Big Tech wants you dazzled.

By the hype. The headlines. The promise of AI as our ‘saviour.’

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, OpenAI and a host of other players are selling us a vision of boundless potential and faster, smarter, frictionless futures. AI will revolutionise everything: medicine, education, work, creativity, relationships etc providing we feed it our data, our behaviours, our attention and ultimately our trust

Yet behind the smoke and mirrors is a story we’ve seen before….

Back in the late 19th century, railways were the revolutionary technology. They reshaped economies, electrified cities, enabled mass communication, brought distant places closer, accelerated commerce and transformed daily life. They were a miracle for modern life.

Yet behind the shiny promise was a darker reality:

• Unleashing wild speculation, financial bubbles and spectacular fraud (Crédit Mobilier)

• Ruthless monopolies (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Gould)

• Wage suppression, union busting, political capture

• Mega-corporations built on centralised power, not decentralised progress

They scaled fast, crushed competition and bought political influence. They promised progress and they delivered power….but for the few. They built empires from economies of scale and created the world’s first mega-corporations backed by the sheer force of concentrated power.

Does that sound familiar?

Now it’s not oil, steel or rail. It’s data and algorithms.

• AI models trained on our unpaid labour

• Platforms gatekeeping innovation behind paywalls

• Closed ecosystems claiming to be “open”

• Sky-high valuations fuelled by hype, not transparency

• Tech giants shaping global policy in their own interest

Like the tycoons of the Gilded Age, today’s tech giants aren’t inventors. They’re consolidators and they don’t build for “we, the people”.. They build to dominate, following that old Industrial Age playbook of scale – dominate - extract. AI is the just the “new railway”. The infrastructure of the future, but also the gold rush and the frenzy.

Now, I’m no Luddite. I believe in innovation. AI has astonishing potential and benefits too, just as railways did then and still do. ( GPT created the picture below!) But real progress only came after society pushed back. It took decades to establish worker protections, competition law, regulation and corporate accountability. We need that same reckoning and oversight now, ultimately before it’s too late.

As John D. Rockefeller once said, “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism is gone, never to return.” That same logic now governs the data economy.

So here we are again. Different technology. Same mindset. We keep calling it innovation, but it’s really iteration of the same dynamics of power, greed and scale.

Mark Twain got it right: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Looks like we're rhyming hard!