Algorithmic Thugs: Big Tech’s Monopoly Playbook
My second piece for the Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism shifts gears toward the political economy and corporate architecture around the attention economy. It argues that the central crisis is not merely the extraction of time or the manipulation of emotions: it is structural. The concentration of attention within a handful of platforms such as Meta, Google, and Amazon creates monopolistic attitudes that shape the behaviour of users, competitors, and even sovereign governments.
As we confront the monopolization of minds, the defense of competition must be understood as inseparable from the defense of cognitive liberty. Without cognitive autonomy, democratic agency withers.
Read here: The Architecture of Control: Market Power in the Attention Economy