• This episode (#377 hosted by Mark) marks eight years of Techtonic.

• The worst possible antitrust outcome (Cory Doctorow, Sep 3, 2025):

Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway. . . .

Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.

• A Judge Lets Google Get Away with Monopoly (Matt Stoller, Sep 3, 2025): “this decision isn’t just bad, it’s virtually a statement that crime pays.”

• One of the last, best hopes for saving the open web and a free press is dead (Brian Merchant, Sep 4, 2025): “Breaking Google up was one of the last best hopes for preventing the free press from getting squeezed into oblivion and harvested into AI slop, and for saving the open web. The ruling that effectively lets Google continue operating as a monopoly isn’t just disappointing, it’s a disaster.” (via)

• Why Google Got Off Easy (gift link, NYT, by Jonathan Kanter, Sep 7, 2025): Kanter was the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division at the Department of Justice from 2021 to 2024.

My disappointment is not just that Google was not properly held accountable, for the stakes extend beyond this particular case. If companies can flout the rules, reap trillions of dollars and face only modest constraints, the deterrent effect evaporates. The message to other companies is plain: It pays to break the law.

At a time when authoritarian power is on the rise, we must not forget that plutocracy is also its own kind of dictatorship. That is the danger when we fail to enforce antitrust laws with clarity and conviction — that enormous concentrations of wealth will have too much influence over our lives.

• Past guest Alan Jacobs (Aug 28, 2025):

I sometimes ask family and friends: What would the big tech companies have to do, how evil would they have to become, to get The Public to abandon them? And I think the answer is: They can do anything they want and almost no one will turn aside.

• Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and other tech leaders lauded Trump at a White House AI dinner (Business Insider, Sep 4, 2025). See also the full attendee list.

• All the President’s Tech CEOs (Wired, Sep 5, 2025): “At a White House dinner Thursday night, America’s tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump.” See archive.is. Also note this excerpt:

Trump loves a banquet, which presumably means he loves a seating chart. Zuckerberg sat directly to Trump’s right, while Gates scored a chair next to Melania Trump on the left. Sergey Brin and his “really wonderful MAGA girlfriend” — Trump’s words — Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto sat directly across from the president. (Gilbert-Soto comes by that praise honestly; in addition to being an ardent supporter of Trump online, she has posted on X that “this world is a spiritual battlefield built on pagan roots, you can’t escape it,” specifically calling out Burning Man, Halloween, Christmas, and the US government as evil. This was on Wednesday.)

...here's the post:

...and from the Daily Beast (Sep 5, 2025), Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto’s remarks at the dinner.

• Mastodon post showing Big Tech CEOs fawning over the host of the White House dinner. Heard in the audio clip: Bill Gates (Microsoft founder), Tim Cook (Apple CEO), Safra Katz (Oracle CEO), Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), Sergey Brin (Google founder), Sundar Pichai (Google CEO), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Meta CEO).

• On Bluesky: “Zuckerberg saying Meta intends to spend at least 600 billion in the US. Zuckerberg at the end caught on a hot mic.”

• The Hot Mic and the Monsters (Mike Brock, Sep 7, 2025): “a follow-up to the oligarchs’ dinner party.”

[Zuck announced] that Meta would invest $600 billion in American AI infrastructure—a figure so astronomically absurd that it would require borrowing more than twice the company’s total book value. The CEO of a publicly traded company just admitted on live microphone that he fabricates financial projections based on whatever pleases the Dear Leader, securities law and shareholder responsibilities be damned.

. . . [These are] the wealthiest people in the history of humanity, sitting in the court of the most corrupt man to ever hold the office of the Presidency, casually making up numbers to placate a public they view as sheep, while the regime they ingratiate themselves with engages in extrajudicial killings of suspected drug traffickers, plans military occupations of American cities that don’t bend the knee, and oversees an era of extractive capitalism that makes the robber barons look restrained.

. . . The hot mic didn’t just catch Zuckerberg lying — it caught him revealing the fundamental relationship between oligarchy and authoritarianism in our time. Power serves wealth, truth serves power, and human dignity becomes an inefficiency to be optimized away by people who’ve forgotten what dignity means.

• Two days later, thousands of people protest in DC against the military occupation there, ordered by the current occupant. (See We Are All DC.) The Big Tech CEOs chose their side.

• Want to Learn From Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel? Listen to Him Talk About the Antichrist (Inc., Sep 3, 2025): “Peter Thiel will be giving a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. . . . The lecture series at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco is already sold out.”

...in other words, everything is fine! Just multi-trillion-dollar companies partnering more closely with an authoritarian, and a billionaire loudly pronouncing his thoughts about the end of time. Cool cool.

• On concentration of power, and concentration of money: Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class (gift link, Daniel Currell in NYT, Aug 28, 2025):

[The] middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

. . . The market, and increasingly the culture, is dominated by the affluent. And technology is enabling companies to see these previously invisible class divides and act on them.

• What you can do: as Cory said last week, structural and collective solutions are our best hope. But if you can, look for Big Tech alternatives (email, web browser, messaging, and social media - for starters).