Every society had its elites, of course: its wealthy, well-educated, upwardly mobile types. Machiavelli, a republican himself, called them the grandi. The trick to preserving a republic was not to allow them to predominate as a class, to amass power at the expense of their fellows. Or more precisely: the key was not to allow them to amass power at the expense of the common man.

Roosevelt believed that liberty had more to it than the right to be let alone. It was the right to have a say in one’s nation, to help shape the future of the community one called home, to exercise the power and mastery of a citizen.

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.

Facebook mouthed platitudes about user privacy and choice; company executives disclaimed any political manipulation or unequal treatment; but the truth was clearly otherwise. Facebook had a political agenda, or more precisely, a social agenda, and it was determined to use its power to achieve it.

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 is desperately afraid of public criticism, of someone taking a public stand.

When the tech behemoths claim, as they routinely do, that they couldn’t exist without Section 230, they are only slightly exaggerating. They couldn’t exist without the new and improved Section 230 that they rewrote with the help of the courts.