When oligarchy meets technology

Trump’s first days promise a rupture in American politics that also threatens democracy in the UK

The way Francis Fukuyama tells it, it starts with Berlusconi.

In the 1990s, Silvio Berlusconi leverages his business wealth to buy newspapers and TV stations. He uses the media assets to take power in Italy. He uses the power to enrich himself and to insulate himself from legal peril.

“This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic,” wrote Fukuyama this week. “All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses. These oligarchs have threatened democracy in a very basic way, by exerting undue political influence and promoting corruption.”

The first few days of Donald Trump’s second term confirm that, in our most important ally, this media-mediated playbook is again being followed. However, the United States being so huge and fragmented, the rupture is being fashioned not by one person but by a clutch of them with a scattering of media assets.

Trump himself has Truth Social. More important in media terms are the Silicon Valley titans who were in the front row at his inauguration – Elon Musk, who has X; Mark Zuckerberg, who has Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp; and Jeff Bezos, who has the Washington Post.

Of course, the Big Tech principals at the inauguration do not only bring media assets to the table. They also bring insane amounts of money and mastery of other technologies, including now AI. But it is the media assets that both make them critical to Trump’s project and make it impossible for them to hide. Not only are they taking sides, everyone knows they are taking sides. They have no choice but to be in the front row.

This nexus of technology, media and money was the backdrop to Joe Biden’s farewell address as president. In it, he warned of “…a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people … an oligarchy”. He urged a range of anti-oligarchy measures such as term limits for judges in the Supreme Court. However, he concentrated most of his fire on tech. Citing Dwight Eisenhower on the dangers of a military-industrial complex, he said:

“He warned us then about, and I quote, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power, end of quote. Six decades later, I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”

“The free press is crumbling, editors are disappearing, social media is giving up on fact checking, the truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risk for our economy and our security, our society.”

In Eisenhower’s time, most technology was developed for military purposes and then spun out into civilian use. But since then, civilian R&D has come to vastly outspend defence R&D and the military is pre-occupied with spinning in rather than spinning out. Silicon Valley and silicon chips exemplify this shift. The valley was originally a centre of the defence industry, the chips were first developed for the Minuteman ICBMs.

Thus, understood properly, both Eisenhower and Biden are warning of the same danger, of the threat to democracy from those who control the technology the nation depends on. The major difference between the two eras is not the switch from the defence industry to the tech industry but the expansion of the empire of technology to include the media.

The rule of law

The idea of “the rule of law” in antiquity was as the antidote to oligarchy and a critical concern now is the extent to which the legal system in the US continues to function as before. This issue can be understood through the three main ways in which law is theorised in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. All three start with the idea that a community is governed by laws when its members regulate their behaviour and practical thought by a set of rules. The question is, how are those rules made? In the 1960s, two rival theories emerged.

H.L.A. Hart articulated an anthropological conception that can be summarised as:

The rules include some standard higher-order rules governing the following operations: (i) revision of the rules; (ii) resolution of disputes about the rules; and (iii) identification of the rules that are genuine.

Later, Ronald Dworkin gave it a moral edge:

The rules include some higher-order rules governing revision of the rules and resolution of disputes about the rules; and there are morally correct principles that justify the community’s decisions, institutions, and practices.

These two conceptions dominate jurisprudence today. But both are reactions to an approach influentially articulated 200 years ago by John Austin:

The rules are commands issued by a person or a group of people in the community who is habitually obeyed by the community’s members, and who habitually obeys no one.

One of the problems with Austin’s conception is that, like Hobbes’s political philosophy, it has little to say about the character of the sovereign power issuing the commands. It is therefore entirely amenable to tyranny or oligarchy, not to mention empire. Unlike the more sophisticated ideas of Hart and Dworkin, Austin can be used as readily to dismantle democracy as create it. The slew of executive orders from Trump in the first days, many of dubious legality as the law has been conceived until now, can be simply understood as part of an attempt to flip the United States into an Austinian legal regime. In such a way, one can change the basic character of a country’s constitution without altering a single word of it.

John Austin

This legal understanding lends weight to an observation from Helen Thompson, the Cambridge political economist, earlier this week. She argued that even if the Democrats somehow manage to win a presidential election in future, it is unlikely to be enough to bring American oligarchy to an end. In the past, it has taken war or civil war rather than visits to the ballot box.

To sum up, oligarchy based on the combination of technology, media, money and corruption of the rule of law is the reality now of our most important ally, the guarantor of Europe’s security for 80 years. We are dealing not just with oligarchy and not just with the tech-industrial complex but a combination of the two. How is this turn liable to impact the UK?

We can get a handle on this question by looking at Musk and another Silicon Valley titan that has thrown his weight behind Trump, Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Die Zeit delivers a lesson in editorial judgement

Musk is the world’s richest person and has been Trump’s most influential supporter. He donated more money to Trump’s campaign than anyone else, $250 million. But even that’s small change compared to Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion and then trashed commercially in order to turn it into X, a megaphone for Trump. With his willingness to undermine constitutional and epistemic norms, he qualifies as the dark and dangerous kind of populist.

This dark populism is increasingly hitched to far-right ideology. His earlier support for Nigel Farage in the UK is now complemented by support for Tommy Robinson, who has thanked him for covering legal fees he incurred during his conviction for inciting riots last summer. The apparent Nazi salute Musk gave at the inauguration can be understood as a kind of flirting that normalises far-right ideas; play with the taboo, and while people are discussing whether you did or did not cross the line, the line disappears.

Musk’s interventions are part of a powerful far-right ecosystem that has no counterpart on the left or in the centre. This is engaged in a broad kind of ideological warfare that includes not only campaigning on immigration but also tutoring in how to be a man or woman. Its success is reflected in the way the fire-wall that has kept far-right parties out of government across the West is being tested. In Europe, the far-right now participates in coalitions with conservative parties in Sweden, Finland and the European People’s Party in the European Parliament.

The salute and the funding for Robinson provide a warning of some of the ways Musk may impact the UK in future – through propaganda, money and violence. At the same time, it would be a mistake to consider Musk simply as an ideologue. He has already fallen out with Maga over visas for tech workers and a true oligarch’s approach to ideology is naturally Machiavellian – a Prince never lacks reasons. This raises the question, what does the oligarch want to get from his attacks on Europe?

I don’t think it’s straightforwardly about money. On this side of the pond, he’s crashing Tesla sales and prompting users to quit X. Rather, I think it’s probably about power, twice over.

One aspect of this can be understood via Fukuyama. He wants X to be free of regulation so that it can be used as a megaphone to swing elections for other allies. That is, he wants to operate as an oligarch and implement the Berlusconi playbook on a global scale. The other aspect emerges from Biden’s tech-industrial complex and is wrapped up in the mystery that is OneWeb.

OneWeb

In the 1990s, a company called SkyBridge was set up to offer internet services via satellite and acquired the global rights to part of the radio spectrum for this purpose. In 2000, it went bankrupt. By 2014, the spectrum had been bought by the company that came to be called OneWeb. It began working with Musk’s SpaceX on a plan to deploy hundreds of satellites in a low earth orbit (LEO). But a year later Musk dropped OneWeb and announced his rival Starlink project.

By 2019, with satellites up and running, OneWeb had secured the legal title to the spectrum. But Starlink was getting ahead and, in 2020 with 74 satellites launched, the company filed for bankruptcy. It was then bought by a consortium formed of Bharti Global, an Indian tech conglomerate, and the British government. Both paid $500m for 42 per cent each of the shares but HMG also got a golden share allowing it to veto future takeovers. At roughly the same time as Boris Johnson signed off on this deal, he also scrapped Theresa May’s plan for a post-Brexit British GPS satellite system.

By 2021, OneWeb had secured additional investment and launched a total of 218 satellites – a third of the way to the 648 required for its initial network. It had also become a founder member of the Indian Space Association. However, by the end of that year Starlink had 1700 satellites in orbit and was providing services to paying customers.

Then, on 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. OneWeb stopped being able to launch from the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome and switched to using SpaceX.

In July that year, OneWeb merged with France's Eutelsat, a private company that started as an intergovernmental organisation. Its speciality is satellites in high, geostationary orbits (GEO). OneWeb shareholders received 50 per cent of the enlarged share capital while the British government retained its golden share in OneWeb itself. By May 2023, 634 LEO satellites were in orbit, enough to put the initial communications system envisaged by OneWeb into operation.

Put simply, Musk has been trying to put OneWeb out of business for a decade and has been frustrated by European powers, including the UK, that see it as promising a kind of sovereignty. The importance of this satellite sovereignty has been understood in Europe for at least 30 years, ever since plans for the Galileo GPS system started to come together. However, as the commitment of the US to Nato has been called into question, the salience of the issue has grown – and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made the stakes clear to everyone.

After the invasion, it quickly became apparent that the Ukrainian armed forces were heavy users of Starlink. Today it has 47,000 terminals. However, Musk denied Ukraine access to the service in Crimea, the portion of occupied Ukraine most cherished by Russia, and for drone control. This demonstrated that Musk had control of a technology that is vital not to the soft power of shaping popular attitudes but the hard power of modern warfighting. It also prompted a spokesman for the US Department of Defense to pointedly say, “There's not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine what they need on the battlefield.”

The original LEO network is no longer the end goal for Eutelsat OneWeb (as it is now called) and the company claims to be developing a service that would be superior to Starlink. On merging, the companies said they intend to develop a common platform for their LEO and GEO services, with hybrid user terminals and an interconnected network creating a one-stop shop for customers.

“The compelling economics and high throughput of GEO, combined with low latency and ubiquity of LEO constellations, will meet a much wider range of customer requirements,” said Eva Berneke, the Eutelsat chief executive.

We don’t know how compelling this alternative truly is to Starlink, but then there is much we don’t know about Eutelsat OneWeb. We don’t know what ongoing leverage the UK’s golden share has provided, for example over the spectrum. We don’t know the kind of commitment to the project being shown by any of the European powers, or India. We don’t know what services are actually being provided, including in Ukraine, We don’t know how it connects, if at all, with IRIS², a €10 billion constellation of 290 satellites being developed by the EU that will compete with Starshield, the military version of Starlink.

Still, it is clear that, for both Starlink and Starshield, the Europeans are the only meaningful competitor for Musk. If he can eliminate the competition, he will dramatically expand his hard power across the portion of the globe covered by Starlink and Starshield, which is all latitudes under 60°. Whether you are the armed forces of a European country or a warlord in central Africa, you will want Musk on your side.

In January, and breaking with conventional EU solidarity, the right-populist Georgia Meloni announced she was in talks with Musk to sign Italy up for Starlink services. Antonio Nicita, an MP in the Partito Democratico, warned that if Musk locks in demand for satellite services by signing medium-term contracts with EU governments, IRIS² may cease to be economically viable.

Ellison

Larry Ellison is the world’s fourth richest person. A founder of the database company, Oracle, he is $67bn richer this year on the back of the company’s AI services. He has described Musk as a close friend and has long ties to Trump, with whom he apparently discussed coronavirus treatments. He is 80 years old and has given up the position of CEO at Oracle.

Like Musk, he gave Trump his support at the election.

Like Musk, he has acquired an interest in media assets that allow him to exert oligarchic influence around the world. In particular, via his son David, he is in the process of taking control of Paramount Global, a move that will give him control of a sprawling global TV empire of channels and brands that range from MTV to news to the Paramount+ streaming platform. In the US, this includes CBS, which includes CBS News, one of the Big 3 broadcast TV news services; in the UK it includes Channel 5 (where the news is currently provided by ITN); in Australia it includes Channel 10.

Like Musk, he already connects directly with an influential figure in UK politics thanks to the money he is donating to the Tony Blair Institute (now heading towards $400m in total). Like Musk, he has been in the news in the early days of the Trump presidency, turning TikTok’s servers back on despite a legal shadow that could cost him billions and which has prompted Apple and Google to keep the app out of their app stores. Like Musk, politics is fusing with business for him and he appeared with Trump later in the week to announce a $500bn investment in AI called Stargate.

Unlike Musk, Ellison has shown no great appetite for frontline politics. Unlike Musk, he has never sought to undermine constitutional or epistemic norms. Unlike Musk, he has never flirted with Nazi salutes. Unlike Musk, he does not fund the providers of political violence. Thus he is in a very different place ideologically.

Unlike Musk but like Bill Gates, he has signed the Giving Pledge, undertaking to give away 95 per cent of his wealth before he dies. This suggests also a different attitude towards oligarchy since a would-be oligarch does not make themselves a lame duck by giving away their fortune, and with it the power of the family.

And unlike Musk he has not used media assets to implement the Berlusconi playbook.

These differences are telling and clarify the critical distinction between the two Silicon Valley kingpins. For anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the UK, Musk is an enemy while Ellison is not.

That doesn’t make Ellison’s involvement in Britain’s politics neutral or inconsequential. It remains problematic. And it leaves us with the question, what does he want with the UK?

Part of the answer seems to be personal. Ellison got to know Blair while he was Prime Minister and the two have stayed in touch since. The long answer seems to be that the two have forged a shared project at the TBI that is crystallised in A New National Purpose, the manifesto co-authored by Blair and William Hague. As with the Stargate AI project, this fuses politics, technology and business. Being limited to the UK, this project is vastly more significant to the politicians than to Ellison. Nonetheless, it promotes a techno-zealous agenda that is beneficial both to the politicians, who acquire a glamorous platform for a potential new party based on Thatcherite principles, and to Ellison and his friends in Big Tech, who are promised a more central position throughout government and the public services.

Thus, when we see a Blairite minister promoting a policy that is favourable to Big Tech, the policy always has to be understood as having the self-interest of Big Tech in it. This doesn’t imply the policy is necessarily wrong, but the taint is ineradicable.

Safety

Musk and Ellison are two ends of a spectrum of interference that the UK can expect from an increasingly oligarchic US in future. Both bring fabulous wealth and media assets to the table, the two ingredients Fukuyama has identified for the Berlusconi-style rupture that has afflicted democracies around the world in recent decades. Both also bring with them mastery of important technologies that make their influence even harder to resist, the tech-industrial complex Biden has warned us about. But only one is also truly oligarchic and promotes a dark and dangerous far-right politics that allies itself with violence. The question is, what are we going to do about him?

The central thrust of Labour’s approach to tech regulation up to now has been safety. Social media now falls under the Online Safety Act brought in by the last government, but the detail of how this is to be implemented is currently under discussion. On AI, the government is committed to putting the current voluntary safety regime on a statutory footing. Both legs have been inherited from the last government and involve a narrow conception of harm but are defended by Peter Kyle, the current and Blairite Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. Two weeks ago, following death threats aimed at his colleague Jess Phillips in the wake of attacks on her by Musk, he told The Observer:

“I am so focused on getting our country to the point where we are fully exploiting all of the technology that is out there, so that we then move to a position where we’re creating more of it and innovating for more of it. Nothing will distract me from that mission.

“I’m available to talk to any innovator, any potential investor, but it is on those terms. The rest of it, I’m just not interested in – with the exception of when it tips over into the kind of content which started to emerge around Jess, where it does need challenging.

“But I have a very high threshold for this. My priority is to be 100 per cent focused on what will put food on the plates of Britons today and into the future.”

Musk’s Nazi salute and everything else we have seen this week make Kyle’s approach already dangerously out of date. I’m glad we are making AI safe, that it’s not going to make it easy for terrorists to make nerve gas, but our democracy also needs to be kept safe.

We should take our cue from from Fukuyama, who said that social media platforms are too-powerful political actors that can influence the outcome of elections and need to be stripped of their editorial power, and from Biden, who said, “We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

We should embrace the idea of a vigilant democracy that is vigorous in its own defence – and legislate accordingly.