Feidias Psaras
November
As a law school student at Yale, Lina Khan was highly critical of how Amazon was doing business. In a break-out 92-page academic hit published in her university’s law journal, she explained how the company’s business model, which prioritized aggressive expansion within and across business lines even at the expense of profits, was poisonous to the free-market economy. Amazon’s Prime membership service, for example, allowed users to offer exclusive privileges such as same-day—for some, even same-hour—delivery and free shipping. Such features are immensely costly and lead to substantial deficits. But only multi-billion dollar companies like Amazon, with sets of faithful stakeholders and immense amounts of capital acquired from a wide variety of businesses, can fuel these ventures. These investments ultimately increase consumer spending and—much more importantly—loyalty.
Lina’s efforts have extended to other tech behemoths that have pervaded their respective markets. After achieving her post as chair of the FTC, she quickly revived a lawsuit to break up Meta, and led attempts to prevent Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to acquire Activision in an attempt to consolidate ground in the gaming market.
Khan called for a radical change in how the Federal Trade Commission, the state body in charge of maintaining anti-monopoly laws, dealt with companies such as Amazon. She contended that whether a company is engaging in anti-free-market practices should not be determined solely by its short-term impacts on consumer welfare and low prices, for example. It’s also the long-term impacts: how these low prices allow the company to gain a stranglehold over the market and paralyze competitors. It sets it up for a sort of dominance that would allow it, in the future, to raise prices as it wished.
But there's something even more worrying about companies such as Amazon and their increasing establishment as the singular e-commerce retailer. While contemporary antitrust analysis would assume that rational firms aim to drive competitors out of business, Amazon’s ubiquitousness and role have made it necessary for competing smaller businesses. Thus, it has created an arena over which it gets to set the rules at the expense of dependent rivals. In a dispute with Hachette in 2014, for example, the company delisted the publisher’s books from its website during business negotiations. In ‘Project Gazelle,’ executives talked about approaching smaller book publishers as a ‘predator might approach a wounded gazelle.’
It’s what Varoufakis calls a digital fiefdom: a post-capitalist economic order where smaller businesses pay dividends to massive corporations which control essential platforms — just like how poor serfs paid landowners in order to farm the land.
An emerging neoreactionary movement
Varoufakis’ interpretation is an expressly Marxist one, and he believes in increased regulation to try and mitigate it. But there are others who welcome such change. Curtis Yarvin, one of the key thinkers of an emerging neoreactionary movement, believes that the best form of government would come about by a nationalization and subsequent privatization of everything. Nick Land, a frequently cited colleague, is known for coining the term accelerationism; that rather than fighting to regulate capitalist forces, we should just let them be and drive the system to its limits. In his essay, Meltdown, he writes:
The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
These thinkers are founding members of what has been dubbed the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ a movement that criticizes aspects of the liberal democratic model prominent in the ‘Western sphere.’ Its proponents support that democracy is fundamentally flawed; that giving power to the majority ultimately leads to mediocre governance by the most popular rather than the most competent. The democratic institutional complex does not promote genuine plurality of opinion but rather just enforces another form of cultural hegemony through the imposition of societal norms. Yarvin’s concept of the ‘Cathedral’ denotes how the liberal universities that predominate the US zealously promote a foundational belief in egalitarianism that stifles freedom of thought and innovation. Land, in the same essay mentioned above, finishes:
Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory.
Although this movement’s intellectual achievements were generated in online blogs by informal scholars, it doesn’t only extend to niche circles of disillusioned internet hermits. Peter Thiel, a multi-billionaire tech—investor listed 212th on Forbes’s list of richest people, recommends Yarvin’s blog unqualified reservations while stating that he ‘no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible’. He is counted among the many ‘broligarchs’ that find the government’s monopoly on money-production irksome and seek to circumvent it. As well as heavy investment in seasteading projects aimed to create tax-free safe havens for the rich, he’s known to have co-opted government programmes intended to extend retirement savings for middle-class Americans to amass 5 billion in venture capital income, uncut.
But it’s not just clever accounting tricks for tax avoidance. A Republican, Thiel has ramped up political involvement in the past decade. After being seriously considered for a position in the Trump cabinet in 2016 and abstaining from support in 2020, he’s been tentatively drawn back to Trump’s side given his choice of a former employee and protégé —JD Vance—for vice president.
The election results and the future
Although ultra-rich donors backing both US 2024 presidential candidates have expressed discontent for the aggressive approach to antitrust of the head of the FTC, Trump’s election has all but sealed Lina Kahn’s fate. Elon Musk, known for cutting Twitter’s staff by half a week after acquisition and now the co-head of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has stated that she “will be fired soon”. The change would most definitely mark a decrease in state checks on private power in the interest of the consumer.
This administration marks a decisive step at the crossroads between state and private power. Trump’s cabinet picks have already indicated his readiness to enact significant reform on the government apparatus. It’s not just the role of the FTC that’s about to experience seismic change, but the nature and freedom of big tech and business as a whole—very likely at the cost of that of the consumer.