The Rulers

A brilliant analysis of capital accumulation in the AI era that charts a roadmap for battling against the predatory concentration of knowledge, data and narratives in the hands of Big Tech, by award winning economist.

Capitalism’s rulers are not abstract entities or shadowy operators. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the cloud hegemons that subsume the world through the exercise of their intellectual monopolies. Giants like Disney, McDonalds, Nike or Walmart depend on them to use AI for knowledge and value extraction and for disciplining workers. States see some of their core functions sequestered. Innovation is not a free and neutral game, but a hierarchy topped by the rulers.

Rikap’s new theoretical framework is grounded in a unique trove of 112 interviews at the world’s largest firms and data on venture capital, acquisitions, open source, AI conferences and patents. They picture a map of the complexities and political implications of corporate power. In Rikap’s counterimage, technology is developed by the people and for the people and the planet through democratic planning.

Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor in Economics and Head of Research at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is also a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. She is the author of Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (Routledge), which recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition, and The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order (Palgrave), the latter co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall.