 A lot of people in our circles have a love-hate relationship with big tech companies, with the technology sector. On the one hand, I mean, we all appreciate how technology allows groups like the Mises Institute to spread information, to popularize our message, to communicate our ideas way beyond what was possible back in the days of Mises and Hayek and Rothbard. I personally feel invested in this. I mean, I remember the very first Mises Institute website, which came online in 1995. This is the oldest version I could find on the way back machine from the fall of 1996. It was brilliantly designed by the Institute's very first webmaster, myself. We've come a long way, baby, as they say. But at the same time, a lot of us feel that the dominant tech platforms and organizations of 2023 can also play a negative role in terms of how they affect our culture, our society, our politics, maybe to the extent that something should be done to try to constrain tech firms from having this kind of influence, in particular. And this leads me to the title of the talk. There's a concern that tech firms are one of the primary drivers of what might broadly be called woke ideology, woke ideas, woke-ism, woke politics, and that maybe some constraint on the technology sector would make it more difficult for woke ideas to propagate through our culture and our society. Now, what do I mean by woke? It's very interesting. I mean, the term woke began to emerge within the last couple of decades. It mainly came out of the African-American community as sort of a slang term for people who were more politically aware, politically progressive. It's a term that was initially embraced by people promoting a particular set of views or promoting the interests of particular communities. There are lots of children's books that we're trying to explain woke ideas and encourage people to be woke. But what I think is fascinating really just almost in the last year or so, the term has become much more of a pejorative. Or rather, the term is embraced more widely now by people who are opposed to woke ideas and woke ideology. I mean, there's a whole slew of books published in the last two or three years. My people like what's his name, Ramaswami, who's running for president. Chris Rufo just had a book came out that's even just a few weeks ago, that's supposed to be a devastating takedown of woke-ism and politics and culture and higher ed. So now I mean woke, I think people who would identify as woke today are less likely to use that term because it's sort of shifted from something to be proud of to kind of more of an insult. And you could even say there's a little bit of a woke backlash in our culture. I started writing about this issue and giving some talks about it two, three years ago and I've sort of changed my framing here because now it's almost everybody's anti-woke now. Whereas a couple years ago that was not the case. For example, look at recent Hollywood movies and Disney remakes and so forth. There's a lot of concern, even among sort of the average consumer, the average moviegoer, the average consumer of media that for example big studios and so forth are bending over backward to try to artificially promote things that don't make sense, like the Lord of the Rings series that came out last year. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings as an alternative fantasy history of Northern Europe, primarily Germanic speaking peoples. So I mean, yes, of course, the story has, it's a universal story in many ways but it was set in a particular historical context and sort of to rip that out and create sort of a strange multicultural world of Middle Earth. I mean, in many ways it seems a bizarre use of the source material. Even the new Barbie movie, which I haven't seen, apparently is not like a fun kids movie but is some kind of an allegory about the patriarchy. I'm not totally sure but a lot of the reviews of Barbie, sort of even mainstream viewers think this is a little bit silly. Okay, now I do think despite the fact that woke has become a much more elastic term, I think you can give a precise definition of woke. I've done so in some of my writings and been criticized for it but I think there is a historical intellectual, if we look at the literature, a way to make sense of woke and define it fairly precisely. So wokeness, as it has been used by its adherents, refers to a set of ideas, practices, beliefs that embrace a primary concern with what you might call social justice, especially as related to issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity and so forth. Now the woke movement, woke politics as we see it in contemporary discourse, did not just emerge overnight, it is rooted, deeply rooted in a philosophical tradition that goes back many, many decades, especially to the so-called Frankfurt School, people like Theodore Adorno for example, and also from French post-modernist thought, Foucault and other writers in the post-modernist tradition, what in philosophy is called critical theory. So nowadays especially because the term critical race theory has become embroiled in these contemporary debates, some people argue, oh there's no such thing as critical theory or critical theory is an obscure doctrine taught in certain, you know, in the philosophy departments, but it has no impact on sort of regular discourse, that's not at all true. I mean critical theory is a recognized tradition within philosophy and cultural studies, and it underlies most of what constitutes woke discourse today, which includes features such as the following, right, an emphasis on subjective personal experience over, you know, sort of logical argument and data, so when you hear people say things like speak your truth, what they mean is, you know, if you feel it inside, if you feel that society operates in a certain way or you're being treated in a certain way, you know, no kind of data or evidence or argument that someone else could bring to the discussion is relevant, it's all about your sort of inner perception and subjective interpretation of reality. Mises, Mises called this polylogism, polylogism is, you know, is the idea that there are different logics among people, you know, Europeans have a logic and Asians have a logic and Africans have a logic or men think logically one way and women think logically a different way and there's no such thing as universal principles, you can't reason from first principles across different groups. Each group has its own, you know, kind of reasoning method, its own sort of logic. Result of this is the idea that as it's often expressed in critical theory, that all truth is positional, meaning that arguments are not about establishing the truth or falsity of some statement, but about establishing a power relationship or, you know, the person who's making the argument is seeking to obtain power over the person who is receiving the argument, right? So we cannot evaluate truth claims independent of the sort of political or social power held by the different people making the arguments, right? So you can see this is completely different from what Austrian economists have in mind when they engage in praxeology, for example, understood as a set of universal principles to which, you know, that all people can in principle assent to or agree to. There's also a strong emphasis placed not on individual characteristics, but on characteristics of the group and on social structures, right? So a famous example of this was the Anti-Defamation League changed its definition of racism. I don't have the exact text in front of me, but the old definition was something like, you know, personal feelings of hatred towards members of other racial groups, and that definition was changed to, you know, a system, a set of systems and structures that privilege white people. So it's not about, you know, an attitude of the heart from one person to another, it's about social structures that lead to certain kind of economic and political outcomes. So terms that you hear now, like structural racism, right, or the patriarchy or intersectionality, these are references to how group characteristics give certain advantages to members of some groups at the expense of members of other groups, and each of us can, you know, be parts of different groups at the same time, and our identities can interact in different ways. So whenever you hear people on your college campus, you know, emphasize the word identity, right? What are your identities? You know, what are your pronouns? Tell us which groups you identify with. That's a means of establishing your affiliation with different groups for purposes of figuring out, you know, where you are in the hierarchy of power, how privileged are you, as opposed to how oppressed you are, which is also another key aspect of this sort of woke ideology is that, you know, we always look at relationships among people in terms of an oppressor victim dynamic. One group is seeking to oppress another group, and we can only understand, you know, even logical arguments in this term. This is, this view is sometimes termed cultural Marxism, meaning that it is a form of Marxism, right, but where Marx was looking primarily at economic relations, right, that the capitalist class exercises power over and exploits the labor class, right? So now you would say, well, the class of males oppresses the class of females, or cisgendered people oppress transgendered people, or members of this racial group oppress that other racial group. This is the complete opposite of what was mentioned, I think it was Professor Rittenauer in his lecture tomorrow, of Mies's view about how, you know, private property, free exchange, division of labor encourages cooperation among members of different groups, different groups. The cultural Marxist view holds that groups are always essentially in conflict with each other. It's always about who's winning and who's losing. Wokeness also includes what Murray Rothbard described as the Whig theory of history, or what others, I think Herbert Butterfield was the one who coined that phrase. The Whig theory of history is the idea attributed to a group of English intellectuals who were called the Whigs, intellectuals and political activists, not the same thing as the American Whig party in the 18th century, 18th and 19th centuries. The Whigs had the view that, you know, there's sort of an inexorable upward march of progress in history. You know, things are always getting better. Economic conditions, political conditions, social conditions are always a state of improvement over what came before. You see that a little bit in the way that woke people look at the past. You know, the past is always worse. There was more oppression. There was more exploitation, whatever. You know, people in the medieval era were not really chivalrous. They were really horrible and they, you know, lived a terrible life, etc., etc. But when you hear people say, okay, you, you're on the wrong side of history. You need to come with us and be on the right side of history. What is the side of history? Right? It's the idea that history is going in one direction whether you like it or not. You know, you can either get on the train or get off the train, but the path of the train is already predetermined. Okay, so even people who have never read, you know, Foucault or are not familiar with the Frankfurt School philosophy, but use this kind of language are implicitly embracing the ideology and philosophical origins of wokeness. I just saw two or three days ago an article in a mainstream management journal, a highly ranked one called the Journal of Management Studies. I've published in that journal before. This appeared on July 23rd. It's called Me, the Patriarchy and the Business School. And it's written by a professor who says, this essay is a call to action to dismantle the patriarchal system which thrives in academia and business schools in particular. Now get this, building on my personal experience of being a woman in academia since 1989 and using an analogy of death by a million cuts, I outline how enmeshed and embedded the patriarchy is and the impact this has had on one's career, health and well-being. While acknowledging that changing and dismantling a system as enshrined as the patriarchy is not an easy task, I offer some solutions, etc., which focus on challenging and changing the patriarchal system structures, power dynamics, cultures and norms resulting in a reimagined business school, one which is kinder, fairer and more collaborative for all genders, etc., etc. There's another part where the author confesses her privileges. It's important to stress that I have many privileges with which other academics do not share. I am white, heterosexual and cisgendered and so forth. So I mean this is kind of the archetype of a woke academic article, right? It's about the research technique is auto ethnography, right? The author writes about her personal experiences and perceptions. That's the source, that's the data source, not, you know, praxeological style reasoning, not empirical, not any kind of systematic empirical analysis. It talks about systems and structures. It has an activist tone. It's not seeking to understand or interpret reality as Dr. Newman put it in the last session, the way Austrians do in causal realist analysis. It's about political activism, changing the culture of the business school. It involves a confession of the author's group memberships and positional advantages thereof and so forth. I also want to point out some critics of the anti-woke backlash claim that no one was talking about these things until the last year or two when, you know, Governor DeSantis in Florida, for example, went on an anti-woke crusade, that critics of woke have created a straw man, that none of these things were really part of the conversation until the anti-woke activists made it out that they were. But I mean, I don't think that's really true either. I mean, if you just look, here's a Google engram, right? I mean, starting going from 1970 to almost the present. I mean, you know, critical theory is not just an obscure idea understood by a tiny handful of specialists. I mean, we see more reference to critical theory and the scholarly and popular literature. Intersectionality became a term in the late 90s and its use has radically expanded in the 2010s, 2015s, long before Chris Rufo or Ron DeSantis or any of these people started talking about wokeness. You see about these other terms too. So there really is such a thing as wokeness and its proponents were chugging along merrily until it kind of got into the public spotlight. Now they're a little bit worried and they're trying to retrench somewhat and respond to some of the criticisms. Okay. It might not surprise us that some Marxist professor is a proponent of these ideas, right? But why do we see for-profit businesses like Disney or Amazon, why would they embrace woke ideas? Why is it the case that in every February, is it February or is it March? I forget now. Yeah, June, sorry. Every Pride Month, I can't even remember. Every Pride Month, you know, Fortune 500 companies around the world changed their logo to the Pride logo except in Middle Eastern countries where they don't. You know, what is it? Is it the case that the decision makers in these organizations are, you know, Frankfurt School philosophers or that they're extremely woke individuals? I think that's probably not the case. While among the general public, you know, managers, employees, computer programmers, executives, yeah, there's probably some more sympathy to woke ideas now than there was 20, 30, 40 years ago because it's become part of our culture. It seems unlikely that all of a sudden there was a rapid shift in the personal ideology of all the decision makers at these companies. So what else could be going on? Well, a number of explanations have been given that you might describe as instrumental motives for organizations like companies and universities and so forth to become woke. By instrumental motives, I mean, these are things that these organizations think is in their interest. You know, for a company, it'll make them more profitable. For a university, they can rise in the university rankings or whatever, even if the decision makers themselves are not personally committed to woke ideology, but they think, hey, it would be good for us to look and sound woke, right? Is that possible? Could that be going on? Well, one, you know, it could be the case that, you know, key stakeholders like customers and investors and some employees, right, or for universities, the faculty, the donors, the students are themselves increasingly woke. And so companies, universities, other organizations are just responding to a shift in demand. Okay. I mean, it's possible, but there's no, there's no empirical evidence that I'm aware of to suggest that this is primarily a demand driven phenomenon. Now in the mixed economy, all organizations, of course, have to deal with government intervention. And so it could be that companies and universities think, okay, if we act more woke, that will buy us some protection from political interference, right? The powers that be will not come down as hard on us if they feel like we're, you know, progressive or whatever than if we're more, you know, conservatives. I mean, that's certainly possible. There's some argument that, you know, there's pressure from, you know, external investors, you know, BlackRock and other, you know, sort of pension funds and big investment funds that themselves are maybe ideologically driven, and they're imposing their vision on the companies in which they have substantial equity stakes. I mean, I think some of that's probably going on. But another sort of underappreciated mechanism is that I think to many top decision makers, like executives at companies, universities, I mean, wokeness to them is kind of confusing. They don't really understand it. They're probably older, you know, that demographic skews older and male and they don't feel super comfortable with woke language and so forth. The main thing they want to avoid is getting in trouble. They don't want to be canceled, right? They don't want their company to be boycotted. They don't want their university to be on the front page of the New York Times for some, you know, some incident where someone acted in a politically incorrect manner. So they enforced a lot of kind of woke norms just to try to stay out of the headlines and hopefully not get themselves in trouble. Now they can backfire, of course. We're seeing in some U.S. states like Florida and Texas, Alabama, attempts by legislators to come down hard on their state universities for being too woke. So, you know, that's a dangerous game to play because you never know what the political authorities will want. They can change their minds very frequently. You know, as a result of these kinds of mechanisms and institutional pressures, you know, what we've seen over the last decade is a huge explosion in things like, for example, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion expenditures at companies and universities, you know, DEI training sessions. Those of you who are college students, I'm sure you've been, unless you go to Grove City or Cornerstone or maybe a few other places, you've probably had mandatory DEI training at your school. All professors have, and companies have, you know, greatly expanded their spending on hiring DEI consultants. I mean, to get, you know, Robin DiAngelo to come in and speak to your company for an hour costs, you know, I don't know, 50 grand or something. So there's a huge DEI industry of consultants and people who produce material. There's a huge number of DEI officers hired within companies and universities. Although there is some pushback against this. There's a little bit of a retrenchment. I just saw, this is July 21. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal called The Rides and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer, which provides some data that companies have, the fewer companies now are giving someone the title of CDO compared to a few years ago. It doesn't prove that the function doesn't exist, but it's being slightly deprioritized or de-emphasized by not having someone called Chief Diversity Officer. You see, where you mostly see woke corporate activity is in areas like marketing and public relations and to some degree HR, right? So companies are, of course, partnering with woke organizations and, you know, the pride logos on their social media feeds and so forth. Also, in terms of philanthropy and political lobbying, corporations and universities have greatly increased their attempts to give money to woke nonprofits and to promote woke political figures and so forth. Now, I myself have done some writing on this topic where I've offered a slightly different explanation for why organizations are going woke and it has to do with the managerial structure of large organizations. There's a couple of articles there, one that's coming out in Academy of Management Perspectives, another one that's coming out in a book called A Book on Strategy. In these articles, we propose an explanation that says that woke ideology primarily comes from the middle level of the company or the organization. It's not the top executives. It's not the top decision makers, the CEO or the president of the university. It's not rank and file employees or students or parents. It's the sort of, you know, at a university, it's the second assistant vice provost for diversity, equity, inclusion. You know, what is it on the office? You know, assistant to the general manager. It's like the low level managerial, mid-level managerial function mostly in the HR department that is promoting DEI training and making sure that all the organization's messaging looks woke and so forth. And part of their argument for that is that middle managers can make their own positions more secure. They can entrench themselves, make it less likely that they'll be fired. They can increase their budgets, their span of control by promoting this particular ideology, an ideology that only they understand really well. And they can use that as a way to make their positions more secure. When this article coming out in Academy of Management Perspectives, we put it on a pre-print site called SSRN where working papers are shared in advance of publication. And it sat there for a while. But then somebody at the Wall Street Journal discovered it. And this spring, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article, this guy Dave Seminara, March 6th. He wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal based on our paper called Employees Terrorize Their Bosses Into Going Woke, which is a little bit more spicy than how we expressed it in this, you know, sort of academic article. And then it sort of took off and exploded. Ben Shapiro did a podcast referring to the Wall Street Journal article and our paper. There was an article in Fortune, Fox News did a thing. You know, our university PR office started getting inquiries because these articles say, well, according to a Baylor University study, blah, blah, blah. You know, usually my university is delighted when it gets inquiries from the media. This time I think it was not so delighted. A fellow academic wrote of our paper, this is what happens when peer review fails. Our article was peer reviewed, of course. She was quoting an anonymous blogger who was referring to the Wall Street Journal article, who said, wait, but this is not really published. The journal article is just a PDF, some business school weirdos uploaded, which I have to say, okay, I resemble that remark. But it's not just an uploaded PDF. It actually is published in a peer reviewed journal, but you upload the PDF to the preprint site. This guy doesn't even know what an academic article is. But why do we think that wokeness could be a means for middle managers to entrench themselves? One of the things we've observed is, again, there's no evidence from survey data or other sources of secondary information or from primary data that owners and boards and top executives of organizations, presidents of universities and so forth, have all of a sudden become more woke. That doesn't seem to make sense. Employees tend to be fairly skeptical about DEI training, for instance. And there's quite a bit of evidence, even among mainstream scholars, that DEI training doesn't really improve, you know, race relations, for example, or gender relations within organizations. It actually has a tendency to make them slightly worse. There's a guy named Frank Dobbin at Harvard, who's one of the leading expert on analysis of diversity programs. And you see a lot of articles like this, this one's from Harvard Business Review. So what DEI training tends to do is it sort of makes people more aware of what in woke ideology are irreconcilable differences among groups. And it makes people more suspicious of people in other groups, because now they see conflict where previously they saw opportunities for cooperation and coordination. So a lot of companies are rethinking their DEI spending. The main beneficiary of these programs, we argue, is mainly middle managers like HR professionals and some people in the marketing department and so forth. So the argument is that top executives, as I mentioned, top decision makers, they don't really understand all this woke stuff, but they don't want to get in trouble. So by delegating a lot of authority, big budgets and a lot of decision responsibility to their lower level, you know, DEI program managers, they buy themselves some plausible deniability. Like, hey, you know, we gave a lot of money to our DEI staff to do their thing. If it didn't work, it's not our fault, right? I mean, they must have done something wrong. Or you can't come blame us for being whatever kind of unprogressive company you think we are because look how much we're spending on DEI, look how much power we've given to these woke middle managers. One other characteristic of entrenchment, right, is groups, people in groups trying to become more entrenched, they will promote like specialized obscure language, like, you know, coded language that regular people don't understand, but only they do. I don't think Dr. Newman pointed this out, but some people have accused, you know, scientists and neoclassical economists, for example, of, you know, using obscure terminology where more standard terminology would be more appropriate because, you know, it makes you part of the priesthood, right? It's like, you know, if we only do the liturgy in Latin rather than the vernacular, then you have to be a priest trained in Latin to be able to understand, you know, the liturgy. I'm not making any religious claim about what the liturgy should be. I'm just using that as an illustration of a common argument you find in social science, this, you know, sort of, we want to establish a specialized priesthood. Will you see that in the area of wokeness and diversity training? I mean, look at all the words that regular people struggle with, but are totally common in, you know, diversity training manuals, like, you know, not equality but equity. Anti-racism, which is not the same thing as not being racist. Most people understand this, oh yeah, I know what it means to be a racist, I'm not like that, I'm not racist, oh yeah, but are you anti-racist? I'm not, isn't that the same thing? No, that's something completely different. You know, fragility, white fragility, male fragility, cis fragility, most people don't know what that means. Even the term cis, normal people have never used the word cis, but in this literature, it's like in every sentence, it's just totally common that, well, you know, cis people this and what if that is a cis person? Most people don't know. Or some of the weird acronyms like BIPOC, Black Indigenous Person of Color, BAME, Black Asian, I can't remember what the M in the E are, URM underrepresented minority, our university distinguishes between BIPOC and URM, so Asians are BIPOC but not URM, it's very confusing. You know, you've heard of the term Latin X for Hispanic persons because you don't want Latina, Latino because that's a gender binary and there have been many studies, at least of Hispanic, people of Hispanic origin in the U.S., you know, only like 2% of them know what Latin X is and none of them identify as being Latin X, but in the academic literature, you only see the term Latin X. I've even seen Philippine X, which I guess is the same thing, you know, terms like intersectionality, performativity, heteronormativity, dead naming someone, committing a microaggression. Again, these are not common English words that most people would understand, so when you hear someone lecturing you, maybe I should say hectoring you, using this kind of language, it's intimidating and you feel like, well, they must know what they're talking about, I must have done something really bad, I don't understand what it is, but that can be another sort of tool of entrenchment. Okay, so, you know, how does big tech figure into all this, right, is, you know, one sort of empirical, I mean, I call it a puzzle, but it's just a sort of phenomenon to think about is that woke behaviors in companies and organizations appear to be more, they appear more frequently in some industries. So, if you look at for-profit companies, you know, wokeness seems to be more prominent in entertainment, journalism, education, finance, technology, less so in manufacturing or energy or transportation or many kind of services, right? So, manufacturing companies are not doing as much DEI training as financial services companies or media companies. Okay, so why is that? I mean, one explanation is that some of these industries, like tech companies and entertainment companies, have been extremely financially successful, which in a sense allows them to hire a bunch of employees who are not really contributing to the bottom line. You can afford to have non-productive employees that do, you know, promote woke stuff and change the logos and all that because it doesn't hurt you that much. You could argue that maybe those firms face a higher regulatory burden, although it's not clear that that would explain why the energy sector, for example, is not woke. You know, maybe there's self-selection, woke people don't want to work on the oil rig, you know, in the Gulf of Mexico, they prefer to work at Apple or Google or Disney, and that could be true also of managers and investors. So what are big tech firms doing specifically? Well, I mean, you might think, gosh, big tech firms are themselves kind of victims of wokeness, right? There's a lot of pressure from government actors to make tech firms act more woke. Maybe they have a lot of woke employees that they have to please. I used this example in my talk last year, but there was an infamous case. There was a leaked video of an all-hands meeting at Google right after the 2016 election results were announced when it was announced that Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton. There was a meeting out if you can see there's Sergei Brin and what's the other guy, the two founders of Google. What's the other guy saying? Yeah, Larry Page. There's Larry Page and Sergei Brin on the left and what's his name? Pinchall, the current CEO of Google and other top executives. They basically had a crying session where everyone was in tears and employees were like, well, what can we do? And the top Google officials, you know, we don't know how this could have happened. How are we going to survive the next four years, you know, under the Trump administration? I mean, it seems like a weird thing for a company to do. I mean, and of course, the fact that they did it indicates that they knew or believed probably correctly that not many of their employees were Trump supporters, right? So we've got to do something to help our people get through the trauma, right? They probably weren't doing that on the oil rigs, for example. There was a guy named James DeMore you may have heard of as a Google engineer who leaked a memo that he had written. He posted something on an internal message board criticizing woke hiring practices. He was immediately fired. Then he went on the media circuit has become sort of a celebrity. His argument was, you know, I'm like the only, I'm one of the few anti-woke people in a tech company. The ideology among the workforce is extremely, extremely biased. And so again, as I said, this might lead tech firms to delegate a lot of authority to middle managers that could then be abused, right? So maybe tech companies are suffering from wokeness just like other companies might be. But on the other hand, it seems plausible to argue that tech firms, big tech firms in particular like social media platforms are among the primary drivers of the spread of woke ideology. We already talked about Netflix and Disney and so forth, you know, content creators, providers, distributors tend to prioritize no more woke content over other kinds of content. You know, social media companies, online retailers, payment providers, you know, it's well known that you can get cut off, you know, at least in the pre-musc era, you would get your Twitter canceled or whatever if you express certain forbidden, you know, politically disfavored opinions on on election integrity or vaccines or whatever you get your accounts canceled or you get your YouTube demonetized, you could get cut off by your bank and so forth. You know, one of the things that we know, like from the Twitter files, for example, we have more evidence now of how closely executives at Twitter and Facebook and other platforms were working hand in hand with the FBI, with the CIA, with the Biden administration, you know, weekly meetings to discuss which accounts would be banned and, you know, what views would be promoted and what views would be suppressed and so forth. So clearly, you know, tech firms were participants, presumably willing participants in attempts to, well, I mean, for lack of a better term, to create and spread disinformation. Right? I mean, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, I mean, it's just it's just absolutely absurd. And I think everyone now recognizes that, well, yeah, there was there was there was no evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian propaganda and should not have been suppressed. Why was it suppressed? Because a group of ex CIA and national security officials wrote a letter to the social media and established media companies and said, this is Russian propaganda, you must suppress the story. And they did. Okay. You know, the latest thing now, of course, is the where did COVID come from? Right? So we now know that Dr. Fauci and others who controlled the distribution of research funds in virology were working closely with the media and with the Biden administration to try to make sure that that any any claims on social media that COVID had the COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, that that would be suppressed, that those stories would be killed, would be dismissed as fringe propaganda or whatever. And now there's some court cases where a bunch of emails have leaked out. Apparently, some lawyers accidentally leaked some unredacted emails, where we have Fauci saying to the authors of this one article, Hey, what can we do to suppress the lab leak theory? And the scientists are saying, well, our evidence suggests it maybe could have come from a lab. But hell, yeah, how can we work with you to make sure that story gets buried? Because for political reasons, we don't want that story spread. So I mean, clearly, tech companies, especially social media platforms, are participants in efforts to distort flows of information for political advantage. Okay, why are they doing that? Well, one thing when we analyze tech companies, and we try to you try to understand their motives from an instrumental perspective, does this help their bottom line? How does this help their business is to keep in mind that, you know, what we call big tech is actually quite a bit more diverse and heterogeneous than it might appear. Tech firms are actually actually have very different business models, right? So Google provides information, you know, Google searches and Gmail, and it allows people to distribute videos on YouTube, but mostly for free, right? But Google's business model is to get revenues from selling advertising. Okay, so the customer for Google is the advertiser, and Google will engage in activities that it think will increase its ad revenue, it's not it's not selling products to consumers like you pay 20 bucks a month, you know, to use your phone, we don't pay 20 bucks a month to use your Gmail, it's free to you. You know, Apple is primarily a maker and seller of hardware and software, right? So Apple gets money from selling Apple hardware, selling Apple software, Apple collects licensing fees from companies that have, it collects a share of revenue generated by apps in the iOS ecosystem. You know, Meta, the Facebook parent is like Google, its main source of revenue is advertising. Amazon is different, right? Amazon is, I mean, Amazon has Amazon Studios and Amazon Prime, but Amazon is not primarily a media content or distribution company. You know, most of us think, well, Amazon is a retailer where I can buy stuff at good prices and get it sent to me, you know, very rapidly. But Amazon, as you may not know, as you may know, Amazon does not earn very much revenue from Amazon.com. The vast majority of its revenue comes from Amazon Web Services, which is a cloud storage service that is sold to other companies, right? Even Netflix has its data stored on Amazon's cloud services. So Amazon and Netflix are competitors in terms of media consumption, production consumption, but they're partners in that Amazon provides the back infrastructure, back end infrastructure for Netflix's service. You know, Microsoft makes most of this money from selling Microsoft Word and licensing Microsoft Windows to hardware manufacturers. So it's not the case that all big tech companies are the same, have the same objectives or same business models. Okay. Also, it's important to think about, you know, for companies that distribute content, we have to, you know, keep in mind the phenomenon that is sometimes described as the long tail, right? The long tail. So if you look at, you know, lots of different examples of content distribution, like YouTube channels, for example, I mean, there are a few YouTube channels that generate a large amount of revenue for their owners and for Google. Same thing with, you know, TikTok accounts or whatever, but the vast majority produce almost no revenue. So there's a few big earners at the top and then the rest don't really earn any revenue anyway. So think about, like Netflix distributing content, most of the shows on Netflix are not watched by very many people, but then you have a handful of the blockbuster shows that everybody's watching. So, you know, what Netflix managers and executives are trying to do is figure out what will be the next big blockbuster from which we can earn a lot of revenue from selling streaming subscriptions. But then we have, you know, hundreds of other shows that really don't affect our bottom line. So we don't really care what they are. So the people who are in charge of picking those shows have a lot of latitude to pick stuff that they personally like. And if they tend to be more woke than the average consumer, the content will also be more woke than the average consumer. This is an idea I got from Murray Rothbard who talked about it in the context of book publishing. He said, you know, why are most of the books at Barnes and Noble, why do they skew mostly progressive left? He said it's because the vast majority of books don't make any money for the publisher. You've got your Harry Potter books and you've got your, you know, detective novels and, you know, Malcolm Gladwell books or whatever that sell really well. Most books won't make any money. So the publishing companies let the editors pick what they want. And the editors being more left wing will tend to pick more left wing content, giving the distorted view among the customer that, oh, gosh, most authors are politically on the left. No, it's just those are the ones that got selected by editors who are allowed to indulge their personal preferences because most of the books they sell are way out at the end of that long tail. They're not going to make any money for the publishing, for the publisher anyway. I think it's largely true in academia as well that there's a lot of tolerance or indulgence for, you know, strange ideas because no one's going to read those articles anyway. Okay. So finally, from an economic perspective, you know, our woke companies able to exercise this, you know, have this influence, our tech firms influencing our culture and our society and our politics in a harmful way because they have some kind of monopoly power. And if so, should we use antitrust or whatever to sort of deal with it? Well, I mean, it certainly is true that large, you know, many of the big tech companies have a large market share, right? You know, YouTube has a huge share of the streaming market, not 100%. Netflix has a large share of the, you know, commercial media consumption market and so forth. And that large market share is, it tends to be the result of certain features of network industries, so-called network effects that the value of being on the network is a function of how many other people are also on the network, which gives a certain first mover advantage. If you're the first one in the market, you know, if you're the first, if you're Twitter, right, you can, once you have a large number of users, other people want to be on Twitter because that's where most of the users are, which makes it hard for new firms to come in and compete. They used to call these winner-take-all markets, now they more sensibly call them winner-take-most markets. So, you know, the cost of developing the platform is high, but once you've developed it, the cost of serving one more customer is fairly low. So combined with the network effect, that makes it likely that you have a few really big players. Another issue that has been a big deal in the antitrust discussions is the idea is the case where platform owners also sell their own stuff on the platform, right? So, you know, Amazon, Amazon can sell its own Amazon Prime and Amazon.com merchandise, but Amazon also runs the Amazon marketplace, which is like eBay, where other sellers can sell. You know, Apple has, it's, Apple not only owns the App Store, but also produces some of the apps that are on the App Store. Can companies, you know, leverage that relationship somehow to give themselves a certain kind of advantage? Yeah, maybe. But in the absence of government interference, there's still competition, right? People are still competing, firms are still free to compete to become the next dominant platform. I mean, I like to show my students this article from 2007 when they say, well, no one could ever dislodge Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Will my space ever lose its monopoly? Was a big concern people had in 2007. Well, we saw how that worked out. I mean, look at even at, you know, social media platforms. So, you know, Twitter is the dominant one, or I guess now it's called X, right? It's not Twitter anymore now it's X. People, you know, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, people got mad, especially people in academia, and they said, oh, we're all going to move to Mastodon, which was sort of a flop. And now, Meta has introduced threads. I mean, are any of those things going to become the next dominant platform? I mean, maybe who knows. So far, it hasn't worked out that well. And you say, oh, well, does that mean that no one can topple Twitter from it from the top spot? I mean, no, maybe not by producing something like threads, which is almost exactly like Twitter, but maybe producing a thing that's a little bit different. Like, you know, TikTok or Snapchat are much more popular in your generation than Facebook or even Twitter. They don't, they're not exactly the same thing. You know, they're, oh, it's video based instead of text based, or it has a different kind of interface. Or maybe the next dominant platform will be one that we've never heard of. Okay, some entrepreneur right now is working on it and you and I don't know what it is, and it's going to be radically different from anything we could have imagined. Okay, I'm running a little bit over my time here, but I had one more point about, which I'll just, a couple of things I'll mention briefly about. There's some arguments that tech firms have reduced their spending on innovation and maybe even are actively suppressing innovation. It seems unlikely because this graph shows that most of the increase in R&D spending in the last 50, 60, 70 years has been from the private sector, not from universities or from the public sector. There's some evidence that maybe R&D is getting more difficult. There's some claims, I mentioned this already, that maybe the government needs to be driving technological innovation. A lot of reasons to think that argument is wrong, but there's an interesting argument that has been offered the last two or three years about so-called killer acquisitions, which is the claim that big tech companies acquire promising startups and then shut them down. So if somebody else develops a technology or a product that competes with mine, I have so much surplus cash, I can just buy them and then I'll shut that alternative technology down and protect my market position that way. The problem with this argument is that it assumes a certain counterfactual. It assumes that if the dominant company had not acquired the new technology, the new technology would have flourished and we would have all switched to it, which we don't know. We have no idea what would have happened in the absence of the voluntary, mutually beneficial transaction that did occur. We only know that it did occur. We also know that it might be that the creators of the new technology only created it in hopes that they would be acquired by a big company and then they could cash out and make a lot of money. Maybe we never would have had that new product developed had the prospect of competing with and maybe even being acquired by the dominant firm existed. So should we break up big tech with antitrust or regulation? No. Should we regulate big tech and force it to be content neutral like you have to have as many libertarian views as socialist views? Obvious reasons why that wouldn't work. Our big tech firm, should we force them to protect our privacy more? Should we force them to make our data portable? All of these things impose costs that they require firms to do things that they could do if there were market demand and some of them already do but without most of us don't care that much. It's not clear that forcing firms to offer a different portfolio of attributes than the ones they currently offer would make us better off. So what I think would be the better public policy is to remove all special protections and privileges from tech companies and let everyone compete openly and fairly on the market. Thank you.