Big Tech Dynasties

Blending personal narrative with critical analysis, Big Tech Dynasties reckons with the place of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon in modern life. It argues that while each company may be a product of platform capitalism, each is also historically familiar; Big Tech is familiar because it is dynastic—and because it is dynastic, Big Tech is inherently undemocratic.

Drawing on political economy, law, media studies, and historical analysis, Big Tech Dynasties explains how, like the many of the dynasties of history, the Big Tech companies sustain their positions of dominance through three interlocking forces: economic management, mythology, and succession. Big Tech rules economically by governing global trade and communication networks and controlling the critical resources of our time—data, platforms, and cloud computing. It legitimates its authority through founder stories and an ideology of innovation that frames private power as moral and inevitable, and democratic constraint unwise and unnecessary. And it works to preserve its power across generations, leadership changes, and technological shifts.

Big Tech Dynasties considers how we arrived at this moment and the growing democratic threat Big Tech poses. It also explains how democracies are beginning—unevenly and imperfectly—to push back, drawing particular attention to Australia's emergence as an unlikely leader in democratic oversight of Big Tech. The book presents an agenda for more nations to reclaim democratic control in the digital era, starting, the book suggests, with everyone becoming a little more Australian about it.