Science as Culture

Science as Culture Forum on “Tech Oligarchy”

“What is happening is not just a battle for market control. A small number of tech titans are busy designing our collective future, presenting their societal vision, and specific beliefs about our humanity, as the only possible path. Hiding behind an illusion of natural market forces, they are harnessing their wealth and influence to shape not just productization and implementation of AI technology, but also the research.” – Judy Estrin, 2024[1]

Echoing US President Eisenhower’s warning about the rise of a ‘military-industrial complex’ over 60 years ago, President Biden’s farewell address in January 2025 did something similar, stating: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights, the freedoms and the fair shot for everyone to get ahead”.[2] Cautioning against the concentration of wealth and concomitant political influence it brings, Biden’s words can be seen as the most visible statement of the growing concern with the implications of an increasingly powerful and power-focused elite. This elite is defined not just by its wealth – which has reached astonishing levels – but also by the source of this wealth, namely the outputs of science, technology, and innovation. Primarily centred on digital and now algorithmic technoscience, this oligarchy has been described by Julie Cohen (2025) and others as a specifically ‘tech oligarchy’, marrying together wealth and technology in ways that threaten our collective futures as this oligarchy flexes its political muscles.[3]

Why the concept of tech oligarchy? Others are already writing about the entanglement of ‘tech’ and political-economic power, using terminology like ‘techno-feudalism’ for example (Varoufakis, 2023; Durand, 2024). These writers especially focus on the rise of intellectual and knowledge monopolies, presenting this as a distinct phase in techno-political economy in which a few entities have captured control over the key factors of production in society today (e.g. IP, data). However, as Morozov (2022) points out, this feudal framing does not address the continuity at play in an economy dominated by Big Tech firms; there is certainly evidence of growing control and ownership over intellectual resources, but this change has not sidelined the continuing innovation spending on and control over physical assets (e.g. data centres) (Birch et al., 2021). Whether it concerns intangible or physical assets, Morozov’s (2022) argument is that there is no significant shift in the basic capitalist logics and dynamics in contemporary technoscientific economies; capitalism still entails the “leveraging of whatever resources it can mobilize” to bring the non-economic into the accumulation process, whether that is our personal data or forms of scientific knowledge or AI models.

This SaC Forum’s focus on tech oligarchy, then, is meant to open up room to consider the shifting political contours of a specifically technoscientific capitalism in which a set of asset-rich social actors has assumed an increasingly prominent political role, but without then having to assume that this has moved us beyond the capitalist dynamics of Big Tech monopolies/oligopolies. Oligarchy represents one way to get at the ‘techno’ -social, -political, and -economic power of monopoly/oligopoly, reflecting an elite few who have an inordinate say in how to organize, technoscientifically, our societies, polities, and economies. This is not a new debate. Early in the 20th century, sociologist Robert Michels (1911) posited a highly Weberian ‘iron law of oligarchy’ reflecting the notion that organizational necessity led to the establishment of elites who come to run state-bureaucratic entities. Today, however, Cohen (2025) points out that oligarchy is more than the dominance of bureaucratic elites, it entails a political coordination to defend concentrations of (oligarchic) wealth – that is, private assets that are deployed politically to reinforce the concentration of private control over those and other assets. This is why it can be conceptualized as a specifically ‘tech’ oligarchy because it entails political coordination amongst a section of capitalists in support of their interests, centring high-tech sectors (e.g. digital, artificial intelligence), their modes of investment (e.g. venture capital), and monetary governance (e.g. private crypto) as the epistemically and ethically legitimate fount of beneficent innovation and, thus, societal growth and productivity.[4] Such political coordination not only positions innovation as the main (if not only) source of societal progress and productivity growth, but also entrenches said innovation as only possible within the ecosystems controlled by a few multinational corporations. Tech oligarchy, then, provides an important conceptual perspective to help clarify the problematic relations, overlaps, conflations, etc. between science, technology, economy, and political power – but it is also a concept with which we urgently need to engage further at this precise moment time.

Building on a previous SaC Forum on “Big Tech”, this current call for papers invites contributors to expand on their analyses of Big Tech by examining tech oligarchy as a new phase in the techno-political transformation of our societies. Driven by the tripartite Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), financialization of everything (Chiapello, 2015), and crypto logics (Caliskan, 2023), the tech oligarchy is (re)defining politically what we should be doing to make our lives better and how we should do this. Science and technology studies (STS) seems well-placed to contribute its analytical and empirical tools to the necessary dissection of the tech oligarchy and its effects and implications, but we have, as yet, seen limited concerted engagement with the specifics of the politics and the techno-logics of oligarchic power. Some hints in this direction exist (e.g. Tutton, 2020), but we need more work to untangle the political configurations that coalesce around the new (and not so new) techno-economic elites emerging at this conjuncture (Klinge et al., 2025). We also need more work on how to challenge the ascendance of this tech oligarchy, in whatever context (Sadowski, 2025).

Paradoxically, the tech oligarchy is flexing its muscles during a time when it has faced more questioning and more criticism than ever before: countries around the world have undertaken numerous studies of the threats to markets and competition by market concentration (Birch and Adediji, 2025); jurisdictions like the USA and EU have successfully pursued antitrust lawsuits against major corporations like Google; academics are writing voluminously about the threats posed by Big Tech (Zuboff, 2019; Birch and Bronson, 2022), their platforms (Srnicek, 2017), and their financial dominance of technoscientific innovation (Hellman, 2022; Pfotenhauer et al., 2022); and stakeholders and civil society are shouting themselves hoarse pointing out the damage that the concentration of wealth and technoscientific power is doing to our polities and societies – and the need to do things differently (e.g. Westby, 2024).

STS needs to address this as a political problem: fewer and fewer people are determining the political-economic and technoscientific direction of our societies – a few millionaires and billionaires drawn from the digital tech sector, venture capital world, and crypto communities have an outsized influence on innovation. It is already derailing the (re)turn to collective action and decision-making represented by the popularity of the ‘entrepreneurial state’ (Mazzucato, 2013); or, perhaps, the entrepreneurial state even helped pave the way for a resurgence of money as the primary arbiter of technoscientific futures and innovation (Pfotenhauer and Juhl, 2017). Whatever may be driving it, there are clear grounds to distrust the motivations, ideas, and capabilities of the plutocrats that comprise the tech oligarchy in light of past failures, frauds, and scams (Geiger, 2020). It is with this political need in mind that we call for contributions to a new SaC Forum; STS needs a politics to engage with the tech oligarchy, whether that means turning to the past (Winner, 1980), or looking to the present (Sadowski, 2025).

This SaC Forum seeks to engage scholars in an STS analysis of tech oligarchy, especially the implications for science, technology, innovation, and expertise more generally. Submissions should address questions like the following:

• How should we define and conceptualize the tech oligarchy? What are the histories of the tech oligarchy?
• How does tech oligarchy gain its economic power? How is this economic power different in ‘tech’ sectors versus other sectors?
• What are the politics of the tech oligarchy? How does this politics shape its agendas?
• How does the tech oligarchy link economic and political power? What are the technoscientific contours of their political power?
• What are the effects and impacts of the tech oligarchy on our societies, polities, and economies? In what ways does the tech oligarchy differ geographically? Culturally?
• How might we unpack and analyse the confluence of culture, finance, and technoscience underpinning the tech oligarchy?
• In what ways can we study the tech oligarchy? What are the barriers we face to studying the tech oligarchy?
• How might we political challenge the tech oligarchy?

Footnotes: 
[1] https://time.com/6302761/ai-risks-autonomy/
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/01/15/oligarchy-meaning-biden-farewell-address/77731224007/
[3] For journalistic examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/tech-zuckerberg-trump-inauguration-oligarchy/681381/;https://www.npr.org/2025/01/24/1226561708/trump-billionaires-tech-oligarchy; and https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-the-tech-industrial-complex-looks-like-under-trump.html
[4] https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/trump-crypto-and-a-billionaire-coup

References:
Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The californian ideology. Science as culture, 6(1), 44-72.

Birch, K., & Adediji, D. (2025). Undermining competition, undermining markets? Implications of Big Tech and digital personal data for competition policy. Big Data & Society, 12(1), 20539517241311584.

Birch, K., & Bronson, K. (2022). Big tech. Science as Culture, 31(1), 1-14.

Birch, K., Cochrane, D. T., & Ward, C. (2021). Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1), 20539517211017308.

Caliskan, K. (2023). Data money: Inside cryptocurrencies, their communities, markets, and blockchains. Columbia University Press.

Chiapello, E. (2015). Financialisation of valuation. Human studies, 38(1), 13-35.

Cohen, Julie E., Oligarchy, State, and Cryptopia (June 22, 2025). 94 Fordham L. Rev. (forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5171050 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5171050

Durand, C. (2024). How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Verso Books.

Geiger, S. (2020). Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty. Journal of cultural economy, 13(2), 169-184.

Hellman, J. (2022). Big Tech’s ‘Voracious Appetite,’or Entrepreneurs Who Dream of Acquisition? Regulation and the Interpenetration of Corporate Scales. Science as Culture, 31(1), 149-161.

Klinge, T., Ouma, S., & Hendrikse, R. (2025). Capitalising on conjunctures: Tesla’s ups and downs in financialised capitalism. Finance and Society, 1-20.

Michels R. (1915/2001). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. Original 1911 in German: Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie; Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens. Transl. Paul Eden, Paul Cedar 1915. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.

Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. PublicAffairs.

Morozov, E. (2022). Critique of techno-feudal reason. New Left Review, (133), 89-126.

Pfotenhauer, S. M., & Juhl, J. (2017). Innovation and the political state: beyond the myth of technologies and markets. In Critical Studies of Innovation (pp. 68-94). Edward Elgar.

Pfotenhauer, S., Laurent, B., Papageorgiou, K., & Stilgoe, A.J. (2022). The politics of scaling. Social studies of science, 52(1), 3-34.

Sadowski, J. (2025). The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. University of California Press.

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Tutton, R. (2020). Sociotechnical imaginaries and techno-optimism: Examining outer space utopias of Silicon Valley, Science as Culture 30(3): 416-439.

Westby, J. (2024). Beyond Big Tech: A framework for building a new and fair digital economy, Balanced Economy Project, IT for Change, and People vs Big Tech, available at: https://itforchange.net/beyond-big-tech-a-framework-for-building-a-new-and-fair-digital-economy

Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus 109(1): 121-136.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York: Public Affairs.