Power & Technology
When any industry progresses in importance and scale, it inevitably seeks to solidify and defend its position. In technology, this natural evolution has taken a noticeable turn - from an ethos of progress and diffusion to an obsession of sorts with power.
This shift stems from two fundamental forces: Human nature's desire to accumulate power once capital has been accumulated (people find money is cool, power is cooler), and the fact that most industries must actively defend their position as they're not naturally self-reinforcing and under threat of erosion.
The rise of technology has historically cycled between zero-sum and positive-sum dynamics. The past 15 years saw massive market cap expansion as tech brought efficiency and scale to the world, with disruptors fighting intensely amongst themselves for market share in more zero-sum ways than many like to admit.
Now we're seeing a dual dynamic: traditional companies finally facing real disruption from tech penetration, while technology companies themselves experience unprecedented value creation through AI-driven shifts along with other technology penetration tailwinds.
The simplistic framing of this is that technology has always been about a trend line of positive-sum compounding impact and more broadly the industry has been built around the core principles of progress and diffusion: Make tools better for more people and let people find more problems to solve with those tools in order to impact more and more people in the way they see fit.1
This has been very profitable with companies growing to sizes that we couldn’t imagine a decade ago and compounding at scales that defy the gravity of most of 20th century economics and business fundamental viewpoints.
Libertarian Principles
Technology’s promise also led to many early believers in this megatrend holding libertarian views of the world (most loudly Thiel and Co.), with a desire to continue to diffuse decision-making and agency to the individuals as they (ideally) became more informed, connected, and “able”.
One could simplistically frame this shift as: Humans are more informed than ever before which actually means they are more confused and less efficient than ever before.
However somewhere along the way libertarians largely recognized that at scale self-agency does not work and humans coalesce around a small collection of people, viewpoints, and points of power.
Today, power has entered the zeitgeist of technology in a way that feels unsettling. As tech evolved from society's edges to become America's dominant industry, its relationship with power has shifted from uncomfortable wrestling match to eager embrace.
Leaders shifted from libertarian ideals to reluctant responsibility, facing an impossible balance: too controlling or too hands-off, depending on who's criticizing. Government officials, armed with minimal understanding and maximal aggression, blamed tech for everything from economic disparity to civil unrest. This has led to overreach from agencies like the FTC and SEC, theater instead of progress, and a hardening resolve within tech to concentrate rather than diffuse power.
AGI and Industrialization of Technology
The industrialization of tech creates a recursive loop where more capital drives expanding scopes of ambition, which then demands even more capital and power to achieve those ambitions.
The emergence of AI has supercharged this dynamic. The discourse around AGI has shifted from building better tools to existential scenarios of utopia or doom. Tech leaders have split between those fighting for open systems and those seeking to entrench power through regulation – some believing whoever controls AGI will permanently cement their position both in political office and in global power structures. The stakes have evolved from economic and social to truly existential, a tension that grows more palpable by the day.2
We saw the canaries in the coal mine years ago with large sovereigns piling money into VC firms in order to be adjacent to the transition of power from oil to the world’s newest hot commodities (software then compute then intelligence).
Now we see a contrast of firms that either view their role as enabling spontaneous emergence - funding ideas and companies appearing seemingly from nowhere - versus those that view capital vehicles as a wedge to own society's power structures through global expansion and candidly hollow initiatives like Responsible AI factions.
When Enablers Become Architects
Why this bothers me is how it in some ways runs against tech's original promise.
Our industry once championed individual empowerment of sorts, but now seems focused on consolidating decision-making power in the hands of a select few who have co-mingled the ability to invest in founders with the ability to know what’s best for the world. Those who once promoted (or at least accepted) the wisdom of crowds on both sides of the aisle now seem fearful of letting progress develop organically, resulting in a prisoner’s dilemma of “if we can’t have a free world we must live in my world”.
Can an industry built on disruption and relative meritocracy3 advance at the proper rate without those principles?
What happens when the core desires of the industry move from diffusion and individual agency to concentration of power and a view of hands of god that steer the market?
There is some level of idealism and naiveté in this entire essay and I think a natural reaction is to view this as an overly deceleration and dare I say woke framing of our industry.4
Perhaps all industries progress in the same way and we are left back with the original point of human nature and this list of questions are just someone (me) longing for a narrative they are romantic for. A world in which the weird edges of communities drive emergent behaviors from the bottoms-up of many belief systems.
Perhaps this is actually the correct approach and the failure and massive inefficiencies of many of our closed-system institutions ranging from healthcare to aerospace and defense necessitate a more heavy-handed intervention from those willing to think from first principles5 on how to solve problems with novel ideas and large amounts of capital at risk.
With all of this said, the questions feel urgent or at a minimum worth pondering as we watch tech position ourselves as the architects of society rather than its organic enablers. The industry that once prided itself on letting a thousand flowers bloom now seems a bit too obsessed with carefully cultivating a specific garden.
Thanks to Andy for thoughts
We’ll come back to why this point matters soon.
I haven’t heard incredibly nuanced reasoning for this but I could see a scenario where that plays out if you’re super AGI-pilled.
Yes I know most of VCs were from stanford/harvard once upon a time, white dudes from ivy league schools get insane funding on a relative basis, yes i know the world is not even close to fair…but at least we were fine with those rising to the top doing so and destroying those napping at the top.
I would truly hate this if you, dear reader, came to this conclusion.
I know this is a meme framing but bear with me.