International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 45

International Journal on Criminology
begins, then, by inviting the reader to open his or her eyes and take a good look at
these tech titans.
The Titans of Technocapitalism: More Powerful than Nation States
What follows is not about innovative companies enjoying well-deserved success.
It is about online monopolies embarked on a ruthless “uberization” of the world.
The US stock market has been growing continuously for the last nine years,
thanks solely to GAFA. Between January and June 2018, 50 percent of company
profits listed on Standard & Poor’s 500 Index came from Facebook, Alphabet
(Google), Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.
Apple was founded in 1976, and in August 2018 its market capitalization
passed the trillion-dollar mark. But twenty years ago, Apple was no more than a
medium-sized business designing high-end computers.
Facebook had 100 million users in 2008. By 2018, it had 2.1 billion. The
company captures 77 percent of the world’s mobile social network traffic.
In 2007, Amazon employed 17,000 people. By 2017, it employed 542,000.
HALF of all the e-commerce in the world takes place via their mega-servers.
Apple and Google provide the software (programs, applications, and so on)
for 99 percent of the world’s smartphones. Google has an 81 percent share of the
global search engine market.
Facebook and Google between them hoover up 59 cents in every online
advertising dollar. They also carry 63 percent of all digital advertising in the United
States. In 2017, 89 percent of the growth in turnover of the online advertising
sector went to these same two companies.
GAFA Ideology: The Fox in the Henhouse
A recent study (New York Times International, October 18 2017) revealed the political
views of six-hundred influential American high-tech directors and senior
executives, one third of whom were based in and around Silicon Valley. As one
might have expected, they are overwhelmingly libertarian and are in favor of total
deregulation and unlimited migration (cheap slaves are always in demand. . .).
Equally obviously, they are fiercely hostile toward all state supervision and are in
favor of the unlimited ability to fire personnel: entrepreneurs must be perfectly
free to operate in their market. Thus unencumbered by any societal costs, these
exalted individuals are free to be ardent supporters of every fashionable idea: free
access to drugs and abortion, the glorification of LGBT causes, and so on.
But when it comes to business, these directors and senior executives are
clearly not such nice-guy progressives. Just consider the profiles of the 2 billion
users of Facebook, which contain around one hundred items of information: race
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