Big Tech’s Wall Street Behemoth | Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams | TMR

In "Hegemony Now," Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams present an updated theory of power for the 21st century, exploring how Wall Street and Silicon Valley have come to control politics, government, and the economy. The authors argue that passive consent, political interests, and technology all play a role in this power shift. While these forces have benefited the interests of the elite, their dominance is now under threat in the era of the digital platform. The book offers a socialist strategy for reclaiming power and countering the current hegemonic system.

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Joining me now is Jeremy Gilbert professor of cultural and political Theory at the University of East London and Alex Williams lecturer in digital media and Society at the University of East Anglia. They are co-authors of their recent hegemony, how big Tech and Wall Street won the world, and how we win it back in parentheses. Jeremy and Alex are welcome to the program. I just want to say for everyone to understand that those are not ukuleles behind you. Those are impact guitars. But wide angle lenses, thanks so much for joining us, thanks very much for having us, I'm a big fan of the show, oh well thank you. Well, let's just start with this let's little remedial to start the first question with the title of the book. But hegemony in the context of what you're talking about, what does that mean? Well, so hegemony is a term that comes from the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. I mean it's weird to have some other meanings in other contexts. but in the tradition of radical political Theory really it translates to an Italian word which is more usually translated as leadership. so basically that's what it means. And if what it refers to is the ability of relatively small groups in society to exercise a kind of leadership over the rest of the society. So the way we like to explain this is to say that hegemony is basically the capacity to determine the general direction of travel for a society or a group or indeed for the whole planet. so that's basically what we mean by it. All right and fair enough. And so Alex as you guys write this it's so much like what we talk about on this program. Much of this hegemony begins or at least those who are in a position of having hegemony over the direction of society starts in the 70s. As we enter into an era of financialization. And also almost simultaneously the development of new technology enhances the ability for financialization and then also becomes certain Platforms in and of themselves. Give us a little bit of that history. Yeah I mean I think that's a really kind of nice way of introducing it. I mean a lot of the time neither of those things is really mentioned when you think about the 1970s. Certainly, a lot of academics and kind of leftist commentators would rather talk about neoliberalism, right? So they'd be talking about maybe Thatcher Reagan. Maybe about the Montpelier society. and Friedrich Von Hayek and Friedman. And all of that. and certainly, all of that is very important. the slightly fewer remarks upon the component of their ability to implement neoliberalism you know first of all in the anglophone world and then later on across Europe and then the rest of the world a lot of what enabled them to do that was exactly the fact that you know financialization could occur. That you know technology allows things like you know disaggregation of production systems. So you know you could crush your working class within America or the UK because much of your production was going to be happening in Southeast Asia. And all of this involves the emergence of a kind of computerization later the internet and the liberalization of finance.