Big Tech's capture of state authority seems easy in a world where it’s hard to escape the clutches of technology

December is shaping up as that kind of month. Warnings about digital media and its barons are coming in thick and fast. Earlier this month, the widely followed Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman labelled the US “a digital narco-state” in a searing Substack post.

Last week, Edward Luce, a columnist of the Financial Times, derided the alarmingly pessimistic worldview of a group he called “the broligarchs,” a clever portmanteau of ‘tech bros’ and ‘oligarchs.’ Luce drew attention to the US government increasingly “playing the roles of lawyer, promoter, hit man and agent” for Meta, Palantir, X and others: “Trumpian populism may be the story of our age, but I am increasingly persuaded that we are underplaying the tech-authoritarian elephant in the room.”

One need only watch less than 10 minutes of Palantir founder Alex Karp’s interview at a New York Times conference earlier this month to worry that broligarchs have an authoritarian mindset. Karp, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk use their substantial power to exaggerate the ill effects of immigration while simultaneously appearing in favour of controlling immigration to favour Caucasians, their critics allege. In Karp’s case, Palantir’s software is being used by the US government to track down illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, it is hard to think of a tycoon who has meddled in politics as overtly as Elon Musk has. From his roughly $250 million donation to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign to offering $100 to voters who attended Trump rallies in the closely fought election in Pennsylvania, his involvement single-handedly makes a strong case for campaign reform.

Not content with his influence on the US presidential election in 2024, Musk seems to have trained his sights on unseating the UK’s Labour government.

Musk has used his megaphone on X to support Tommy Robinson, who this year was released from jail after being convicted for contempt of court for continually ignoring court orders as he continued to repeat false allegations about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee who he claimed had attacked two schoolgirls.

Undeterred by imprisonment, Robinson was one of the lead organizers of a huge anti-immigrant rally in London in September. Appearing at this rally over a video link, Musk declared, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Ignoring the fact that the The Labour Party won a five-year term by a landslide in 2024, but Musk grandly declared that “a change of government in Britain “was urgently needed and that there should be a “dissolution of Parliament and a new vote held.”

I am no lawyer, but many of Musk’s pronouncements on immigration to the UK seem like hate speech. It is time governments found legal routes to police and punish such words that end up promoting discord and violence.

If action is to be taken in the developed world, it will have to be taken by the EU. The US government’s alleged capture by ‘broligarchs’ was recently outlined by an academic at the University of London who pointed out how it has affected procurement and personnel hiring:

“A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies was framed as a move toward ‘efficiency’ .

The Federal chief information officer spent a decade at Palantir. Thiel’s former chief of staff, meanwhile, heads the White House’s science and technology policy. Silicon Valley executives from Meta, Palantir and OpenAI have transitioned from the private sector to the rank of lieutenant colonels in the US army in June 2025,” observes the report, “The line between contractor and commander has been erased.”

The US administration’s broadside attack this month on the values of European democracies seems driven partly by the broligarch agenda, which, for example, frames the EU’s data protection law as a kind of conspiracy to selectively target large US tech firms.

It is not a stretch to imagine trade talks between the US and the EU getting stalled by divergent views on Big Tech’s stranglehold on our economies. Australia this month began to implement a social media ban for children under the age of 16, but it remains to be seen how many other governments follow suit.

Regardless of age, we should all be concerned about the effects of social media on our politics and personal lives. In The Shallows, a brilliant book about how reading on screens and smartphones is inflicting a kind of universal attention deficit disorder, the author Nicholas Carr quotes a pathologist from the University of Michigan medical school, who confesses: “I can’t read War and Peace anymore. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.”

It mirrors my own failed resolution to read many more novels this year. I had cancelled Netflix and weaned myself off Amazon Prime, to no avail—although I do get more sleep. Invariably, a performance on YouTube or a WhatsApp exchange distracts me, however, from the book I am reading. Implicitly admitting defeat, last week I coincidentally started watching War and Peace on BBC iPlayer.

The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.