Smashing the Tech Oligarchy

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Jul 30, 2025

Kara Swisher, a leading tech journalist, delves into the pressing issues surrounding technology's power dynamics. She argues for strong regulation to combat surveillance capitalism and promote algorithmic transparency. The conversation highlights the dangers of unconstrained capitalism, which can turn technology into weapons, and advocates for antitrust measures to foster healthy competition. Swisher also emphasizes the importance of tech workers speaking out for ethical practices and discusses the potential of AI to either enrich society or further entrench wealth.

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INSIGHT

Concentration of Power Is Core Problem

The key problem of the internet is concentrated power in homogeneous hands.
Adequate regulation is needed to keep people safe while allowing innovation and transparency.

INSIGHT

Tech: Tool or Weapon?

Kara Swisher loves technology's promise despite seeing its misuse.
Technology can be a tool or a weapon, shaped by how people use it.

INSIGHT

Profit Has Always Driven Tech

Early tech leaders were always motivated by profit, not purely altruism.
The real power belongs to today's oligarchs like Zuckerberg and Gates who built massive empires.

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Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more.

Kara Swisher has been documenting the internet’s titans for almost 30 years through a variety of media outlets and podcasts. She believes that with adequate regulation we can keep people safe online without stifling innovation, and we can have an internet that’s transparent and beneficial for all, not just a collection of fiefdoms run by a handful of homogenous oligarchs.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

Why it’s so important that tech workers speak out about issues they want to improve and work to create companies that elevate best practices
Why completely unconstrained capitalism turns technology into weapons instead of tools
How antitrust legislation and enforcement can create a healthier online ecosystem
Why AI could either bring abundance for many or make the very rich even richer
The small online media outlets still doing groundbreaking independent reporting that challenges the tech oligarchy

Kara Swisher is one of the world's foremost tech journalists and critics, and currently hosts two podcasts: On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, the latter co-hosted by New York University Professor Scott Galloway. She's been covering the tech industry since the 1990s for outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times; she is an New York Magazine editor-at-large, a CNN contributor, and cofounder of the tech news sites Recode and All Things Digital. She also has authored several books, including “Burn Book” (Simon & Schuster, 2024) in which she documents the history of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires who run it.