Bezos & Friends are the masters of the world but without Trump they are at great risk

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The “No Amazon” movement was born in Paris, it goes without saying. Much to the surprise of Jeff Bezos, who worked very hard to obtain the Legion of Honor, and in the end Emmanuel Macron pinned it to his chest two years ago . When he landed in the City of Lights in 1999 for the annual digital fair, Bezos was riding high. He had recently listed his company, which at the time was focused on selling books, even though he wasn’t making a dime. Time magazine was about to name him man of the year and all the spotlight was on him, even more than on Steve Jobs, who, with his hieratic manner and scenographic flair, presented the very light and colorful “iMac to go” from the stage, holding it on his fingers (other masterpieces such as the iPod, iPad and iPhone were already in preparation). The correspondent of the Corriere della Sera lined up for the ritual interviews (first the Americans, then the French and then all the others, starting with the most prestigious newspapers, a more important attribute than sales among Parisian snobs). Outside, the No front was rumbling, a bizarre amalgam of intellectuals, leftists, sophisticated booksellers like Shakespeare and Company, but also the bouquinistes of the Seine, fearful of losing their stalls. It was difficult to get a few phrases worthy of a headline from the prophetic Jobs, who kept them waiting a long time and stopped briefly, showing signs of impatience.

The enthusiasm for the origins of Amazon, the democratization of purchases that eliminates geographical and social distances

Then Bezos jumped out, small, thin, with an incipient baldness still not resolved by the shaved head, all pepper, pointed eyes and a captivating smile, a river in full flood that fervently unfurled his enterprise: "I started with the book because more than any other product it is the symbol of my project". It was nothing less than the democratization of purchases that eliminates geographical and social distances. The old mail order sale passed through the internet, but where was the novelty? The consumer will not only be the king, as they say in commerce, but the very source of knowledge, the engine that moves all the other stars thanks to the information that passes through the great network. "Amazon is not an online supermarket, it is a high-tech company", Bezos said at the time: it would use what was generated externally to innovate internally. Today it has come to use more robots than human workforce, but its real advantage is the collection and management of data. How not to be infected by so much enthusiasm. Remembering him, the difference between that Bezos and the sixty-year-old with more silicon than his wife Lauren that we saw in Venice jumps out at you. Times change, he has changed, all of them have changed while they changed the world.

The Garage Boys

Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the net, “the last large-scale expression of anarchy”, a society without the need for a central authority

It is hard to imagine that the richest and most powerful men of the new era started out like this. But their story does not begin only from the bottom, it begins with a revolutionary project that overturns the hierarchies of the industrial society built in the previous century. Ms-Dos was born in 1982 and took a few years to establish itself, but it arrived where the powerful IBM had failed to arrive. Gates was 27 years old, Paul Allen two years older. The first Macintosh was in 1984, Jobs was 29, Steve Wozniak 34. The World Wide Web arrived in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee was a little older, 36, and he did not come out of a garage, but from the laboratories of CERN in Geneva. The language, the tools, the network: Gates, Jobs and Berners-Lee laid the pillars of the digital world. Then the others arrived. Jeff Bezos was thirty in 1994 and still worked in finance when he invented Amazon in a garage in Seattle. Mark Zuckerberg came from Harvard and founded Facebook in the university cafeteria at the age of twenty. Different in origins, milieu (adopted children Jobs and Bezos, wealthy bourgeois Gates and Zuckerberg), character and country (Berners-Lee is British and the son of an artist), they had a common thread: if language is what characterizes the human race, exchanging information, ideas, work, among everyone and for everyone, without limits, at the speed of light, made humanity take a leap. And to themselves, let's be clear. Profit remained an essential driving force, when Bezos said "we will remain in the red for a long time and this is our strategy" he meant to overturn the old paradigm of commerce, crushing profits was also a way to pay few taxes and for a long time Amazon paid Uncle Sam less than the other Big Techs. Elon Musk did the same, who took 15 years before making an operating profit from Tesla. Taxes aside, would they have been successful if Wall Street had not believed in them? Bezos had admitted it from the beginning and had never denied that, for all his humanitarian impulses, he wanted to become rich. For him and for all of them, the old saying of Adam Smith applies: it is not from benevolence that the innovations that have transformed the world come. Only Berners-Lee did not participate in the great raffle.

The Lords of the Net

The memory of one of the protagonists, who has become a legend, says that the name of the “worldwide network” was born in the CERN cafeteria, while Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, a British and a Belgian who worked on hypertext, were chatting. Caillau remembers that he didn’t like names that were too pretentious, so Berners-Lee proposed an acronym, WWW. Together they presented the project in 1991. A year later, CERN released the portable browser for free. The crucial point for the two European scientists was to make available a universal language and means of communication with an easy and non-exclusive connection. The difference with previous online services is abysmal: before there were many separate tribes, each of which spoke its own language and tried to expand at the expense of the other. The Internet, by contrast, “is the latest large-scale expression of anarchy; not in the sense of unbridled, ungovernable violence, but rather of a society that is not only not governed by a central authority, but functions without the need for a central authority,” according to Berners-Lee.

Things took a different direction when an American researcher, Marc Andreessen, entered the scene. Using the laboratories of the University of Illinois, he created an easy connection system to be used on Unix computers. It was January 1993 and at that point the Internet left the pioneering phase to become a true technological revolution, the most important after electricity. Andreessen prepared a browser for Macintosh and another for Windows, then together with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, he created Mosaic Communications. The two partners rented some premises in the university, then put their colleagues from the laboratory to work; within a few months they all moved to the offices of the new company which was called Netscape and would become one of the greatest successes, so strong as to challenge Bill Gates who in the meantime had risen to the top of the digital ladder. In 1998 it was absorbed by the AOL (America Online) portal to form, together with Sun (software and chips), the alternative to Microsoft under the leadership of Steve Case, who, while Gates issued his sceptical judgments on the future of the Internet, became the master of the network.

But if access to the web is free and open to all, why subscribe to a search engine? The answer comes from the ability to offer more and more services in an organized way and with the simplest possible access. The Internet is an unexplored forest in which one can get lost, the engine is an Italian garden with its paths, its avenues between hedges, its labyrinths built for fun, not for getting lost. “AOL everywhere” is Case’s motto. More subscribers, more advertising, but investments cost money, acquisitions accumulate debts, profits languish, the future is e-commerce, but here Amazon was faster than the others. AOL becomes number one in information and buys Time Warner in January 2000. In the meantime, a financial bubble had been created that began to explode in 1999 and the following year would create a real crash. It’s fine to crush profits, but who will repay the investments? On the stock market, an avalanche of sales begins and that Darwinian selection is triggered from which Google emerges as the winner, closely followed by Yahoo. In 2007, AOL ends up in Yahoo, which in turn is bought by Verizon, the leading American company in wireless communications. In 2018, Time Warner goes to AT&T, the telephone giant. The entire scenario changes; in the end, the 90s were a taste of the main course that would come in the following decade.

The data eaters

Google was also born metaphorically in a garage thanks to two Stanford University PhD students: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, born Sergej Michajlovic Brin in Moscow in 1973 in a Jewish family that left the country in 1979. The father, a mathematician, found a teaching position in Maryland, Sergey wanted to be an astronomer, but he turned to computer science and met Page, also Jewish and the son of an artist (both his parents were mathematicians) who, looking for a topic for his doctoral dissertation, began to study the mathematical properties of the WWW network, encouraged by his supervisor. Larry tried to discover which page linked to the others and based on what characteristics. He involved a research assistant Scott Hassan and then also Brin. The project was called BackRub and the three young men soon understood its potential. Page and Brin left the University and founded Google, at the time a small search engine, but more sophisticated than others. Hassan returned to devote himself to research. His fellow adventurers become billionaires and beat everyone, starting with Yahoo, then the main contender. What is the secret? Page and Brin told it in a book in 2018. PageRank, the search system, is certainly the strong point, the filter is accurate, easy to use (Google Chrome has surpassed all other browsers) and above all fast. Speed ​​​​first of all even sacrificing the elegance of the design, because four out of five users abandon after a few seconds if a search or a video gets stuck.

A deluge of data threatens to flood the network and block its use if the infrastructure to channel the information is not created. Data is extracted, but for many it is actually expropriated, and this opens a vexed question that has so far remained unsolved. Raw data is worthless, their manipulators say; the same goes for crude oil, which does not prevent the sheiks from enriching themselves with rich royalties. The digital tax that has now become the bone of contention with Trump's America is a useless shortcut. The European Union has long discussed whether to make the legitimate owners pay for information, that is, every person who enters the network and agrees to give it up. Perhaps we will never get out of it. In the meantime, the digital economy has built its own rules, one of which in English is called stickiness: how long and how many times a user remains "stuck". Everything depends on attention, an increasingly scarce resource in this library of Babel in which we are immersed. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, a true pioneer of artificial intelligence, worked extensively on information overload and short attention spans. He died in 2001 before seeing how right he was, because the secret is to capture attention in the shortest possible time.

To achieve this goal, Google has built who knows how many mega data centers (the number is secret), with over a million computers acting as servers, it has spent billions of dollars on fiber optics, a powerful and very expensive infrastructure. It is no longer enough to leave the garage, or even the Harvard cafeteria where Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook on a cold day in February 2004. It was supposed to be used to communicate between students and to pick up girls more easily, it has become what we know. These are well-known stories, or rather they are now legends. Now search engines or social media are complex and ramified technological platforms that store, manage, manipulate data. To do what? To make money in exchange for advertising, but also (today perhaps above all) to create consensus, see what Twitter has become after Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, or see Trump making his war trumpet on the Internet. Netflix’s motto, according to which “everything is a suggestion” based on information extracted from users, opens up unexplored prairies and paints scenarios that can become disturbing now that generative artificial intelligence has become the latest battlefield. And here comes a new “master race”.

The Ring Gang

They call it the “PayPal mafia”, but in reality they would prefer to be compared to the company in Tolkien’s novel, which they are particularly fond of. In 1998 they got together to create a company that offers payments in digital form. Only one of them, Ken Howery, is a native American: Peter Thiel is German, Luke Nosek is Polish, Elon Musk, who will join in 2000, is South African, Max Levchin is Ukrainian, Yu Pan is Chinese. After the initial hardships it becomes a success and in 2002 it is sold to eBay for a billion and a half dollars (it will become an independent company in 2015). Each continues on their own path without ever really leaving each other (Nosek has invested a lot in SpaceX, Thiel in Tesla). The mind is Peter Thiel. In 2007 he wrote a long article, actually a real essay, entitled “The Straussian moment”. He starts from the shock of September 11 as the event that marks the watershed and reveals the vulnerability of the West. But the West was already vulnerable internally. After a digression on human nature between Machiavelli, Hobbes, Voltaire, Smith, Marx, Locke and the “American compromise” (it is clear that he has read, old German school), we arrive at Carl Schmitt for whom taking part is a human thing (hence his theory of the partisan) and “the essence of politics is to recognize the enemy as an enemy”. “We have reached an impasse”, he writes. “On the one hand the New Enlightenment (which stands for globalization, ed.) never became inclusive on a large scale, on the other the return to tradition”. Leo Strauss tries to resolve this paradox with one of his formulas for initiates: “The unity of knowledge and communication of knowledge can be compared to the combination of man and horse although not in a centaur ”. Whatever it really means, this new man-horse couple fascinates Thiel, who from here arrives at his master, the French philosopher René Girard who taught at Stanford, and the theory of the scapegoat. Only with a sacrificial victim can “mimetic rivalry” be prevented from becoming generalized violence, says Girard, who as a good Catholic had in mind the sacrifice of Christ. But what does it have to do with the digital world? It does, Palantir is the name of the magic stone that transmits knowledge in “The Lord of the Rings”; and here we are at Strauss. But who is the destined victim? Judging from the developments of Thiel and his pals’ thought, it is liberal democracy which has now become a hindrance. Palantir enters the political arena in favor of exponents first of the libertarian right like Ron Paul then of the authoritarian right; it bets on Trump when he wins the nomination in 2016, and pushes Musk to change sides. Today the true crystal ball that communicates just by looking at it (like Tolkien's palantir) is artificial intelligence and it is on this that the Fellowship of the Rings intends to focus.

The Philosopher's Stone

When Jen-Hsun Huang was sent with his older brother to Tacoma, Washington, where a distant relative lived, he certainly didn't imagine he would become one of the richest in America. Today he would be deported to his native Taiwan or Thailand where his parents lived. He had a very tough start, in a dormitory, as a waiter in a restaurant to pay for his studies (he said it taught him humility), then a degree in engineering and a master's degree at Stanford. American elegy, not Vance. In 1993, at the age of thirty, he founded Nvidia, produced microchips and the company went public before the Internet bubble burst. Its key product is graphics processing (code name GPU), its market is video games (Playstation, Nintendo), then the automobile. Its secret: focusing on applications, a path that led Nvidia to the big turning point, when between 2015 and 2016 it dived into artificial intelligence. In the meantime, Sam Altman had made his way . Born in Chicago in 1980, he was already tinkering with his first computer at the age of eight, he studied computer science at Stanford without graduating, and he soon entered the world of technological start-ups until he dedicated himself to artificial intelligence. OpenAI was born in 2015 as a research laboratory and Thiel, Musk, Amazon and others joined. Satya Nadella, the big boss of Microsoft, also approached, with whom strong tensions would arise . Meanwhile, ChatGPT, a language developed by OpenAI, was gaining ground. A new Google that displaces the old one? They are different things, Google offers us real-time data and content based on our preferences, ChatGPT generates information from other information. There are those who have given a very clear example: Google is a librarian who finds any book you ask for in a flash, ChatGPT is a bibliophile who has read all the books available so far and responds based on what he has learned. But in order not to be displaced, Google is also now integrating artificial intelligence just as Apple and gradually all the others are doing. It is a race that has limits: one intrinsic, that is to what extent it is possible to imitate the functioning of the brain and reach human thought; the other external, that is how much this very powerful machine costs, who manages it and where they want to take it. But here we go off the paths of technology and economics.

High-tech Leviathan

Donald Trump is neither nice nor generous, easy to fall in love with and even easier to disagree with. He has never really gotten along with Elon Musk, after the sensational breakup and the fake reconciliation we are at sea. “Without subsidies he should close up shop and go back to South Africa”, he declared, and does not rule out deporting him given that there is some confusion over how he obtained citizenship – Steve Bannon, the ideologue of the Maga, denounced it. Musk spent 300 million dollars in the swing states to buy the presidency for The Donald who now thanks him like this. Aside from the fall in style (what style?), the president tells an uncomfortable truth: who among the Magnificent Seven (Meta, Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia) could resist today without the clearly visible hand of the state? On the day of the inauguration there was a court worthy of Ivan the Terrible around King Don and it was shocking to see the Lords of the digital universe wagging their tails like puppies around their master. Have they really ended up like this? Is it just opportunism, flattery, an exchange of interests? Or have the champions of innovation, the epigones of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur, become state boyars and their companies are in fact state-owned? Silicon Valley, a liberal temple, has not moved to the right, but to Washington.

Today the Great Network needs gigantic plants and huge investments. Artificial intelligence requires even more and absorbs an immeasurable amount of energy, everyone is wondering to what extent it will be able to absorb American resources. Palantir works for the government and now it should collect information on American citizens in a mega data center, writes the New York Times. It's as if Frodo brought the ring to Sauron. Poor Tolkien, all house, church, university and family, will roll in his grave. Jeff Bezos is dancing like a leprechaun around the White House so that NASA also gives him at least a slice of what it has given in recent years to Musk who, without the support for SpaceX and Starlink and without Washington turning a blind eye to Tesla's business between Beijing and Shanghai, could hardly continue to reap dollars. But how come, wasn't everyone for the free market? They used to be. Thiel is at least consistent, his Pindaric flight from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt via Nietzsche takes him straight to the Leviathan, albeit a high-tech Leviathan.

Negroponte or Schumpeter?

The guys in the garage were initially followers of Nicholas Negroponte, the guru, or rather the sorcerer (with that last name) of the digital age in its ascendant phase. In 1995 he published what was considered his bible, entitled “Being Digital”. The mantra was that the Internet would become the great agora of universal democracy. The computer revolution was the information revolution, it would allow everyone to create their own newspaper that he called The Daily Me. “The monolithic empires of the mass media are shattering into a myriad of small businesses”, wrote Negroponte. Words in the sand, it took only a few years to understand that he was wrong. Why? If we apply economic geography to cyberspace we find a growing process of concentration, the opposite of what had been said and seen until now, much closer to the theory of Joseph A. Schumpeter. It begins with the heroic inventor who becomes the risk-loving innovator; whoever wins creates a successful business that, as it grows, transforms itself into “a giant, perfectly bureaucratized industrial unit that ultimately expropriates the bourgeoisie itself,” wrote the Austrian-American economist, so much so that “the true pioneers of socialism were the various Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Rockefellers.” And he didn’t like socialism at all. Let’s change the names: Bezos, Musk, Thiel, let’s put state capitalism in place of the obsolete socialism, and the result doesn’t change.

Negroponte's prophecies have not completely vanished, many swear that free competition still reigns and new guys from the garage are always arriving, ready to invent and innovate. For this reason, any regulation can become counterproductive, it ends up strengthening the incumbent, the one who has already conquered a dominant position. Berners-Lee dreamed of a sort of "digital communism" and said: "On the web there is nothing superior to the other". Instead, yes. Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo capture a good part of all visits to the network. Schumpeter's paradigm prevails over Negroponte's unless the cycle starts again thanks to new discoveries and innovations. Will it start again from China and not from America? Maybe, given what is also happening with artificial intelligence. Will quantum intelligence overturn traditional models? Maybe. Everyone is looking for it, from giants like IBM to Altman himself, so far no one has found it. See you next time.

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