I was just listening to this week’s (2026-05-21) All In Podcast. David Friedberg said something that I found very interesting. He said that many people are distrustful of tech companies because of a perceived imbalance in power- namely, that technology creates an opportunity for a very small number of people to exercise an outsized amount of power. I’m writing this to explore how Friedberg’s observation either modifies or invalidates my previous assumptions about power.
There are different kinds of power: force, political, economic, and influence. Force is the “purest” form- it is the only one that does not require the target’s cooperation. It is the power to make someone do, or not do, something, whether or not they agree. Economic power, influence, and persuasion all work the other way: they get someone to choose to comply, and anything a person can choose, they can also refuse. Force is the form that works on someone who refuses. That is why most uses of power ultimately devolve to force, or to the threat of it- force is the floor that everything else stands on, the place power goes when every refusable method has been refused. A law is the clearest example: it is a stack of polite requests with force at the bottom- comply, or eventually men with guns will come to drag you to jail. Take the force away and a law is just a strongly worded suggestion. Economic power and influence sit a step further removed; they are used to “buy” political power, either through campaign finance or pressure campaigns- which is to say they are potential force, power that has not been cashed out yet but can be. Extortion and blackmail straddle the line between economic power and force directly. None of this means force is frequently used- most of the time it sits in the background. But it is always the backstop, the guarantee that holds when the softer forms fail, and the reason those softer forms work at all.
For a long time, I thought that one of the primary differences between people in the United States with left of center political views versus people with right of center political views was that left of center people trust government, but not private companies, and right of center people trust private companies, but not government. It’s actually even more subtle than that because left of center people are perfectly happy trusting large organizations that are outside government such as labor unions and NGOs.
My personal thoughts have been more “small L” libertarian. I am distrustful of all groups of people, in proportion to the size of the group, because groups centralize power in their leadership. Government centralizes power in an executive. Corporations and labor unions centralize power in an executive. NGOs centralize power with their donors and directors. I want to use the power of government to limit what other people can make me do.
My solution prescription was always twofold: (1) distribute government power as low as possible in the hierarchy; this was what the Founders envisioned with enumerated vs delegated powers- if a government doesn’t have a power, then that power can’t be bought. And (2) use taxes to limit size and power of organizations. Corporate income tax should be scaled (probably logarithmically) to both the number of employees in the organization and the organization’s market power- this would replace current antitrust law with a formula; the more market share you have, the more % of revenue you pay in tax. Investors and business leaders would reorganize accordingly.
Technology doesn’t break my rule of thumb so much as it forces me to add a term to it. My heuristic assumed that the power an organization could wield was a function of its size and its market share- that to amass a lot of power you needed a lot of people, and that the danger lay in how those people centralized their power in a leader. That is still true. But it was incomplete. Technology adds a third variable- leverage- that the first two don’t account for. A very small number of people- a founder, a handful of engineers- can now acquire power that used to require a government or a large corporation, not because size and market share stopped mattering, but because technological leverage is a separate multiplier that doesn’t depend on either. My old formula said that power scales with size and market share. The corrected formula says it scales with size, market share, and technological leverage- and that last term is the one that lets a tiny group punch far above its weight.
It is actually worse than that. Technology doesn’t just let a few people replicate the power of the many- it grants kinds of power that no group, at any size, could previously hold. Surveillance is the obvious example. Watching an entire population used to be impractical- it required an informant for every handful of citizens, and even then it was slow and incomplete and often inaccurate. A recommendation engine does it silently, completely, and for free. Influence is the subtler example, and it works in two ways. The direct way is subtractive- suppressing dissenting voices on the channels that a few companies control but that are used by many due to network effects. The indirect way is selective- shaping what people believe by shaping what they are shown. The second, labeled “Manufactured Consent” by Chomsky, is arguably more dangerous than the first precisely because it is invisible. There is no banned post to point to, only the things you were never offered. And influence, as I said earlier, does not stay influence. It is translated into political power, and political power is enforced by force.
Friedberg is right, and I’m pivoting my previous view slightly by taking “leverage” into account- so it’s not just about group size or market power, but it’s also about the leverage that technology gives you.
I think that my prescription is still valid but that I have to think more about how to make leverage a direct part of the formula. Leverage is kind of like market power but a little bit different; I’m going to have to think on that a while.