Technology Breaking Control

That moment when you’re trying to repair the smartphone you paid $1,000 for, only to discover that using third-party parts will brick your device. Or when you realize the tractor you “bought” actually requires calling an authorized technician with proprietary software just to change a sensor. Or when your small business gets buried on page 37 of Google results while the big corporations dominate the first page.

Remember when technology was supposed to democratize everything? When we were promised a future where anyone could compete with the giants, where middlemen would disappear, and where we’d all be connected without gatekeepers taking their cut?

Yeah, that was cute.

Instead, we’ve watched as the same technology that promised liberation has morphed into something else entirely. The internet that was supposed to give everyone a voice now amplifies only those who can afford to pay for visibility. The digital tools that were supposed to eliminate middlemen have created super-middlemen who take a bigger cut than ever before.

And where are those free-market conservatives during all this? Cheering wildly when technology helps the already-powerful become even more powerful, then suddenly discovering a burning passion for regulation whenever it threatens to give regular people a fighting chance.

The “Some Innovation Is More Equal Than Others” Game

Sarah runs a small farm in Nebraska. After three generations of family ownership, the operation is threatened because her new tractor’s software won’t let her make basic repairs. The manufacturer requires authorized technicians—at $150 an hour plus travel time—for problems she could easily fix herself. When she tried using a third-party repair tool, the tractor’s software detected it and shut down completely.

Meanwhile, across the country, Goldman Sachs deploys artificial intelligence trading algorithms that make thousands of trades per second, operating with virtually no oversight. These algorithms are proprietary “black boxes” that even regulators can’t examine.

Sarah’s situation and Goldman’s situation share something fascinating: they both involve software. But Sarah’s repair tools face aggressive regulation and legal threats using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, while Goldman’s financial algorithms operate with minimal scrutiny despite their far greater impact on the economy.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the innovation control paradox in action: the more a technology empowers those at the top, the less regulation it faces. The more it might empower those at the bottom, the more regulation suddenly becomes “necessary.”

Here’s how this works in real-world terms: Corporations deploying facial recognition systems that can track citizens without consent? Light-touch regulation. Regular citizens using cameras to document police misconduct? Suddenly we need laws protecting officer privacy. Investment firms using high-frequency trading algorithms to gain microsecond advantages? That’s the free market at work. Regular people using cryptocurrency to trade directly with each other? That’s dangerous and requires extensive regulation.

This selective approach reveals something crucial: the conservative commitment to “innovation” and “free markets” has nothing to do with technology itself and everything to do with who benefits from it.

Cutting Out the Middleman

Think about the last time you published a video, piece of writing, or music online. If you wanted anyone to actually see it, you probably had to go through a platform—YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify. These companies didn’t create your content, but they take a significant cut of any value it generates.

This is the modern version of a toll booth. Want to reach an audience? Pay the toll. Want to sell a product? Pay the toll. Want to communicate with others? Pay the toll.

Before the internet, these toll booths were physical. Publishers controlled printing presses. Record labels controlled recording studios and distribution. Retailers controlled shelf space. The digital revolution was supposed to eliminate these gatekeepers by making the means of production and distribution available to everyone.

For a brief, beautiful moment, it seemed to be working. People started connecting directly, creating peer-to-peer networks that allowed them to share information and value without middlemen taking a cut.

The response was swift and brutal.

File-sharing technologies that allowed artists to connect directly with audiences were legally destroyed. Open protocols were replaced by proprietary platforms. Encryption tools that protected privacy faced legal challenges and backdoor requirements. Every technology that threatened to eliminate toll booths found itself under attack from the very people who claimed to champion innovation and free markets.

Jason, a software developer in Austin, learned this lesson the hard way. He built a peer-to-peer lending platform to help people bypass credit card interest rates of 25% or more. His system would have allowed direct lending between individuals at much lower rates while still providing better returns than savings accounts.

After two years of development, his platform was effectively regulated out of existence by rules supposedly preventing money laundering but actually protecting established lenders. These regulations were championed by conservative politicians heavily funded by the banking industry—the same politicians who routinely claim that government should “get out of the way” of innovation.

“I still believe in free markets,” Jason says, “but I’ve realized we don’t actually have those. We have captured markets designed to protect incumbents.”

The Tollbooth Economy

The core of the modern conservative economic model isn’t really about free markets—it’s about controlled access points. Think of them as economic tollbooths where anyone wanting to pass must pay the collector.

When you’re forced to go through Amazon to reach readers, Apple to reach app users, or YouTube to reach viewers, you’re passing through these tollbooths. The companies controlling these access points didn’t create the value—you did. But they extract a significant portion simply because they control the gateway.

In medieval times, lords would set up literal tollbooths on roads they controlled, forcing merchants to pay for passage. Today’s digital lords use the same model, just with better marketing. They don’t call it a “toll”—they call it a “platform fee” or “commission” or “revenue share.” But the function is identical: pay up or you can’t pass.

The most lucrative businesses today aren’t those that create the most value—they’re those that position themselves as unavoidable intermediaries where value must flow through. Apple doesn’t make most of the apps in its App Store, but it takes up to 30% of all revenue. Uber doesn’t own cars or employ drivers, but it takes a substantial cut of every fare. Amazon doesn’t create most of the products sold on its marketplace, but it collects fees from every seller.

This isn’t innovation—it’s rent-seeking. These companies didn’t create new value; they just figured out how to extract a toll from value created by others.

From Blocking Access to Controlling Minds

When directly blocking access proved impossible, those in power pivoted to a more sophisticated approach: they transformed tools of liberation into tools of control.

Your smartphone was supposed to empower you. Now it tracks your location, monitors your activities, and collects your data to predict and influence your behavior. Social media was supposed to democratize information. Now its algorithms determine what you see based on what generates the most engagement and profit.

This shift from blocking access to guiding behavior represents the evolution from crude censorship to what some call “algorithmic authoritarianism”—control through influence rather than force.

Consider your own daily experience. When you open a social media app, you’re not seeing a neutral feed of information. You’re seeing content selected by algorithms designed to maximize your engagement, not your understanding or empowerment. When you search online, the results aren’t based purely on relevance—they’re influenced by who paid for placement, which companies have the resources to optimize their content, and what the platform thinks will keep you clicking.

The brilliance of this system is that it maintains the illusion of freedom while exercising tremendous control. You can theoretically post anything on social media, but if the algorithm doesn’t show it to anyone, does it matter? You can theoretically start an online business, but if search algorithms bury you on page 37, will anyone find you?

This isn’t conspiracy theory—it’s business model. Companies are explicit about using algorithms to shape behavior. They call it “engagement optimization” or “user experience design,” but it amounts to sophisticated manipulation of what you see, think, and do.

And when these systems threaten to slip out of control—when encryption might make surveillance impossible, or peer-to-peer networks might bypass centralized platforms—suddenly those champions of innovation discover urgent reasons why such technologies must be restricted.

One Rule for the Lords, Another for the Peasants

When Edward Snowden revealed that the government was collecting everyone’s data without warrants, conservative politicians didn’t rush to protect citizens’ privacy. Instead, many labeled him a traitor and defended mass surveillance. Yet these same politicians become privacy champions when corporations face potential regulation of their data collection practices.

This double standard applies across technology policy:

Financial algorithms that manage billions operate as proprietary “black boxes” with minimal oversight. But personal encryption for your messages faces constant legislative attacks demanding backdoors for government access.

Corporations can deploy facial recognition everywhere from stores to apartment buildings with minimal regulation. But when protesters use cameras to document police misconduct, suddenly there are urgent concerns about “privacy” requiring legal restrictions.

Companies can use digital tools to monitor workers’ every keystroke, bathroom break, and conversation. But when workers use digital tools to organize or share salary information, they often face company policy violations or termination.

The pattern is clear: Technology that enhances elite power faces minimal restriction, while technology that might empower ordinary citizens faces aggressive regulation.

Take the right-to-repair movement. When you buy a tractor, smartphone, or even a refrigerator, you might reasonably expect to be able to fix it yourself or hire anyone you choose for repairs. But manufacturers increasingly use software locks, specialized tools, and legal threats to prevent independent repairs, forcing you to pay whatever they demand or replace the entire device.

This isn’t about protecting intellectual property—it’s about protecting repair monopolies. Yet conservative politicians who claim to champion property rights and free markets routinely side with manufacturers against the basic right to repair what you own.

The Blind Leading the Technological

Remember that congressional hearing where a senator asked the Facebook CEO how the company makes money, and he had to explain, “Senator, we run ads”? Or when another asked the Google CEO to explain why his iPhone was showing certain results?

This would be merely amusing if these weren’t the people creating the laws governing technology.

The technological knowledge gap between those making regulations and the systems they regulate has become a crisis. Imagine if airline safety was regulated by people who had never seen an airplane and thought they ran on magic. That’s essentially our situation with technology policy.

This knowledge gap doesn’t prevent regulation—it just ensures regulations are often ineffective or counterproductive. They’re frequently crafted based on fundamental misunderstandings or, worse, directly written by industry lobbyists taking advantage of this ignorance.

Mike, a software developer in Texas, experienced this firsthand when his privacy-focused messaging app faced regulatory challenges. “The politicians pushing the regulations clearly didn’t understand how end-to-end encryption works,” he told me. “They were demanding technically impossible things while using analogies that made no sense. It was like trying to explain calculus to someone who doesn’t know addition.”

When regulators don’t understand technology, they default to either doing nothing (when the technology benefits powerful interests) or imposing blunt, often harmful restrictions (when it might empower ordinary people). This technological illiteracy becomes a weapon that industry lobbyists exploit to shape policy in ways that protect established players and block genuine innovation.

The Startup Dreams That Weren’t

Alex believed in the American Dream. A software developer from a rural community, she created an app to help people in areas without reliable transportation share rides with neighbors—not an Uber competitor, but a non-profit community solution for places big companies wouldn’t serve.

Her app gained traction in several small towns where public transportation didn’t exist. Then came the regulatory hammer. The state legislature, lobbied by commercial transportation interests, passed a law requiring any “ride-sharing platform” to carry $1 million insurance policies, conduct background checks using specific vendors, and implement various other requirements that made perfect sense for Uber but would bankrupt a non-profit community project.

The law wasn’t written to protect public safety—it was crafted specifically to prevent competition and community alternatives to corporate services. The insurance requirements alone would have cost more than Alex’s entire operating budget.

This pattern repeats across industries. Young innovators who believe the rhetoric about free markets and disruption discover that markets aren’t actually free—they’re carefully managed to protect established players. The same politicians who talk about entrepreneurship and innovation routinely support policies that make genuine market entry impossible for anyone without massive capital.

The victims of this hypocrisy aren’t just progressive technologists—they’re often conservative-leaning entrepreneurs who took their own side’s rhetoric about markets and opportunity at face value. They built businesses based on the promise that better ideas would win, only to discover that the game was rigged from the start.

The Rural Internet Desert

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between technological rhetoric and reality more devastating than in rural America. Tens of millions of Americans still lack reliable high-speed internet access, limiting their economic opportunities, educational access, and participation in modern society.

This isn’t because the technology doesn’t exist—it does. Solutions from mesh networks to white space broadband to community-owned fiber could connect these communities affordably. The problem is that these approaches threaten the regional monopolies of major telecom providers.

So instead of embracing these technologies, conservative legislators have passed laws in over 20 states explicitly prohibiting communities from building their own networks, even when private companies refuse to serve them. These laws, typically written by telecom industry lobbyists, protect monopoly providers from competition while leaving rural communities—predominantly conservative voters—stranded in the digital dark ages.

Consider Wilson, North Carolina. After private providers refused to deliver adequate service, the community built its own fiber network offering faster speeds at lower prices. The response? State legislators passed a law effectively blocking the network’s expansion to neighboring communities that were begging to be included.

The representatives who passed this anti-competitive legislation claimed to support free markets and rural development. In reality, they chose to protect monopoly interests over their own constituents’ needs. The result is a persistent digital divide that limits economic opportunity in the very communities these politicians claim to represent.

Breaking the Digital Chains

We’re living through the emergence of a new feudalism where access to digital infrastructure has replaced land as the primary mechanism of control.

In medieval times, lords granted access to land in exchange for labor, military service, and political loyalty. Today, digital lords grant access to markets, audiences, and services in exchange for data, attention, and a percentage of all value created. The technology has changed, but the power relationship remains eerily similar.

The promise of liberatory technology was breaking this system—creating a world where people could connect, create, and exchange value without asking permission from digital lords. That promise remains largely unfulfilled as those lords have adapted, capturing regulatory systems to protect their power.

Breaking free requires more than just new technology. It requires:

1. Recognizing the fundamental contradiction between rhetoric about innovation and actual policies that restrict it
2. Building cross-ideological coalitions around specific technologies being suppressed—from encryption to community broadband to right-to-repair
3. Developing truly decentralized alternatives resistant to corporate capture
4. Fighting for policies that prevent gatekeeping and encourage genuine competition
5. Educating both technologists and citizens about how power actually operates in digital systems

The good news? The very nature of technology makes complete control impossible. New tools and approaches constantly emerge from unexpected places. For every technology that gets captured or suppressed, others appear that are harder to control.

The establishment fears truly liberatory technology because it threatens hierarchical power. Their nightmare is a world where people can connect, create, and exchange value without intermediaries extracting tribute at every step.

That’s exactly the world we should be building.