A recent online event by the Ash Center for Democracy and Governance focused on the increasing global influence of an elite group of wealthy and powerful tech leaders—the tech oligarchy—and the implications for the global political economy and democratic governance.
At a earlier this year, Danielle Allen said that what we are seeing is the real time implementation of an extreme ideological vision of the role that technology and a small cohort of its wealthiest leaders could have in the world. In this vision, as Allen later wrote , the world is divided into talented and untalented, where talent is measured by technological innovation and corporate success, and seek to “replace the modern nation state system with corporate states.”
“The challenges facing democracy right now are considerable,” Allen said in her introduction to the presentation. Allen is the Professor of Public Policy at vlog, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and public policy and director of the and founder of the . “The questions are extremely hard, and none of us are at the point yet of having answers.”
Joining the discussion were Julie Cohen and Henry Farrell. Cohen is the Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University. She teaches and writes about surveillance privacy and data protection, intellectual property, and the ways information technologies are reshaping legal institutions.
Farrell, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, is the recipient of the 2019 Friedrich Sheel Prize for Politics and Technology. His work spans democracy, the politics of the internet, and the international political economy.
Below are some insights from the conversation, with questions by Allen, edited for space and clarity.
The is available online.
Q: What is concerning about a tech oligarchy?
Cohen: My recent paper “” was motivated by a worry that those who have been pondering the question of how to make giant tech platforms governable were missing a couple important pieces of the puzzle. And that worry has grown only more acute.
The large tech companies that exercise so much power are very unusual, not only because they’re so big and not only because they have attained an infrastructural kind of power, and that they have tendrils into all of the different functions and arenas of our lives and our economy and our governance, but they’re also unusual from a financial and legal perspective.
“There are stories that we tell in law and in political science and in economics about the behavior of capital and capitalists, but oligarchs are different.”
In fact, these companies took advantage of a structure that reserved more than 50% voting and control for their founding innovators. So, when things were going public, trading scale and capital for increased accountability, these companies and their household names, the Googles and the Apples and X of course, went private. They grew very, very large, and in a way that did nothing to temper or constrain the enormous personal power of their founding innovators/oligarchs. And that is a fact worth paying attention to.
There are stories that we tell in law and in political science and in economics about the behavior of capital and capitalists, but oligarchs are different. Their power derives from extreme concentrations of material wealth that they solely control, and that they leverage and deploy to obtain and build their own personal advantage. In the paper I trace the ways in which that is very centrally accountable for a lot of these puzzles around why the big tech companies are so ungovernable.
A particular set of legal and financial arrangements is very centrally implicated in why they became so big and at the same time so powerful and so unconstrained.
Farrell: When I think about these oligarchs, I think that the ideology is really important. And it’s complicated. There’s a very strong libertarian emphasis on access, which in some ways enables them to engage in unbridled entrepreneurial creativity.
This also tends very much towards neo-reactionary theories of politics in which we’ll be much better off without government, and instead we will be governed by the equivalent of Silicon Valley startups and able to move back and forth from one to another. This goes together very clearly with a “great man” theory.
And gender specificity, I think, is intentional here. If you read the so-called Silicon Valley canon of key books, they’re mostly about “dudes” and figuring out how to reshape society in the face of enormous opposition and how wonderful and heroic this is. This ties into a kind of engineering and optimizing mindset.
This really gives us a description of what DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is doing, a very practical description of many of the strategies that DOGE has adopted, and the ideology gives you a sense of the values and ideals that are driving this.
“There’s a very strong libertarian emphasis on access which in some ways enables them to engage in unbridled entrepreneurial creativity.”
What we’re seeing with DOGE is an effort to apply Silicon Valley values and Silicon Valley oligarchical techniques to really remake government. They have identified a whole bunch of vulnerabilities. My colleague Bruce Schneier would identify this as an attack surface, that there are all of these technical systems within government, for example, data structures, which can be turned into unintended purposes. They have identified that they are a threat model.
We seem to be moving to something which is not actually the old Silicon Valley oligarchical approach. We seem to be moving to something which has some weird Russian characteristics. If you were a Russian business, you needed to have a protector, which was either a member of the government or a member of some criminal organization, and it was very often hard to distinguish between the two. That is the world we seem to be moving towards.
Q: What are you calling out when you identify this new category of oligarchy?
Cohen: Tech oligarchs avail themselves of the trappings of a civil government. They do pay taxes, even though one could wish many things about the structure of the tax system. They do convene their boards of directors, they do show up to testify in Congress.
They don’t have standing personal armies of their own. But in their spaces, the Facebook, Instagram, Metaverse space, the Amazon space, the X space, they rule their spaces like petty despots. And within those spaces, they sometimes behave like they care about governing institutions. So, we get the Facebook oversight board.
That combined with the global scale of their power and the way it is underneath all of these different activities are like a highway system or a water grid. It’s infrastructural; it gives them a reach that is very distinct. It is a platform that any other group of oligarchs has previously exercised. And they all seem to know one another, and sometimes they work in concert.
“It seems like an important part of what we need to do is to articulate a vision for the future we want, then pursue a democratic way of seeing that vision through.”
Q: How does cryptocurrency fit into this story?
Farrell: It fits in a lot of ways, first as a kind of business model. What we have seen, for example, with the Trump administration is people who were worried about their crypto investments really came together in a quite unprecedented way to try and make sure that the next government and indeed the democratic legislators would be as crypto friendly as possible.
And now we’re about to see the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, which has passed the Senate, but is still in front of the House), which would effectively bring in stablecoins, a particular kind of cryptocurrency, into the mainstream financial system of the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, crypto ecology has made sketchy offshore financing, like transferring illicit proceeds, increasingly regularized as part of the financial system. It also provides a means for exchanges between politicians' businesses and indeed foreign governments and foreign funds which are looking to try and influence the United States.
Most recently there’s a stablecoin called USD1 (a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in March 2025 by World Liberty Financial Inc. (WLFI), controlled by members of the Trump family) which was used by the Abu Dhabi investment fund to transfer quite an extraordinary amount of money through, which potentially benefits the people who are associated with President Trump.
In a world in which crypto becomes integrated into the financial system of the United States, it becomes much easier to enable shady-seeming political and economic arrangements.
Q: How far can antitrust laws take us?
Cohen: Antitrust is a tool for taking aim at bigness under certain circumstances. Antitrust law does not say bigness is always bad, but there can be circumstances in which it’s been used in an anti-competitive way. We’re kind of taking aim at the very big thing that has emerged at the end, but not really going to the giant pools of dark wealth or to the structure that enables this governance authority to be exercised. Antitrust is not personal. Antitrust is a judicial action that you bring against an identifiable corporate entity.
Allen: It seems like an important part of what we need to do is to articulate a vision for the future we want, then pursue a democratic way of seeing that vision through. One of the challenges is that you have tech oligarchs with considerable resources. Those resources empower them to do that visioning exercise because they know that they can leverage their resources to wield and affect great transformations.
Reconnecting that basic democratic fact to a visioning process might be something useful for us at this moment. This discussion can move us forward as we think about solutions, in addition to providing an incredibly rich and comprehensive set of analytical terms for understanding the circumstances we find ourselves in.
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Banner photograph by Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/AP Images.