Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism

<p><em>Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism</em> is a major contribution to our understanding of how technology oligopolies are shaping America’s social economic and political reality.</p><p>Technology oligopolies are the most powerful socioeconomic entities in America. From cradle to grave the decisions they make affect the most intimate aspects of our lives how we work what we eat our health how we communicate what we know and believe whom we elect and how we relate to one another and to nature. Their power over markets trade regulation and most every aspect of our governance is more intrusive and farther-reaching than ever. They benefit from tax breaks government guarantees and bailouts that we must pay for and have no control over. Their accumulation of capital creates immense wealth for a minuscule elite deepening disparities while politics and governance become ever more subservient to their power. They determine our skills and transform employment through the tools and services they create as no other organizations can. They produce a vast array of goods and services with labor marketing and research that are more intrusively controlled than ever as workplace rights and job security are curtailed or disappear. Our consumption of their products—and their capacity to promote wants—is deep and far reaching while the waste they generate raises concerns about the survival of life on our planet. And their links to geopolitics and the martial domain are stronger than ever as they influence how warfare is waged and who will be vanquished. </p><p>Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism’s critical multidisciplinary perspective provides a systemic vision of how oligopolistic power shapes these forces and phenomena. An inclusive approach spans the spectrum of technology oligopolies and the ways in which they deploy their power. Numerous previously unpublished ideas expand the repertory of established work on the topics covered advancing explanatory quality—to elucidate how and why technology oligopolies operate as they do the dysfunctions that accompany their power and their effects on society and nature. This book has no peers in the literature in its scope the unprecedented amount and diversity of documentation the breadth of concepts and the vast number of examples it provides. Its premises deserve to be taken into account by every student researcher policymaker and author interested in the socioeconomic and political dimensions of technology in America.</p>