In the late nineteenth century, the American landscape was dominated by “robber barons” who amassed fortunes by securing monopolistic control over physical infrastructure—steel, railroads, and petroleum. Today, we have entered a second Gilded Age defined not by the ownership of tracks or rigs, but by the control of data infrastructure. A handful of giant corporations now preside over the key portals and platforms of our modern life, serving as “digital landlords” who extract rent from both the private sector and the state.
The Architecture of the New Monopoly
Modern-day monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Meta have obtained their market power through serial acquisitions and the control of essential platforms. Unlike the industrial trusts of the past, these “Tech Goliaths” succeed by becoming the indispensable intermediaries of commerce and information. Amazon, for instance, functions as a privately run authoritarian government, holding consumers, sellers, and workers captive within its digital arena. It uses its platform to monitor competitors and launch private-label versions of successful products, effectively leveraging its surveillance power to crush rivals.
The logic of the digital landlord is predicated on the “rent-based economy of software”. Companies like Oracle, founded by Larry Ellison, provide the “plumbing” through which trillions of data points travel every second. By owning the data centers and the relational databases that host information for the Fortune 500 and the U.S. government, these firms become “software landlords” who can raise the rent at will. For a government agency or a major bank, switching providers is not a simple choice; it is a near-impossible feat that locks them into permanent rental agreements for their own data.
The Case of the Ultimate Landlord: Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison, who has been described as the “robber baron of this era,” exemplifies this fusion of opulence and data control. His wealth, which exceeds $230 billion, has been leveraged to purchase nearly the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai. On Lanai, Ellison has created a modern-day company town where he owns the businesses, the grocery store, the newspaper, and the residential leases. Residents who work for his companies can be evicted from their homes if they are terminated, a level of control that mirrors the most extreme feudal systems of the past.
Ellison’s company, Oracle, manages data for the CIA, the NSA, the Air Force, and the top ten banks in the country. This concentration of information provides what former Google CEO Eric Schmidt called a “God’s-eye view” of human behavior. When a single entity controls the infrastructure for health insurance data, bank transactions, and government surveillance, the boundary between public interest and private profit dissolves into a singular score: wealth.
The Convergence of State and Silicon Valley
This new monopoly power has reached its most alarming explicitness in the current era of “retribution” and government reorganization. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and supported by a cadre of Silicon Valley engineers, has successfully secured access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems that process over $5 trillion annually. This unprecedented access includes Social Security, Medicare, and tax refund data—information that could be merged into a central government “operating system”.
Firms like Peter Thiel’s Palantir are now embedded within the IRS to build “mega APIs” that allow anyone with access to view and potentially alter all taxpayer data in one place. The goal of such technology is to completely reconfigure an organization’s reality, determining what processes and information matter. This “financialization of defense” and governance ensures that the state becomes dependent on proprietary platforms owned by billionaires who are also major political donors.
The End of the Democratic Commons
The transition from a society of small producers to one governed by a digital oligarchy has had profound consequences for human agency. Data brokers now vacuum up personal information from every corner of the internet, selling it to the highest bidder and creating hits lists for politically motivated violence. The “mismatch” between the control these landlords exercise and the economic interest of the public has resulted in a world where the free market is no longer free, but rigged by those with the best inside information.
History demonstrates that whenever wealth and power become so concentrated, democracy is imperiled. The new digital landlords do not seek to provide better products; they seek “pricing power”—the ability to raise costs without losing customers because there are no alternatives. As we find ourselves living in a world of “high-tech feudalism,” the challenge remains to reclaim the digital commons from those who would turn the infinite variety of human life into a controlled and profitable tree farm.