oligarchy – Memphis Flyer

Keepers of the Flame

The presidential inauguration in the Capitol rotunda on Monday marked the return to power of the most controversial and scandal-plagued president in American history. It felt a little like when the second plane hit the tower on 9/11 — the moment when we knew it wasn’t an accident.

Monday was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and here in Memphis — the city where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 — the celebration of his life takes on a special significance. The NBA’s annual MLK Day celebration featured the Memphis Grizzlies hosting the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the National Civil Rights Museum held a day of events called “Community Over Chaos,” which seemed a most fitting theme.

But before it fades into history, buried by the noisy deluge of Trump drama, I want to take note of former President Biden’s farewell address of last week. As might be expected, he cited the achievements of his administration — the record job-creation numbers, the long-desired ceasefire in the Middle East, the strengthening of NATO, and the ongoing resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — but his real purpose in his speech seemed to be to deliver a warning, to address, as he said, “some things that give me great concern.”

Citing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation, in which he warned the country about the dangers posed by the “military industrial complex,” Biden decried the rise of a new threat, one he called the “tech industrial complex.”

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden warned. “The free press is crumbling. Errors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” No errors detected.

The tech industrial complex was on full display in the Rotunda on Monday, including Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, The Washington Post), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Threads), and Elon Musk (X, Tesla, Starlink, xAI).

Never have so few had so much unbridled power to influence public opinion and so much money to invest in doing so. And it doesn’t help that they’re supplicating themselves (and giving millions of dollars) to the new president to curry his favor. It’s called obeying in advance, and it’s worrisome stuff. Journalism is in danger of being put out of business by “content providers” that have no ethical qualms about ignoring the truth in favor of whatever makes a profit — or makes the president happy.

CNN, ABC, and even MSNBC have also made at least token moves to ameliorate relations with the new administration. CNN buried Trump critic Jim Acosta in a late-night slot. ABC settled a libel lawsuit with Trump that it easily would have won in court. Facebook eliminated fact-checkers. Companies are getting rid of diversity hiring programs. Macho (“masculine energy”) is all the rage among the tech bros. Women’s healthcare rights continue to be eroded in red states.

Biden called it “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” and cited the consequences “if their abuse of power is left unchecked.” What Biden was describing is an oligarchy. Merriam-Webster (remember dictionaries?) defines it as “a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”

Can there be any doubt that an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power, and influence is moving into power in the United States, one that threatens our democracy and our basic rights and freedoms?

Democracy depends upon the will of the people, and if the people are misinformed, disinformed, or uninformed, they can be manipulated. As we well know, public opinion — and elections — can turn on well-funded, broadly circulated lies and propaganda.

Our social media platforms are already permeated by disinformation, mostly via bots that skillfully imitate real people and overwhelm legitimate content by their sheer numbers. Artificial intelligence is now upping that deception to previously unknown heights. Biden called AI “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”

The former president concluded by saying to his fellow Americans, “It’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keepers of the flame.” That doesn’t feel like malarkey, folks.

As I write these words, on January 16, 2025, Mr. Donald Trump is still President-elect, though he’s certainly acting as though he’s already been inaugurated. Thanks to the peculiar time traveling magic of print periodicals, President Trump will have been in office for at least three days before you read these words, such as they are. (Look, I’m not any more excited to write about the guy than you are to read about him, but news is news.)

Despite a compelling farewell address (more on that below) from the 46th president of the United States, the absurdity machine is already winding up here in the final days of President Joe Biden’s term in office, as a casual glance at recent headlines attests.

“Trump Taps Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight as Hollywood ‘Ambassadors’,” from The New York Times. Makes sense. At 69, 78, and 86, respectively, those venerable gentlemen surely have their collective finger on the pulse of the generation. When I think about connecting with Gen Z, my mind immediately goes to the co-star of 1972’s Deliverance and prominent right-wing nutjob Jon Voight. With Los Angeles devastated by historic and tragic winter Palisades fires, Trump’s move shows he still has all his old tricks, ready to go. It’s performative, backwards, and it toes the line between casual cruelty and cluelessness. We are off to a great start indeed.

Worse than Trump’s sycophantic set of Hollywood “Ambassadors” are the rich and empathy-deficient tech titans lining up to pull the president’s strings. In his farewell address, Biden warned of this oligarchy of the super-rich and the influence they wield, particularly through technology, and I agree with almost everything he said — save one minor detail. Biden warned that this tyranny of tech bros is on its way; I say it’s already here. I worry our nation will be as successful ousting the tech-industrial complex as we have with the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address in 1961.

Trump is notoriously susceptible to flattery. His own former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, already admitted as much in an interview in 2024, not that we needed an expert on security to attest to that fact. With Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook and Instagram are letting their fact-checkers go, it will be that much easier to suck up to the new president. He really did have the biggest inauguration crowd of all time — and no one is allowed to prove otherwise!

Jokes aside, if abandoning fact-checking wasn’t Zuckerberg’s way of saying, “standing by, dear leader,” I’m not nearly as well-versed in the speech patterns of near-human replicants. All those hours watching Blade Runner on repeat and Star Trek: Next Generation on reruns really were wasted, I guess.

Social media — and the tech industry in general — are criminally under-regulated. Well, that is to say, their actions aren’t technically crimes, because there aren’t really any regulations. But it should be a crime. Unfortunately, a loosening of tech’s stranglehold on U.S. policy seems increasingly unlikely. Between Trump’s burgeoning friendship with the AI Axis of Evil — the aforementioned Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, the grifter who bought Twitter, renamed it X, and is now poised to poison Memphis’ water — and an aging and out-of-touch legislative branch who don’t see the harm in a little social media, it seems to me that the tech-industrial complex keeping Biden up at night have already set up shop.

Though I’m sending this missive from a presidency in the past, I sincerely doubt that all hope is lost already, on Thursday, January 23, 2024. You can fire the fact-checkers, but you can’t burn all the facts everywhere. That doesn’t mean that the coalition of the mean and greedy little minds won’t try. It just means to remember that everyone (including yours truly!) has bias, that book burning is never the last move in someone’s playbook, and that libraries are a truly radical and wonderful place.

Anyway, at least I’m sure I’ll get a good laugh out of the “article” my uncle shares on Facebook as proof that the Mississippi is supposed to be on fire, actually, and annual ice storms can’t be climate change, because it’s global warming, not global icing, dummy.

Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, were minding their own business in Memphis on January 6, 2021. Were yours?