Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good

A fascinating look at how the Space Barons and Techtitans--heads of companies like Uber, Amazon, Tesla--have hijacked technology, preventing it from being used on behalf of the common good and profiting from the politics of fear and consumerism.

The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future

At the dawn of the digital revolution, the internet was going to be the great equalizer, a global democratic force. Instead, with the money printed electronically to bail out banks, Wall Street ended up funding a new breed of serial capitalists, the Techtitans, who embraced rapid, transformational change while stripping their workers of rights and enriching themselves beyond anybody’s wildest imagination; and the Space Barons, who mine new frontiers for precious resources. Then came the gig-economy, another supposed digital equalizer, where everybody was his or her own boss, but it was just another illusion.

Tech pioneers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft never had any intention of spreading democracy. Those who control and own the technology are the absolute masters. As artificial intelligence enters the labor market, companies like Uber are able to cut labor costs to the barest of minimums, by squeezing workers’ privileges and rights.

In Technocapitalism, Napoleoni describes these phenomena as the genesis of a new paradigm, born in a period of extraordinary change in which the acceleration of transformational change has caused a dizzying, anxiety-induced paralysis from the FTX collapse to AI, private space companies to the war in Ukraine, from inflation to the dirty environmental truth of EV car batteries. Technological transformation is occurring at a speed that is existentially unbearable for most of us. We must fight for our common good to address today’s real challenges of global warming and militarism and the soulessness of capitalist endeavor. Napoleoni shows us how.

LORETTA NAPOLEONI was born in Rome, and in the mid 1970s she became an active member of the Italian feminist movement and of the student movement. A Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics, in the early 1980s she began her professional career as an economist in Hungary, Russia and the city of London. In the mid 1990s, when she was one of the people chosen by the Red Brigades to relate their story, she began analysing terrorism collecting information, data and interviewing several armed groups. In 2003 she published Terror Incorporated, the first comprehensive book on the financing of terrorism, and she began consulting governments and international organizations on this topic. Among her many achievements, Napoleoni served as Chairman of the countering terrorism financing group of the Club de Madrid, lectured at the Judge Business School in Cambridge on business ethics, was a TED and TEDx speaker, and sat on the board of the Journalism Fund Europe for financing investigative and independent journalism. Napoleoni is an international speaker and a contributor to several newspapers including El Pais, La Repubblica, and the Chicago Tribune. She is also a commentator for BBC, Sky, CNN and many other media outlets. She is the author of several international bestsellers including Rogue Economics, Maonomics, and Terror Nation. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.