2019 was a year we talked – a lot – about big tech. Alas, the much-expected “techlash” has not materialized: Silicon Valley still stands unscathed.

This might, of course, change in 2020, especially under a president like Elizabeth Warren. It’s easy to mistake her populist stance – let’s just break up the tech giants! – for some kind of leftism; it isn’t. Hers is a mere repetition of the (neo)liberal creed that well-policed, competitive markets will yield prosperity.

Little by little, big tech’s veneer of invincibility is starting to crack

A Warren-style critique of big tech accepts, as a matter of fact, that some “smaller tech” is on the horizon. This populist account rests on a powerful myth of domestic politics gone wrong. It presents the rise of big tech as a series of policy errors by distracted or corrupt technocratic regulators, not the result of careful policy planning by a different set of Washington elites, keen to use every tool in their arsenal to consolidate America’s power globally.

Focused almost entirely on domestic affairs, the Warren-style account rarely situates big tech alongside big money – Saudi Arabia, SoftBank and JP Morgan – and big state – the Pentagon, with its massive contracting orders, and the NSA, with its massive spying apparatus. Positioned properly inside this troika, big tech emerges as an almost inevitable consequence of global financialized and militarized capitalism.

Not surprisingly, this account remains blind to the real reason American big tech is not smaller: big money and the big state need it to remain big. The former to make sure Wall Street can recoup its loss-making investments, the latter to ensure that America’s defense and intelligence needs are met swiftly, efficiently and on the cheap.