You wake up and trudge to work at a job making someone else money, listening to news spewing tales of woe; thinking, “Government is useless, just other kinds of greedy men in suits.” Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Except this is 1873, not 2022, and the internet hasn’t even been imagined yet. This is the era Mark Twain called the Gilded Age; Gilded means that an object is not made of gold (golden) but merely surfaced with gold to give the appearance of grandeur. The term came to symbolize the period when capitalists became enormously wealthy at the expense of the increasingly impoverished lower classes.

The Gilded Age of American history was a time of unprecedented economic expansion as mechanization powered by coal and oil became the norm. The technology powering factories and assembly lines had never been seen before.

Oil, steel, fertilizer, and dynamite vastly increased worker efficiency and expanded what could be done. The great railroads were laid down across the United States, when great opportunities existed for those Industrial Capitalists bold enough to seize them... and when the word Capitalist became an epithet. A class spoken of in anger, fear, and envy – becoming known to the world as Robber Barons.

These industrial corporations, the largest economic entities in America, swallowed competition, gorged on hoarded resources, and devoured the economic landscape. If they could not eliminate their competition, they conspired to form trusts to keep prices high and themselves on top.

2021 has seen the US wealth concentration surpass the peak of the Gilded Age. The Industrialists of old produced goods through industry, requiring control of land to extract resources like iron, coal, and oil. The mega-giants of tech today do not strive to control the land. They seek a different prize in the Information Age, data.

They produce services derived from direct access to the mountains of data each person on the internet litters along their path. It’s freely available for anyone to process, but what good is raw information? It must be rendered, and no one can compete with the behemoths in data processing power. So they continue to extract insights from monopolized access to the marketing insights of processed data to sell targeted ads fired like guided missiles, exploding dopamine in our brains, screaming “Buy now!”

Big Tech has accumulated massive wealth by exploiting the data produced by using the information network of the Internet. By operating as monopolies, the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have reached the reckoning. It took government intervention to reign in the corporate excesses of the Gilded Age, will the time come again?

Notes

Author

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Bankless DAO. He is the creator of Fight Club’s contributor onboarding process, is the Content Director of Bankless Academy, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.

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This is essay 1 of 4 for the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort

Title image created with MidJourney AI