Cover of Big Tech Dynasties

Big Tech Dynasties

Rethinking the Power, Spectacle, and Downfall of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon

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Big Tech Dynasties

By: Joanne E. Gray
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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 as 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.
History & Culture Ideologies & Doctrines Politics & Government Public Policy Social Sciences
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Reviews

Jo Gray has written a hugely accessible analysis of US Big Tech power and how to counter its global influence. She urgently advocates the importance of good government, democratic civility, and international cooperation. Her writing–based on wide-ranging research–is confessional, conversational, and acerbically satirical about self-regarding tech bros and politicians. It's a rare academic book that can make me laugh. Here’s one for those worried citizens who want to know why regulating the digital world and AI really matters.
We are often told that the tech giants rose on merit and innovation alone. Gray shows otherwise. This wittily-written (could aliens actually be billionaires from other planets?) book exposes the dynastic ambitions, founder myths and anti-democratic impulses that drive the biggest tech companies of our time. It incisively dissects the Tik-tok ban, digital sovereignty showing the “imperial reach” of not just the tech giants but also their regulators in the USA. This is Big Tech as seen from outside its own mythology. Its attention to societies beyond America makes it compelling reading far beyond Silicon Valley.
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