Book Review by Tim Christiaens of The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud. Cecilia Rikap. Verso. 2026: “…Big Tech corporations and their products have infiltrated nearly every aspect of our everyday lives, from Apple smartphones to Amazon grocery deliveries and from OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and its many competitors) to Meta’s recently launched smart glasses. The pace at which this infiltration is happening is accelerating: a handful of American tech firms have colonised our lifeworld and there is almost no island of refuge left.
Most recent books on AI and Big Tech domination explore how Silicon Valley dominates workers, consumers, and/or governments. Exemplary publications by, among others, Kate Crawford, James Muldoon, Shoshana Zuboff, and Cathy O’Neil have built the genre. But in The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud, Cecilia Rikap shows the type of corporate domination underlying these news stories. A crucial gap about AI and Big Tech is how tech corporations exert control over other businesses to expand their corporate empire. We still often think about “big corporations” through the lens of Fordist monopoly capitalism, when businesses would dominate markets through vertical integration. One company then tries to own and control all elements in its supply chain. Such businesses grow by reinvesting profits in their own self-expansion, by acquiring competing smaller firms, and by managing internal research labs to establish R&D that keep competitors out of the race.
The rise of intellectual monopolies
Today’s networked capitalism, however, no longer favours vertically integrated firms. It prefers more nimble companies that coordinate an assemblage of subordinate yet nominally independent organisations. Big Tech establishes its monopolistic hold over everyday life not by growing one single corporation, but by managing an extended universe of supposedly autonomous organisations. Just like you might watch different Marvel movies which are all in fact the same Disney-owned intellectual property, you can have seemingly separate interactions with Google, YouTube, an AI ethics department at an American Ivy League University and your local municipal government, without knowing that these are all different faces of the same Alphabet extended universe…(More)”.
