As the power of the common person declined, the power of the Big Tech overclass multiplied: power over attention, over time, over users’ judgment, and soon power over their speech.

In the great Age of Tech, journalism was clickbait, and Big Tech controlled the clicks.

Big Tech was the culmination of the corporate liberal ideology and the globalized economy it envisioned. This was an economy that by the early twenty-first century depended less and less onproducing anything tangible, or on producers themselves, for that matter, but lavished ever greater rewards on the rarified, highly educated, largely urban technologist class.

That’s the thing about plutocrats: once they seize the power, they tend to keep it.

Big Tech’s handouts from Big Government made the tech class what it is.

Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more riven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today.

That sturdy American yeoman, the common man, was to be swept aside as the dominant force in American life and replaced by the enlightened, sophisticated, corporate aristocracy. America would become a corporate republic.

The new monopolies brought bulging profits without all that desperate competitive struggle. The capitalists were certain they had unlocked the secret of the industrial age. This was what the new economy, the new country, required, they decided: enlightened management and control, by persons such as themselves.

Today’s Big Tech barons have benefited from lax antitrust enforcement and outdated antitrust laws, from cozy relationships with supposed regulators, and from special protections in the law. All this must end.