On January 11, 1994, I traveled to UCLA’s Royce Hall to attend Vice President Al Gore's keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. At the time, I was in the nascent stages of establishing Intertainer, which would eventually become one of the pioneering companies in video-on-demand. The 2,000 attendees gathered in that auditorium were on the brink of a profound transformation. The lineup of speakers featured prominent names in the industrial sector: John Malone from TCI, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Schulhof from Sony, and Barry Diller of QVC. These were among the wealthiest and most influential leaders in American communications. Today, their collective influence pales in comparison to that of figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreessen. The landscape these Hollywood magnates returned to would, in many ways, differ significantly from the one they had left.
Gore’s speech at UCLA now appears as a notable moment during the early Clinton administration's vision of managed modernization: the belief that a lightly regulated market, appropriately incentivized, could foster the creation of a new civic commons. He portrayed the initiative as a public utility built with private capital, asserting that “the nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment.” In hindsight, what stands out is not just the enthusiasm for technology but also the naïve expectation that competition would ensure pluralism and accessibility, believing that government-designed market rules would successfully avert the emergence of monopolistic practices and private tolls. The actual evolution of the internet—where a select few firms dominate every layer, from carriers to platforms to advertisers—casts the scene in an almost allegorical light: an administration promoting competition as the protector of openness while simultaneously facilitating the establishment of a consolidated, quasi-monopolistic ecosystem that would, paradoxically, limit and privatize the public sphere it claimed to be nurturing.
For 150 years following the Industrial Revolution, Americans placed their trust in science and technology to unify the nation, just as railroads and the telegraph once bridged vast distances. Historian John P. Diggins noted that “whereas the very nature of politics in America implied division and conflict, science was seen as bringing forth cohesion and consensus.” This faith, however, was soon to be severely tested.
Within two years, Gore and Newt Gingrich joined forces to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which contained a pivotal provision—Section 230—that would have far-reaching implications. This section granted emerging platforms a liability shield that other businesses in America lacked: immunity from accountability for the content created, moderated, or amplified by their users. This provision effectively empowered the architects of the digital age with a license to operate without obligation. Welcome to the Wild West; the platforms have become the law.
In the ensuing years, an era characterized by aggressive accumulation emerged. In 1994, the largest company in America by market capitalization was Exxon, valued at $34 billion. Today, Google boasts a value of $3.7 trillion. When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, flanked by the technocratic elite whose wealth had surged to unprecedented levels, it became apparent that the preceding decade was coalescing into a formidable concept: techno-fascism—an authoritarian, corporatist regime where a narrow elite of technocrats leverage digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, heighten surveillance, and diminish democratic accountability, all while presenting their rule as an impartial application of expertise.
Over the last decade, I have chronicled a nearly theological divide between two opposing ideologies. The nostalgia-driven narrative promises to "make America great again," rooted in the belief that the America of the 1950s—a time when the assumptions of white men went largely unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or LGBTQ+ individuals—was a more stable and coherent world worth reclaiming. Conversely, the progress-oriented narrative, as articulated by Andreessen, posits that “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” This perspective is characterized by a reductionist logic: stop complaining. Rising inequality, social media-induced mental health challenges, declining homeownership, and climate change might warrant concern, but at least we have smartphones. Philosopher Antonio Gramsci predicted this tension in 1930: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.”
Following the Republican midterm setbacks of 2022, Thiel advocated for a party that could unify “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”—a formula that, with the benefit of hindsight, serves as an accurate blueprint for Trump’s second term: a blend of Christian nationalism, military force applied both domestically and internationally, and a financial oligarchy robust enough to influence the state. By the time of the 2024 election, the nostalgia-based narrative and the progress-oriented narrative had forged a temporary alliance to secure Trump’s election. The result is the emergence of an oligarchy composed of fewer than 20 American families.
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