The Tech Industrial Complex

Democracy, Plato and Aristotle both theorized, is a governmental system that is most susceptible to the mob—meaning mob-rule. Accordingly, the Electoral College and the appointments of U.S. Senators by state governments, the latter being the case from the establishment of the U.S. Constitution to a few decades into the twentieth century, were meant to limit any damage from momentary passions of the People to the U.S. House of Representatives. The governments in the United States, like those in the European Union, are republics in which democracy is a part rather than the whole. What neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee in their agrarian city-states is the threat to democracy by plutocracy—the system of government in which private wealth rules. It is less understandable why the American electorates have ignored repeated warnings of the threat, especially as governmental power has concentrated at the federal level since the war between the CSA and the USA in 1861.

Much like U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had done “in 1961 when he expressed concerns about the ‘military industrial complex’ in his farewell address,” President Biden said in his address, “’an oligarchy is taking shape in America’ as power and money become more concentrated in the hands of the few.”[1] Biden “criticized the ‘tech industrial complex’ and social media, where ‘the truth is smothered by lies for power and for profit.’”[2] It seemed likely in 2025 that Biden’s warning would not eventuate in any policies oriented to breaking up the concentrations of private wealth, which I submit are inherently incompatible with a democracy. Simply put, seeing billionaires visibly chatting with government officials during President Trump’s second swearing-in presents a picture that may suggest that the influence of private wealth on public policy (and thus government officials) had gained such a foothold that the confluence could be shown brazenly without fear that the American people might vote for candidates campaigning on enforcing anti-trust law and raising the effective tax-rates on billionaires to the point that, with anti-trust, being so rich from an oligarchic business would not be possible going forward.

Tech titans amid the incoming administration: Just the visible tip of an iceberg. (Getty)

Besides Elon Musk, perhaps the richest billionaire in the world at the time, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) as well as the titans of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft could be seen on television in front of, and amicably chatting with the incoming administration's Cabinet secretaries. Musk was chatting with Trump's proposed secretary of defense in spite of the conflict of interest in Musk owning SpaceX. Zuckerberg could feel comfortable being seen chatting with secretaries and President Trump’s adult sons in spite of his power to minimize political dissent on social media. With 90 days to decide whether to close down or sell Tik Tok, President Trump expressed interest in a news conference in the evening of his second inaugural in letting rich Americans buy into a 50/50 joint venture that would allow China to continue Tik-Tok operations in the United States. Were Zuckerberg or Musk to invest enough that they could exercise control on the company through the American half, the investments could put the two social-media titans closer to achieving monopoly control over social media in the United States. 

The real power evinced in the inaugural ceremony was in the seating area where the Cabinet nominees, the tech titans, and Trump's business-oriented relatives were sitting. At one point prior to the arrival of Trump himself, all of the living former U.S. Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, were looking across the aisle at the cadre of Trump’s nominated cabinet secretaries, the billionaire tech titans, and Trump’s business-family. Those former presidents undoubtedly knew where the real power was, and perhaps they were surprised to see the public-private collusion so brazenly visible. After the ceremony, hidden from the public’s view at the lunch in the Capitol, members of Congress, “Cabinet nominees and business titans within Trump’s inner circle” mingled.[3] The luncheon was an “opportunity that VIPs use to mix and mingle with members of the administration and advance their policy priorities. Apple CEO Tim Cook [was] seated between Donald Trump Jr and [U.S. Senate] Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.”[4] I submit that most such mingling takes place behind closed doors, even and especially in regard to the writing of laws. It is not uncommon for Congressional committee to use language written by the companies to be regulated.  

Lest President Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers to democracy from the military-industrial complex be replaced by Biden’s warning of a tech industrial complex as if the former had gone away on its own,  President Trump promised in his second inaugural address, “Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen.” Lest it be forgotten, President Biden has approved weapon-sales to Israel even as it ravaged the residents of Gaza on a scale that openly deified international human-rights law. Rather than assuming that Eisenhower’s problem was only existed in the second half of the twentieth-century, the American people in the twenty-first century would not be wrong in perceiving the tech industrial complex as being on top of the continuing military industrial complex. How many such complexes must there be before a existential threat to democracy itself be recognized and combatted? The sheer power of huge sums of private money, such as the influx of Elon Musk’s millions in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the magnitude of the discretion that Zuckerberg showed he had in unilaterally firing fact-checkers on his social-media company, can indeed be peeled back to reveal just how much the American voters could be manipulated on whom to vote for and even what issues to focus on. Rarely, if at all, did a candidate for federal office propose applying anti-trust law to the social-media’s big companies in the U.S.—an oligopoly. Nor was there any traction from the few voices in Congress suggesting that maybe the U.S. Government should stand up to military contractors by refusing to buy weapons for Israel and give that country’s government money to buy even more American weapons. The shop was open for business; human rights be damned.

The point is seldom made in American public discourse that had the U.S. Government enforced anti-trust law, including stopping tech giants like Facebook and Twitter from peremptorily buying up potential new-entrants in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a billionaire class would not have been so large, and thus such an implicit threat to democracy. Just in how social-media company financial (and political) interests can be tacitly presented to manipulate internet users in feeds without the voters realizing it, the reason why Biden’s warning was not likely to be heeded at the ballot box can be understood. I submit that the televised images of tech “competitors” sitting together at Trump’s second inaugural points to an inter-related oligopoly instead of a competitive market (wherein new entrants are not bought up). But this is not all that we can take away from having watched the ceremony; we could also see the billionaires amicably chatting with likely high officials in Trump’s second administration, with Musk’s SpaceX having a financial interest in being NASA’s exclusive space-sub-contractor, and with Musk’s “X” and Zuckerberg’s social-media giant having a financial interest in what the Trump administration does about Tik-Toc. 

Extreme personal and corporate wealth literally in front of government officials at the inauguration in democracy's own Capitol Rotunda. 

My point is that, had the inherent threat that having billionaires poses to a viable republic been grasped by the American public, then governmental power would have been used such that the Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other tech managerial-visionaries would not have been able to become billionaires in the first place. As of 2025, and perhaps even back in 1961 concerning the military contractors, the proverbial horses were almost certainly already out of the barn. Thus, the electoral grass-roots energy going forward from 2025 needed to upset the proverbial apple-cart being steered by individual teckie billionaires to advance the financial interests of their respective companies in the halls of American government would be, realistically speaking, virtually unattainable. One of the most remarkable visuals from President Trump’s second swearing-in ceremony was that of the former presidents all looking over at the billionaires' very visible nicities with the incoming Trump officials and Trump's financially-inclined scions. The former presidents looked like bystanders rather than as pillars of power in themselves even though power had presumably been given to them by the People. I’m just glad that it does not fall to me to get the horses back in the barn. Ultimately, the American People since World War II are to blame for not having minded the proverbial shop as a going concern, for they should have known from the Titanic that most of an iceberg is hidden from view under water. Yes, I think people should know that, even with respect to icebergs in the ocean of political economy. Perhaps, though, I think too highly of popular sovereignty, which, unfortunately, is admittedly quite vulnerable to being manipulated. Both the manipulation itself and the sources are very difficult for the public to detect. Whether through social and/or mass media, even just a few very rich people or a large company, or a network of large corporations with  oligopolistic shared financial interests can frame what is debated, and keep out what is not. It is precisely because detection is so rare that the visuals coming out of Trump's second inaugural are so important, for they give us a rare glimpse of the nature and dynamics of real power in America.

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1. Chris Megerian and Colleen Long, “Five Things To Know about Biden’s Farewell Address that Also Served as a Warning to the Country,” APnews.com, January 15, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Michelle Shen, “Trump Attends Congressional Luncheon Where Key Politicians and Business Leaders Mingle,” CNN.com, January 20, 2025.
4. Ibid

Apple’s iPhone and the FBI: Recalibrating the Right-to-Privacy

On February 29, 2016, a federal judge rejected the FBI’s request to unlock the work-issued iPhone 5c of Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people at a 2015 holiday gathering of county workers. The FBI and DEA cited the All Writs Act, a law passed in 1789 that authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”[1] The U.S. Justice Department was demanding that “Apple create software to bypass security features on the phone.”[2] In other words, Apple was to “write code that overrides the device’s auto-delete security function.”[3] In response, Apple’s lawyers argued that the statute does not give the court the right to “conscript and commandeer” the company into defeating its own encryption, thus making its customers’ “most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves, hostile foreign agents and unwarranted government surveillance.”[4] Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO at the time, said the FBI “was asking his company to create a ’back door’ that could be used to unlock other phones, exposing customer data. Agreeing to the FBI's demand would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to other calls for Apple's help to obtain private information, Cook said.”[5] Only weeks later, the FBI abruptly dropped the case because the bureau had found an outside company with technology that could serve as a master key. The FBI could use the “key” to unlock any iPhone. This left customers fearful that their data was now less than private even though Apple had promoted the iPhone product as not having a “back door” In the end, “(t)he iPhone fight exposed a rift between the FBI and Silicon Valley technology companies over encryption, and sparked a debate about the right balance between privacy and national security.”[6] I suspect that although a trade-off, or tension between the right of privacy and the national-security interest of the United States existed at the time, electronic privacy would become harder and harder to protect as a result of the FBI’s tactics.  

No doubt focused entirely on national security, the U.S. government cannot be expected to protect an individual right to privacy when it is in the way. The FBI “sometimes loses sight of what is important to corporations . . .  and privacy is incredibly important," Jack Bennett, a key figure in the FBI’s iPhone hack, said after the fact.[7] Even so, he was unapologetic about the FBI being able to access the phone. “We were trying to get on one phone because we had 14 murdered people."[8] As it turned out, investigators did not find anything of significant value on the phone.[9] Even so, the damage was done as far as privacy is concerned.

Even though Bennett “disputed that the FBI was asking Apple for a tool that could access other iPhones, calling it a ‘one-shot deal,’”[10] the bureau could be expected to extend the one-shot deal the next time phone data might serve a useful purpose in preventing or prosecuting a terrorist-attack or even a lesser crime. "What's comfortable for a private corporation that will still provide an investigator the ability to stop or prevent a terrorist attack, a missing child or a national security incident?" Bennett asked.[11] The list could easily be extended; hence, some legal limitation on the FBI’s access would be necessary lest the bureau resort to clandestine data-swooping on a massive scale not limited to particular crimes and people related to them in some way.

Apple’s iPhone was supposed to be hack-proof; the company promoted the product as not having a “back door.” Even so, this turned out not to be so. It may be, therefore, that there’s no such thing as a completely secure system. Privacy may simply be an illusion marketed by the company and valued by the customers. Customers of any smart phone could feel vulnerable, moreover, as a result of the FBI successfully getting into the iPhone.[12]

Furthermore, a court can put a gag rule on a tech company, such that customers may be oblivious to any personal data being extracted. This only exacerbates the insecurity to be felt by customers regarding the privacy of their information. Microsoft had sued the Justice Department over the gag-order practice in April, 2016, “arguing that law enforcement was relying on these orders too often. Specifically, the software giant said the gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property and also the company’s First Amendment right to speak to its customers.”[13] Yet the gag orders could continue. To be sure, a company’s First Amendment right seems a bit of a stretch here.

Lastly, the FBI could be expected to continue to go wherever private data useful in uncovering a crime exists. For example, Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of 2016 “for subscriber information, including web browsing histories, telephone numbers, methods of payment, internet providers, and data stored in the tracking “cookies” of the web browsers associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.[14]  Interestingly, “one of Signal’s biggest draws is that it does not collect most of that information.”[15] Civil liberties lawyers argued nevertheless that “the Justice Department request fell well outside the bounds of what is typically covered by a subpoena, including basic subscriber information.”[16] Particularly upsetting, the subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year. Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations. Justice Department officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets. The officials say that they are simply following leads where they take them.”[17]

In conclusion, even wealthy companies like Apple are no match for the FBI and the courts in protecting customer privacy. Just as companies pursue profits often single-mindedly, the FBI can be expected to attempt to uncover any lead. Furthermore, the electronic means of storing personal information may simply be too susceptible—too easily accessed by a government (and hackers)—for privacy to be at all realistic. Smartphone technology, as well as social media such as Facebook pages, is causing us all to come to terms with a recalibrated acceptance of privacy-risk and even loss. It is asking too much, I submit, for a company to be tasked with defending an increasingly antiquated expectation of privacy. As a result, we might expect people to recalibrate what personal information we are willing to put on a phone (or social-media page). The Apple case can be interpreted as one of the triggers of the societal recalibration, rather than settling the matter.

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1. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

2. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

3. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

4. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

5. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

6. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

7. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

8. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

9. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

10. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

11. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

12. Arjun Kharpal, “Apple vs FBI: All You Need to Know,” CNBC.com, March 29, 2016.

13. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

14. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

15. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

16. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

17. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.