Tech bros seem bent on controlling minds and politics. Can anyone rein them in?

In Dave Eggers’ 2021 novel The Every, a giant search engine company acquires an e-commerce behemoth. Delaney Wells, the lead character, plans a vigilante action against the company by getting a job with it. Her college thesis, written with a view to charm her way into the company, argued that it was immaterial that it was a monopoly if consumers were fine with it.

Delaney describes the phenomenon as “Benevolent Market Mastery.”In the autumn of 2021, in a case of art foreshadowing real-life events, a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave the Wall Street Journal a stash of documents that showed that Facebook had been carrying out research for three years that revealed the damaging psychological effects on teens who used Instagram. Its findings revealed: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the emotional issues, according to the WSJ report in 2021. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide.

“This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The reports led to a Senate hearing. Concern is rising about the effect of large tech monopolies, with alarm bells jangling that governments are ineffectual in curbing their excesses. Or worse, they are mostly going along with the logic of Delaney Wells’ thesis—that their market mastery is benevolent.

Tech CEOs are seen as today’s royalty, emblematically so at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi recently. Videos were enthusiastically shared of Google’s Sundar Pichai enjoying a cup of coffee or speaking about his rail journeys as a student to IIT Kharagpur. (Clickbait alert: I also travelled from Kolkata on the dusty Corom