“I see the 2010s as the turning point,” Wu told me. Initially, Wu writes in his 2025 book, The Age of Extraction, the web was built on public platforms equivalent to the town square—ARPANET, the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, and private businesses tamed by antitrust actions (the phone companies and Microsoft). As newer platforms like Amazon and Google moved in, they initially presented themselves, Wu writes, “almost like corporate charities.” Amazon posted no profits for most of its first decade, and Google adopted the motto, “Don’t be evil.” But by the 2010s these and other private platforms were joining the rest of corporate America in prioritizing shareholder returns. In 2016, Google cut its tax bill by $3.7 billion by shifting most of its international profits to a Bermuda shell company. In 2018, Amazon paid no taxes at all on $11 billion in profits. That same year, “Don’t be evil” quietly moved from the top of Google’s code of conduct to the bottom.

Another change was the extraordinary power a handful of tech firms acquired. “Amazon determines how people shop,” The New York Times’ David Streitfeld observed back in 2017, “Google how they acquire knowledge, Facebook how they communicate.” That’s even truer today. In her 2024 book, The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament, calls this “de-facto governing power.” Tech firms have amassed actual governing power, too. Since 2008, Palantir has received $3.7 billion in government contracts; Microsoft, $5.8 billion; and Amazon Web Services (i.e., the cloud), $798 million—all primarily from the Defense Department. While Musk was laying waste to the federal bureaucracy in the winter of 2025, The Washington Post reported that his business empire was built on government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits totaling $38 billion. Tech libertarians, it turns out, love to suck hard on the government teat.

Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.