control in obvious and subtle ways with their concentrated knowledge, financial muscle and the other advantages of being the biggest players at the table. These ecosystems include startups, suppliers and customers as well as research institutes and parts of academia.
This “turbulent and subordinated periphery” generates knowledge which then flows one way: to the cloud giants. Their clouds are not only digital storehouses; they are also marketplaces for software and sites of connection between technologies. Control of clouds gives Microsoft, Google and Amazon a uniquely comprehensive or "panoptic" view of the digital economy which they exploit to extract super-profits and to shape its rules and evolution.
(The term “cloud” is itself a clever piece of corporate myth-making. It implies that these digital realms exist in some faraway virtual space, rather than being situated in huge buildings around the planet which are filled with servers and guarded by fences and cameras and which voraciously demand power, water and land.)
Rikap calls the cloud giants “knowledge predators” because they capture ideas created by many people in order to profiteer from them. Multinationals in other industries are willing (though not always happy) to be locked into these clouds on the cloud giants’ terms because access to the latest technologies and services helps them, in turn, to extract more value for themselves from their own industries. The "cloud giants" are very dynamic businesses, always looking for ways to stay ahead, and their sheer size and technological capability makes it very difficult indeed for other firms to catch up.
Into the public sector
The cloud giants are also locking states into their digital infrastructure and bending public policy towards their own interests: for example, towards a vision of healthcare which is data-driven, highly individualised and based on expensive treatments for those who can afford them, rather than on tackling the social and environmental causes of ill-health.
Meanwhile, behind a high wall of secrecy, the cloud giants are free to quietly collude with each other, and with select allies such as chip-maker Nvidia, to increase the dominance of each.
A deep irony, given the rhetoric about free markets and liberty which still pours out of America, is that the commercial empires of the US cloud giants are highly centralised and planned. These empires pose a geopolitical as well as an economic and a social problem, because they are so willing to ally themselves with domineering US foreign policy – a phenomenon unlikely to end when Trump goes.
Reading “The Rulers”, one can’t help but feel profound sadness at the great store of human ingenuity and organisational skill which, behind all the visioneering and the sci-fi gloss, is being used up on an essentially oligarchic project to extract more profit from society on behalf of a small minority who are already rich.
The cost of this project is to our privacy and the free evolution of knowledge, to our hopes of containing the climate crisis and reducing inequality within society, and – for as long as policymakers keep treating Big Tech as a helpmate rather than a predator - to public trust in democracy itself.
What we can do
At the end of the book, Rikap considers existing remedies for the power of the cloud giants. Competition law is not well-suited to breaking up monopolies which cross over industries and can exert power without ownership. Digital regulation can limit the extraction of rent but does not unpick its causes. Even China’s more ambitious alternative – building its own digital ecosystem under the eye of the state – relies heavily on copying US technology.
Rikap argues for public institutions to cut their ties with the cloud giants and other intellectual monopolies, and for the creation instead of a truly “public cloud” run by an autonomous international body and funded by taxing the profits of intellectual monopolies.
She suggests that this public cloud could focus at first on providing public services related to healthcare. This makes sense, given the clear benefits of pooling knowledge to create public goods and the obvious problem of healthcare being captured by private rent-seekers.
She also calls for the creation of an international research institution, under democratic governance, which can develop frontier digital technologies in the public interest, rather than leaving the cloud giants to capture public research for private ends. Such an institution might attract many of the brilliant minds which are being lucratively wasted at the moment in the service of Silicon Valley and its investors.
More broadly, Rikap calls for a resurgence in democratic planning at local, national and international level, which digital tools could be used to support, and for democratic conversations about which technologies we actually want and need.
Corporate power has become a massive obstacle to a more just world. “The Rulers” offers invaluable analysis of one of its mightiest and most insidious forms.
The publisher's page for "The Rulers" is here. You can read an article that Rikap wrote for Critical Takes last year here.