Big Tech can beat political parties at their own game
Elon Musk does not need to launch the “America party” — he already owns the tools to herd individuals into a critical mass
One could be forgiven for being sceptical of Elon Musk’s recent announcement that he will launch the “America party” in order to “give you back your freedom”. The last time Musk claimed to act on such lofty impulses, he spent a mind-boggling $44bn to acquire Twitter, only to see between 50 and 80 per cent of that money temporarily evaporate as what used to be a lively public square turned into a cesspool where users have to sift through torrents of waste in order to retrieve anything of value.
In retrospect, however, we may have got the Twitter acquisition wrong. It is increasingly obvious that Musk wasn’t interested in curating a free marketplace of ideas. What he saw in the platform was a formidable reserve of raw political energy, which needed only to be tapped, mobilised, and channelled into the political cycle. By acquiring Twitter, Musk bought himself a political party — potentially the biggest in existence.
Of course, the “America party” may never materialise and remain as much of a stunt as the prospect of colonising Mars. But its creation would only officialise what is already reality. It is the latest development in the evolution of Big Tech from a position of neutrality at the margins of American politics to its decisive role in pushing it towards the alt-right.
The politicisation of Big Tech started in 2015, when Airbnb fought off Proposition F, a ballot initiative meant to cap short-term rentals to remedy the housing crisis in San Francisco. Airbnb didn’t just pour millions into the campaign against Proposition F: it tapped its trove of data to churn out “Airbnb voters” almost overnight. The company relied on tested canvassing techniques but turbocharged them with the razor-sharp targeting of voters made possible by the capillary information it had about its users. Inaugurating a script that would soon extend to crypto and AI, it claimed a “victory for the middle class” while defending the interests of venture capitalists, shareholders and property owners.
The defeat of Proposition F was a pivotal moment. Tech companies realised they could beat political parties at their own game. Traditionally parties aggregate social interests and mobilise them during election cycles. But as class cleavages align less and less with ideological commitments, they have become “catch-all” machines increasingly competing for the same electorate. This is precisely what platforms do better: they can directly reach out to millions of voters and organise them into a critical mass on any given issue.
The America party wouldn’t be the first political party dependent on a digital infrastructure. Until 2019, the populist Five Star Movement in Italy was powered by a digital platform that allowed party members to take part in institutional decisions such as selecting election candidates. The platform wasn’t superimposed on to the structures of the party: it was its backbone. Provided by a company that previously sold workforce-management software, it stood for the virtues of decentralised participation while allowing for unprecedented levels of centralised control. In the 2018 national elections, the Five Star movement got the most votes and defeated well-established parties.
The limitation of the Five Star platform was that it strictly overlapped with party membership. This is not the case with X. Musk could grow a party or a movement from a social network counting over 100mn users in the US alone. In effect, the America party already exists, with every X user a potential member. Trump is wrong to see it as a third party with bleak prospects (and, being its first successful candidate, he should know better). It could be capable of colonising entire sectors of the Republican and even Democratic parties, and of acting either through them or on its own. This is not politics as usual.
Traditional parties brought people together around collective interests and common values. Their decline predated the advent of Big Tech. But they are now being eviscerated by the direct control platforms exercise over political socialisation. Private companies characterised by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power get to decide what is politicised, when and how.
The America party, or something like it, would be one further step in this privatisation of politics. Its pretence of giving power back to the people is a sham for herding isolated individuals through sophisticated algorithms. It will be democratic in the same way the old Stalinist parties practised “democratic centralism” — except this time it will be in the interest of an infinitesimally small and yet immensely powerful class of oligarchs.