Remember the “techlash”? A few short years ago, expectations were widespread that discontent with the Silicon Valley giants could result in major political and legal change. The Economist suggested that corporate break-ups, bans on mergers, utility regulation, and changes to content-liability rules could be in the offing.
Indeed, the European Commission and the Biden administration took some ambitious steps. The EU chastened Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Google with antitrust actions; more significantly, it passed laws setting conduct and content standards for large “platform” companies and imposed new data protections that created annoying pop-ups but also gave users more control over their information. The Biden administration also went to court, launching antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, and Meta, and a separate suit against Amazon that recently yielded a $2.5 billion settlement. Shifting from brakes to gas, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act to assert national control of a vital industry. Acting out of national-security motivations rather than social ones, Congress banned TikTok (until Donald Trump voided the law). Perhaps most consequentially, the social media giants face an avalanche of personal-injury lawsuits and litigation from state attorneys general in echoes of the 1990s cases that bludgeoned Big Tobacco.
Those are instances of government baring its teeth, changing how the tech giants handle data and tweaking the industry’s structure. But so far, it remains far short of a bite that would give the mass public a lasting grip on a sector that is transforming our culture, economy, and politics at breakneck speed. In the United States, the last two years have seen a dizzying rise of artificial intelligence free of any comprehensive policy framework to mitigate risks and encourage provision of public goods, with the Trump administration signaling it will pursue “minimally burdensome” regulation; the ever-deepening intrusion of social media into our lives, lawsuits notwithstanding; and a political realignment that has seen the Silicon Valley elite scrambling to get on the right side of a president with a penchant for crony capitalism.
To critics, the meager results reflect the reality that the techlash never ran as deep as its champions proposed. “It was never the people v. tech, it was a fight between media and tech,” writes the entrepreneur and investor Erik Torenberg. But half of Americans have consistently said tech should be more heavily regulated, and nearly 80 percent believe social media companies have too much power, according to a 2024 study from Pew.
Now, there are signs that a new wave of revolt is gathering. AI’s embodiment in grimly purpose-built data centers is drawing grassroots opposition from across the political spectrum. Deeper fears of AI doom are generating proposals for more serious regulation of the technology. The EU has already acted. And the ever-growing anxiety over the cultural acid leaking through our phones is leading many schools and parents to clamp down.
Will we get a political movement that is equal to the challenge this time?
Our new Hypertext forum asks why Big Tech is so hard to rein in, and how we might generate the cultural and political power to build a digital political economy that enhances our democracy rather than eroding it.
Historian Jennifer Burns recalls that the last industrial revolution seemed no less overwhelming to those who lived through it and was only tamed after 60 years of effort — one that required cultural change as well as political organizing. “Someday,” she writes, “we might look back to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and place it in the same category as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the expose that forever changed American factories.”
Longtime journalist and editor Christopher Allbritton argues we are trapped in a “fragmentation flywheel.” Unregulated tech platforms exploit their users and deploy the profits to build successor platforms; those users then flee to the new place, restarting the cycle. Meanwhile, the tech barons’ power is not just economic and political, but narrative. As Allbritton notes, “The muckraking that forced Standard Oil to accept regulation doesn’t work when the monopolist owns the megaphone.”
Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Adam Garfinkle argues that we have not yet fully recognized what we are confronting, not least because the technology is designed to obscure it. “The level and nature of addiction to digital devices is misunderstood and thus underestimated,” he writes, “and constitutes a species of Catch-22 paralysis new to the history of attempts to grapple with communications revolutions.”
Finally, my colleague Brink Lindsey invokes the 19th century temperance movement in America to wonder if we could do something similar for media. “Just as the antebellum temperance movement changed attitudes about alcohol, using moral suasion to reveal it as inherently addictive and dangerous, so a modern-day movement needs to raise public awareness of the addictive spell that virtual experience can cast on us — and the cognitively compromised nature of that virtual experience.”
In his landmark book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri explained that digital technologies are enormously powerful in generating outrage and protest, but much less suited to building durable movements. That insight applies to backlash against technology itself for all the reasons Allbritton and Garfinkle elaborate.
But as Burns points out, the problem of adjusting to an economic order that shifts social and material relations in ways that undermine community building and protest is not new. When factories began mushrooming across the landscape, it took much time and a good deal of bloodshed for laborers to fashion unions that could effectively advocate on their behalf.
In America, early industrial development spawned a class of “mechanics” who sought their champion in Andrew Jackson. But the Jacksonian dispensation proved better at conquering new land for settlement than at managing an industrial economy; Jackson’s successor, Martin van Buren, became known as “Van Ruin” for presiding over a deep depression. Later, as the mechanics gave way to a true industrial proletariat, the Knights of Labor combined a progressive solidarity across ethnic divisions with a radical politics and enjoyed spectacular growth, but eventually found itself supplanted by the American Federation of Labor, which notched wins with a more exclusive strategy focused on highly skilled workers. Only after decades did the Congress of Industrial Organizations develop the techniques to effectively represent workers in the full range of jobs within a single industry.
Countervailing movements are slow to develop during a time of rapid industrial changes because people need time to invent new systems of organizing. Along the way, they must develop not only a negative agenda — knowing what they are against — but also a positive vision that moves the clock forward, with the new technology, rather than backward, against it.
In his recent essay “Abundance for what?” Lindsey suggests that a far more ambitious version of the abundance agenda could provide the basis for such a positive vision. As Lindsey writes:
This wider cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement. The negative motivations are already in place. Fears of genuinely dystopian dangers have been awakened — and what’s more, the people most exposed to those dangers are our children, rousing our passions all the more.
The idea here is to appeal to ordinary people — not technology enthusiasts who thrill to the ingenuity and brilliance of the new and pathbreaking, but regular, risk-averse folks who tend to be suspicious of change because of their natural focus on holding onto what they’ve already got. To generate mass support for a resumption of large-scale progress in the physical world, you’ve got to hold out the prospect of big, tangible gains in ordinary people’s lives.
That something, Lindsey suggests, is not just a turn back to real-life community, but the prospect of making improvements back in the physical world that drive the cost of living down far enough to free people from the necessity of lifetime employment.
It’s a vision that may sound utopian in this era of low trust and low hope. But that underlying despair is precisely what we are trying to beat. We’ve done it before.
David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.