The Appistocracy Inaugurates Trump
A new breed of elite flexes its muscle
Donald Trump was inaugurated president on Monday by a Chief Justice most people couldn’t name or recognize. But up in the VIP seats, looking down like an approving collective of Greek gods, were six tech billionaires whose companies practically everyone knows: Elon Musk (Twitter), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Instagram), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok).
The media has tended to focus on the net worth of this half dozen, using rusty words like “oligarchy,” in homage to their vast wealth. But their power penetrates much deeper than that. It is literally in my pocket as I write this: their host of apps that dominate our every waking hour, their dominance and control over the very appliance that most now get their news and entertainment from, where they do their banking, receive their advertisements, connect with their friends, date and buy stuff.
Oligarchs are nothing new, but these six men have a power over us that is more intimate than other billionaires. They collectively build, run, and control what can only be likened to an appendage of our own human bodies, a new organ that most can’t imagine losing or losing access to.
I call them the appistocracy.
The power these apps command is so awesome that not even their owners are fully in control. Attempts to rename the companies consistently fail. To any ordinary person, “X” remains Twitter; “Alphabet” remains Google; and “Meta” remains Facebook. The rebrands fail because these apps have lodged themselves so deeply in our minds that unlearning our conception of them is about as realistic as unlearning a native language. They exist in some timeless, platonic realm of ideas. These companies might as well try to rebrand the concept of a tree.
The path to power increasingly runs through these apps. Trump leveraged the power of Twitter to get himself elected president in 2016 before founding his own social media company, Truth Social. In 2022, Elon Musk shelled out $44 billion to buy Twitter. The eye-popping sum once drew derision. That was before Musk used Twitter to catapult himself into the center of the 2024 election discourse, to Trump’s inner circle, and as an impossible-to-ignore figure on the world stage.
TikTok illustrated the extraordinary power of the app last week. As a U.S. ban neared, public backlash grew to the point that the same politicians who voted for the ban reversed their positions. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Biden not to enforce the ban, going as far as saying it would damage his legacy. Emblematic of the humiliating defeat was the Biden administration’s move to leave the decision of whether to enforce the ban — which Biden signed into law! — to incoming President Trump. Washington played chicken with the appistocracy and lost.
We are only in the infant stage of our fealty to the apps as a collective entity, to our smartphones and to online everything. The sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists are only just beginning to ponder the effects. Since the advent of the smartphone around 2012 or so, adolescent loneliness has skyrocketed, studies show. And that’s just one example.
Though we don’t understand the consequences yet, the entire world economy is reforming around the appistocracy. It isn’t a coincidence that these are the richest men on the planet. And yet consider this about the appistocracy economy: despite its enormous valuation, most of its products don’t exist in any physical sense. It also doesn’t create anywhere near as many jobs as conventional industries.
The robber barons of yesteryear, the Carnegies, the Fords and so on, at least employed a lot of people. At least they manufactured something tangible and of use to people’s lives. The appistocracy doesn’t do anything to improve health care, housing, or education. Their contribution to infrastructure amounts to building more energy facilities to power their data centers and fuel their artificial intelligence empires.
Like jealous gods, these apps demand constant sacrifices: of our time, our attention, even our relationships. We are told we are saving time through the products of the appistocracy and yet we have no time. They’ve hollowed out the malls, stores and other public spaces — even ourselves, as we spend more time alone. Call it the hollowgarchy.
Donald Trump took the oath of office on Monday alongside the appistocracy, but it would be a mistake to see this as a mere transactional relationship, which many have diagnosed it. I’m afraid it is much worse than that. The appistocracy has accumulated such wealth and power through their creation and operation of this new bodily organ, this phantom limb, that even megalomaniac Trump feels compelled to pay homage. Old school oligarchs couldn’t dream of that kind of power.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
It’s incredible how we are so unwilling to endure even a seconds worth of discomfort by deleting these apps. If everyone who read this post finally deleted their Facebook accounts it would actually hurt Zuckerberg bottom line and free you from something that literally only serves to waste precious time. And I bet some of y’all STILL won’t do it.
Congratulations on coining a great word, Ken! Yes, it is indeed distressing that after years of totally avoiding Facebook (I never joined) I was appropriated by Meta through Instagram. I should give it up but it is a way I display my artwork. Sigh. I think all the time about the way I grew up and was a young adult in the late 70s and early 80s with no tracking devices and social media feeds and really just living in the moment comfortably and developing at my own pace. In college there was a pay phone down the hall and no one ever picked it up. Our parents had zero idea where we were or what we were doing; now i hear that parents track their children via apple “find my” apps and see where they spent the night! It is really sad and in only a very few cases would that be necessary (medical conditions, for example). My kids were in that first wave of people who had cell phones in high school and college but things were quite “primitive” compared with what has evolved. And the sick thing is, we all seem to want the phones day and night and use them to as huge crutches in so many areas of our lives. It really was better before they came into our brains and hands. The freedom we have ceded to these creepy billionaires will be the end of us. We have already become a step below the bots Elon wants us to be so he can go to Mars and have workers and sex slaves. We did this to ourselves, willingly. Pathetic.