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The genius of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of Meta, the alleged new Facebook, was that it managed to be both disappointing and sinister at the same time. Backed by a series of lame effects, the Zuck announced a virtual world that sounded as gimmicky and unsatisfying as Second Life had been, but authored by an organisation which had the power to enforce it everywhere. 

The utterly uninspiring vision of Meta, like all such tech, draws on the utopian impulses which lurk in culture, in art, and in the very structure of human imagining and projection: that we can project worlds that are radically other to everyday life — and yet are still recognisable and meaningful — and able to be controlled and commodified.

The disappointment that has been widely expressed at this concept is due to what might be called the accumulated insufficiency of dreams. 

That is, any new techno-cultural system which offers the capacity for otherworlds will launch to huge effect, as it opens a new way of seeing and being — or semi-being — which offers the form of human life, but with a lightness, freedom and possibility that the ground-down drudgery of day-to-day human life frequently lacks.

Cinema was probably at its most powerful when it was black-and-white and silent, and the darkened space of the auditorium was halfway between individual and collective dreaming; poetry at its height, when the recounting of an oral epic could summon up the gods as real.

As the capacity for technology to instantiate that provisional world becomes more totalising, the capacity for it to truly wow us for long diminishes. 

But the launching of Meta as a Facebook salvation shows both how determined the company, and big tech, as a whole is to retain and extend control, and how impoverished is tech’s imagination of what that role might be. And it has come at a moment when the US government has finally moved to use its antitrust powers to address the power of big tech, as a series of de facto monopolies over whole areas of social life. 

The EU, Australia and other jurisdictions had turned their attention to monopoly effects of big tech some time ago — not always for the cleanest of reasons, as Australia’s News Corp driven policy demonstrates — but nothing much could happen of real effect until the US joined in.

This it did in the last months of the Trump administration, as big tech swung decisively against the Donald, with a series of lawsuits filed (by both the DOJ and multiple state attorneys-general it must be said) against the big five — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft; no one cares about Twitter — for monopolising search functions, e-commerce, and suppressing competition. 

Now, the Biden administration has shown its determination to go further, with the appointment of antitrust academic Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission this year, with a brief to renew aggressive antitrust law.

Khan’s academic work has been a critique of the interpretation of antitrust law that has held sway for 40 or so years, one governed by an ultra-free market Chicago school interpretation of human action.

This view — which emphasised the cost-benefit to consumers of de facto monopolies, rather than the fact of monopoly itself — more or less stalled the robust use of antitrust legislation on a grand scale.

The most high-profile case of that era — against Microsoft — was fought to a messy draw. Other de facto monopolies, such as Walmart, were allowed to run riot. Amazon, when it emerged, gained the same grace. Thus a 1970s change in legal regime decisively reshaped American life in every aspect. And ours too, by default. 

Biden has given Khan and others more power to go after the big five than many expected, with an executive order in July promoting “competition in the American workplace”, and a new antitrust spirit has bipartisan support, with Trumpist Republicans lining up against big tech (often describing it as “communist”) alongside progressive Democrats lining up against corporate America in general. 

That coalition will need to hang together for some time. Taking on the tech giants will be a truly massive undertaking. One of the things that killed effective antitrust prosecution was an antitrust lawsuit against IBM, which was thrown out of court in 1981, having begun, by some measures, in 1956, and running in full from 1969.

The failure showed how limited the effectiveness was of antitrust legislation that had been originally drafted in 1890 to an integrated tech economy, in which market dominance was being achieved not merely by explicit anti-competitive practices, but by the rapid universalisation of user-systems. Untangling that with regard to search engines, algorithms, etc, will take more than a decade, unless the government’s case is super-aggressive. 

And it may still fail, due to the deep structure of the tech revolution, which largely involves the creation of fortunes and corporations via the discovery of natural monopolies.

But these are not natural monopolies grounded in the physical world — one railroad tunnel through the mountains — but in the very structure of language and communication.

Obviously, a single “realm” of connection, in which everyone connects to everyone, is “better” (if that borderlessness is what is wanted, a dubious desire in itself) than multiple, Balkanised services.

Rather than a further break-up, on its own terms, the most efficient service would be one which combined Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and then plugged them into government services.

This “Big One” might have been the sort of thing that developed had the battle for democratic socialism been won in the post-war era — a public service, in which online interconnection was as uniform, public and general as the streets of a city. One can see the first form of that in services like France’s Minitel (adopted by the UK as Teletext), which worked through the TV and phone system in the pre-PC age. 

The true aim of the left in these decade-long disputes should be not the breaking-up of platform capitalism but the overall socialisation of it, intact. The left is co-operating with the right in attempts to restrain the big five through state action, both because the techno-social form by which they operate not only facilitates, but produces, the angry, isolated, asocial world that underlies a new hard-right politics.

But one effect of such a break-up — as it is with the break-up rather than socialisation of big banks — is to “re-set” capitalism to an earlier period of accumulation, slow down technical change that drives towards free association and near-zero-cost production, and thus restore capitalism’s faltering profit ratio. 

Thus the world would have been very different if even one of these techpreneurs had had the decency of a Tim Berners-Lee, and just at some point socialised their innovations to be run by some interconnecting authority of state, public and citizen bodies.

That didn’t happen, and one tempting possibility is surely to let the right run with the antitrust stuff, fail, see the tech giants totalise their control until it becomes “obvious” that such organisations are in no sense private entities, and must be socialised.

But that of course relies on the gamble that there would be a sense of public life remaining, in which that struggle could be staged. The whole purpose of something like Zuckerberg’s “Metaverse” is to wholly own public space.

If one way to define “evil” is as the systemic abolition of the full humanity of others — in this case, through the total commodification of experience and relationships — then the conception of the Metaverse is really the intrinsic evil of capitalism being presented in its purest, most weightless form.

It is producing evil, megalomania, in a group of people who would not have been so in other contexts. The only way that big tech could live up to Google’s quaint early motto “Don’t be evil” would be to dissolve itself in its current form.

That is not going to happen, and their project will come into crisis eventually. Until then, antitrust suits may buy us some time to challenge them — but the later struggle, decades down the track, will be a more decisive and categorical one. Zucks to be us.