We must break up the tech platforms that threaten our democracy

We are prisoners of a global online panopticon that knows more about us than we do.

The riots that started in Southport and then spread across the country were triggered by fake viral claims published and promoted on tech platforms. As rumours remake reality, social media powered by the tech giants serves to fuel violence on Britain’s streets and promotes a world without truth or mercy.

Cyberspace was to be a new frontier of freedom, breaking down barriers between establishments and the people. As with popular democracy, social media purported to usher in an age of mass media democracy where everyone could comment and opine. Liberated from the constricting shackles of editorial gatekeepers and their paymasters in the legacy media, consumers of news were now also co-creators of knowledge.

Yet cyberspace has morphed into a Hobbesian fusion of anarchy and tyranny. Online we are both atomised individuals and cogs in a collective wheel, engaged in a “war of all against all” on social media while being forced to surrender the contents of our lives to impersonal entities if we want to work, trade, travel, communicate, socialise or pay the bills. With new levels of digital dependence and addictive attention-seeking, over-excitement and disenchantment cascade into each other as politics and society become ever more debased. Greater connections mask the paradox of individualism that we are at once more entangled and less involved; we are more connected even as we are more divided.

Our condition of atomised anarchy exposes us to the tyranny of internet Leviathans primarily led by US and Chinese tech platforms that impose an arbitrary order on their virtual subjects. What is more, the tech giants deploy new means of behaviour modification by mining data from the most intimate recesses of our selves. We freely yet unconsciously surrender our humanity to the clutches of what the American author Shoshana Zuboff astutely calls “surveillance capitalism”, in which data is the main resource and attention the dominant currency. As personal experience is monetised in the interest of global capital, individual liberty turns into digital despotism. X and Meta – Facebook’s parent company, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram – are a lethal mix of echo chambers for self-indulgent groupthink and platforms for virtual Hunger Games with no forgiveness or reconciliation.

Increasingly, we are prisoners of the global online panopticon in which Meta’s algorithms and Google’s artificial intelligence know more about us than we do. It reflects the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s theory that a prison is ideally designed if its inmates are kept under permanent observation. Digital surveillance is the contemporary expression of a sacrificial utilitarian calculus that dispenses with the dignity of the person for the supposed greater good of the masses and their masters. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the new gods of our secular age, as Bruno Maçães has argued in these pages.

Far from empowering people, tech platforms create what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of voluntary servitude” – a “kind of servitude, ordered, mild and peaceable, a singular power, tutelary, all-encompassing”. The attention economy of click-bait and TikTok videos appeals to our base instincts. Powered by unprecedented computational power, the tech platform’s algorithms do not merely entertain or distract us – they absorb our attention to the point of undermining our fundamental capacity for critical reflection and self-discipline on which robust public debate, a vibrant democracy and human nature depend.

Increasingly, politics as a civic practice aimed at reconciling estranged interests – capital and labour, young and old, indigenous and immigrant – is abolished in favour of new forms of tribal warfare. Unregulated by national media laws and unmoored from ethical constraints, social media unleashes the violence of mob rule in which tech owners and prominent influencers are prosecutors, judge and jury all at once. The tech platforms are no ordinary big business but empires of everything that acquire rival messaging and imaging services. Tech owners such as Musk or Zuckerberg seek to replace the old politics of competing ideologies with a populist plutocracy that destroys democracy: “Move fast and break things,” as Zuckerberg is fond of saying.

In their current configuration, tech platforms unleash barbaric forces that portend a post-democratic and anti-political age in which technology rules unopposed. Social media destabilises not just governments but the social fabric of countries by injecting poisonous propaganda into the body politic. The response has to be greater regulation. That must include the licensing of outlets, compulsory content moderation and a fit and proper person test for the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg. Given their contempt for competition, it’s time to tackle tech platforms’ monopoly power. The US, UK and EU should bring the full force of anti-monopoly rules and regulations to bear on X and Meta. They need to be broken up before they break our polity and society.

Adrian Pabst is an author, academic and New Statesman contributing writer

[See also: Why leaders listen to Elon Musk]