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Tyrant, me?

The new tyrannies seem to have no face. No name. Not even evil. They exist to protect us. Worse: to give us pleasure. Perhaps that is why they have never been so silent. We are talking about technology. Or rather: the use that is being made of it.

Isabel Nery

There are four words that define the times we live in in terms of power: digital; data; concentration (monopoly) and attention.

The digital society has led to data becoming the oil of the new century. The value that this data has acquired has attracted greed and the consequent concentration of incalculable wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people. All this is only possible by capturing our attention.

In other words, we are now the product.

It sounds strange. It is strange. But for very few people – still.

Let's start with the digital economy. Whoever owns interesting data attracts people's attention. Whoever has people's attention gets more data, more money, and more power. Whoever controls data, attention, and money, rules.

In its genesis, the definition of tyrant means the usurpation of power by an individual. But this is a global time. We are no longer talking about a country, but about the entire globe. However, even drawing on Hannah Arendt's political thinking, prior to globalization, it is easy to apply the idea of tyranny to the current use of technology. For Arendt, totalitarianism was not synonymous with an all-powerful state, but with the erosion of the For difference between public and private. Freedom based on control of what people know about us. Given this assumption, can anyone be free in the age of social media?

Digital sovereignty has been concentrated in the hands of companies as large as states (Kerdellant, 2025; Williams, 2021; Han, 2021). Six American billionaires—Elon Musk (X and Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sergey Brin, and Larry Page (Google)—have accumulated a personal wealth of around $150 billion. Such fortunes allow them to “replace states,” something unprecedented in the history of democracy (Kerdellant, 2025, p. 9).

As an example, it should be noted that there are only six countries (the US, China, the UK, India, Japan, and Germany) with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) higher than that of a single company, Apple.

To maintain their power, big tech companies eliminate competition, accumulating more information, more wealth, and more control over citizens—users, in today's lexicon, a semantic shift worthy of study in itself. This was the case with Zuckerberg: when Facebook's number of followers began to decline, he bought out competitors such as Instagram and WhatsApp (Kerdellant, 2025).

In addition to swallowing up or killing off the competition, they also cornered the information business, without any compensation for the media or journalists (Williams, 2021; Kerdellant, 2025), relying on free services, whose return is that each consumer becomes a source of information, without even being aware of it. Google and Facebook alone account for 85% of annual growth in Internet advertising (Williams, 2021).

This is not about demonizing wealth, but rather analyzing the unprecedented power it represents in the hands of so few—and on a scale unimaginable before the digital and global economy. Nor is it about criticizing the morality of spending on yachts and space travel. It is about looking at the facts mentioned above and adding another – the accumulation occurring in technology companies – to see the issue as a problem of concentration of power, not just wealth.

Because such a technological monopoly has the capacity to swallow up political power, Brexit being just one example (Brändle et al., 2021), but also defence, education, and health.

Recent events, such as Elon Musk's entry into the White House, show an unprecedented promiscuity between economic, political, and technological power. Examples like like Musk’s embody absolute power by controlling big tech, the economy, and politics at the same time.

Although the aphorism “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has become common sense when it comes to politics, it has not been applied to the fact that absolute technological dominance poses an existential threat to democracy. With power shifting from parliaments and ministries to the digital realm: “Those who control the technologies will increasingly control everyone else” (Susskind, 2018, p. 3).

If we were told of a politician that he wanted absolute power, the reaction would probably be to protest. Why, then, do we not protest against the absolute power of technology companies?

Because we do not (yet) see them as institutions of power. Because we do not even imagine ourselves as their subjects. They are so friendly. They exist to make our lives easier. To make everything faster and better. To be everywhere without leaving home. To socialize without making friends. To date without the risk of rejection.

And for free.

As philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2021, p. 40) warns, smart power does not work with commands and prohibitions. It makes us dependent and addicted. "Instead of breaking our will, it satisfies our needs. It wants to please us. It is permissive and not repressive" (Han, 2021, p. 41).

We thus become prisoners—voluntary prisoners—of platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Google. Prisoners of a dominant force that has never been so complete. Because domination coincides with freedom itself (Han, 2021).

But none of this would make sense without one last ingredient: attention. Not only because it has become the key to profit, but also because, since it is impossible to pay attention to the tsunami of information that engulfs us daily, we paradoxically become more distracted from what truly matters. A kind of distraction that becomes a system (Williams, 2021; Han, 2021), creating cognitive overload and critical numbness.

Epistemic distraction dehumanizes. With it comes the perfect storm for basic impulses, such as hatred, the root of populism.

Exploiting the cognitive weaknesses of human beings. “This is how the 21st century began: with an alliance between the most sophisticated forms of technology and persuasion at the service of our most childish efforts to establish their foundations in the field of persuasion” (Williams, 2021, p. 47).

Hatred, polarization, and the provocation of strong negative emotions feed the algorithm. “Social networks exploit users' psychological weaknesses and make them dependent by giving them small injections of dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for addiction” (Kerdellant, 2025, p. 69).

Why invest in the truth if the most profitable message is now the most effective—shareable, viral, monetizable—rather than one based on facts?

While journalism—governed by a Code of Ethics, unlike the unregulated digital world—is experiencing its greatest crisis ever, the word “fact” has fallen into disuse. It seems like a whim. A silly idea, even. However, it remains what can save us from any tyranny. Because “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom”, Snyder (2017) tells us. "If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis for doing so. If nothing is true, then everything is spectacle. The fattest wallet pays for the brightest lights" (Snyder, 2017, p. 65).

Without facts, there is no reality. And without reality, there is no resistance. Only numbness: “We submit to tyranny when we give up the difference between what we want to hear and what is reality” (Snyder, 2017, p. 66).

For resistance to be possible again, perhaps the first barrier to break is the preconceived idea that politics is in distant ivory towers. “Life is political, not because the world cares how people feel, but because the world reacts to what people do. Every small choice is in itself a kind of vote” (Snyder, 2017, p. 33).

Where does your vote go to?

To fight tyranny, you have to identify it. Today's tyranny is in every life, in every click.

References

Brändle, V. K., Galpin, C., & Trenz, H. J. (2021). Brexit as ‘politics of division’: social media campaigning after the referendum. Social Movement Studies, 21(1–2), 234–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2021.1928484

Fry, R. (2019). Nature or Nurture: A Crisis of Trust and Reason in the Digital Age, Foreword. London: Albany Associates.

Han, Byung-Chul (2021). No-Cosas. Uruguai: Taurus.

Kerdellant, Christine (2025). Mais Poderosos do que os Estados. Lisboa: Edições 70.

Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Crown.

Susskind, J. (2018). Future Politics – Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Oxford University.

Williams, J. (2021). Clics Contra la humanidad – Libertad y Resistencia en la Era de la Distracción tecnológica. Barcelona: Gatopardo Ediciones.