On the second day of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, a distinguished panel sought to make sense of the impact of Big Tech on both capitalism and the power of the nation-state. Among the panellists were Kenneth Cukier, the Deputy Executive Editor at The Economist, Anu Bradford, the Henry L. Moses Distinguished Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia University, and Aaron Bastani, the co-founder of Novara Media. The timely nature of this topic is underscored by the ongoing legal battles, which are arguably the most significant challenges to Big Tech's power and influence in decades. Steering the discussion was Stephanie Hare, a researcher, broadcaster, and the author of 'Technology Is Not Neutral', whose insights added a compelling dimension to the discourse.

What do Big Tech - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft - all have in common?

They all have immense reach, with billions of users around the world. Many, if not all, dominate entire markets. Most also benefit immensely from network effects. And all, have thus far, obviated regulatory scrutiny with the ease of companies that have market capitalisations equal to the GDP of many countries, which, most of them do. Perhaps most importantly, however, all rely on collecting, analysing, and monetizing data. An approach that is not only essential to their business models but also their ability to innovate and hence in many ways define the contours of our collective future.

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There is no doubt that digital technology has transformed the world around us and in its many manifestations, most notably AI, it will continue to expand the scope of what is thought to be possible. But as the capabilities of our society have grown immeasurably greater, so too, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, has ‘the scope of society’s domination over the individual.’ From the title of this debate, ‘Capitalism, Big Tech and the Nation-State,’ one would infer that what is sandwiched in between two institutions - that have, for better or worse, been essential to the functioning of much of our society for several hundred years - represents an affront to them both.

To make sense of their sheer size, however, we must first make sense of the political climate that enabled the growth of these companies’ extreme economic concentration. This is a point touched upon early in the discussion by both Anu Bradford and Kenneth Cukier. “At the same time these companies got so large,” Kenn says, “the state as an entity lost its strength to review how companies were operating and to act.”

It is as great an irony as it is a tragedy that the neoliberal project vastly reduced the capacity of the state to intervene just as digital technology gave private entities such extraordinary reach upon our lives. The prominence of Big Tech, however, should not detract from the failure of anti-trust regulation in the US more broadly. When we want to understand why increasing monopolization and declining competition have been a feature of the US economy since the 1970s, why there are such historic levels of wealth and income inequality, or why there seems to be so little competition within US politics - the enfeebling of a legislative framework that historically checked and distributed concentrations of private power seems like a good place to start.