History Repeats: When Humans Corrupt Their Tools
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.
Over the past two days, we’ve seen how Clay Montgomery’s blacksmith shop became an unwilling soldier in Big Tech’s political army, and we’ve dissected the four-pillar influence machine that makes such manipulation possible. But this isn’t the first time powerful interests have used new technology to concentrate control while convincing the public to fear the innovation rather than its controllers.
History has a clear message: humans, not their tools, are always the real threat to freedom and democracy.
Today, we’ll examine four historical cases that reveal an unmistakable pattern. In each case, revolutionary technology promised to benefit humanity. In each case, the technology itself remained neutral. And in each case, the humans who controlled it transformed beneficial innovation into instruments of power concentration.
The parallels to today’s situation aren’t just striking – they’re practically identical.
The Telegraph Monopoly: Information Control as Political Power
In the late 1800s, Western Union controlled the communication networks that modern civilization depended on. Sound familiar?
The Technology Promise vs. Reality
The Promise: The telegraph would democratize information, connecting distant communities and enabling rapid communication across vast distances.
The Reality: One company – Western Union – gained control over virtually all telegraph lines in America, giving it unprecedented power over information flow.
How Western Union Used Information Control
Election Manipulation: The company controlled election night reporting, determining how quickly and accurately results reached the public. Western Union used this power to favor Republican candidates who supported business-friendly policies.
News Control: Newspapers depended on telegraph networks for timely information. Western Union could delay, prioritize, or selectively distribute news to favor allied political candidates and business interests.
Market Manipulation: The company had advance access to economic and political information, creating opportunities to profit from market movements while influencing outcomes through strategic information distribution.
Political Influence: Western Union maintained extensive lobbying operations and cultivated relationships with government officials, creating a revolving door between the company and regulatory agencies.
The Parallel to Today
Replace “telegraph lines” with “internet infrastructure” and “Western Union” with “Big Tech platforms,” and you have today’s situation. The methods are identical:
- Control information distribution channels
- Influence election reporting and political discourse
- Use advance information for competitive advantage
- Capture regulatory processes through revolving door relationships
Just as Western Union could claim to provide “neutral” communication services while actually serving partisan interests, today’s platforms claim algorithmic neutrality while shaping political discourse.
How It Finally Ended
Western Union’s monopoly was eventually broken through sustained political pressure and regulatory action that took decades to achieve. The parallels to current antitrust challenges are remarkable – particularly the technical complexity that made regulatory action difficult and the political influence that enabled the company to resist oversight for so long.
The Rothschild Banking Network: Information as Strategic Advantage
The Rothschild family’s 19th-century financial empire provides another instructive parallel: building power through superior access to information that enabled market manipulation and political influence.
The Information Advantage
The Network: The Rothschilds built a network of correspondents and couriers that provided faster access to political and economic information than their competitors – or government officials.
The Strategy: This information advantage enabled them to anticipate and influence market movements while using financial leverage to shape government policies.
The Scale: By the 1800s, the family controlled an estimated 50% of global government bond markets, giving them enormous influence over national policies.
How They Converted Information into Power
Market Manipulation: The Rothschilds could move markets by strategically buying or selling based on information others didn’t yet possess.
Political Leverage: Their ability to influence government bond markets gave them power over government policies without requiring explicit quid pro quo arrangements.
Regulatory Arbitrage: The international nature of their network enabled them to play different governments against each other while avoiding accountability to any single jurisdiction.
Influence Networks: They used financial resources and information networks to cultivate relationships with political leaders and diplomatic officials.
The Modern Parallel
Today’s tech giants use superior data analysis and algorithmic insights exactly like the Rothschilds used their information networks:
- Predictive market advantages through data analysis
- Political influence through financial leverage and strategic contributions
- Regulatory arbitrage by operating across multiple jurisdictions
- Cultivation of influence networks spanning government, academia, and civil society
The fundamental difference is scale: while the Rothschilds influenced bond markets, tech companies influence information markets that shape political discourse for billions of people.
Standard Oil: Market Dominance as Political Control
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil demonstrates how market monopolies convert economic power into political control while claiming to serve consumer interests.
The Monopoly Playbook
Market Control: By 1890, Standard Oil controlled approximately 90% of U.S. oil refining and distribution.
Political Influence: The company used its market position to pressure elected officials through economic leverage – threatening to affect local employment and economic conditions.
Regulatory Capture: Standard Oil placed allies in key government positions and funded research that supported industry positions.
Public Relations: The company consistently argued that its practices benefited consumers through efficiency and lower prices while actually eliminating competition to extract monopoly profits.
The Influence Operations
Direct Lobbying: Extensive campaign contributions and lobbying operations across multiple states and the federal level.
Academic Funding: Supporting research that provided intellectual justification for monopolistic practices.
Economic Leverage: Using the threat of economic disruption to influence political decisions.
Legal Resistance: Extensive litigation to resist antitrust enforcement while funding legal challenges to regulatory authority.
The Modern Echo
Today’s tech monopolies use an almost identical playbook:
- Platform dominance (replacing physical infrastructure control)
- Economic leverage (threatening to withdraw services or investment)
- Regulatory capture (revolving door relationships and academic funding)
- Public relations (claiming consumer benefits while extracting monopoly profits)
- Legal resistance (constitutional challenges to democratic oversight)
The key parallel: Standard Oil took decades to dissolve despite overwhelming evidence of harm to consumers and democratic processes. The company’s resistance involved extensive litigation, political lobbying, and public relations campaigns that sound remarkably similar to today’s tech industry arguments.
The Military-Industrial Complex: Institutional Capture Through Revolving Doors
President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex provides the most direct parallel to today’s tech influence operations.
Eisenhower’s Warning
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
How the Complex Operated
Revolving Door Relationships: Systematic exchange of personnel between defense contractors and government agencies, creating networks of shared interests that transcended organizational boundaries.
Academic Capture: Universities became dependent on defense contractor funding while researchers learned to frame their work to support industry interests.
Political Investment: Extensive lobbying and campaign contributions created political environments where challenging defense spending became professionally risky.
Regional Economic Leverage: Defense contractors strategically located facilities across multiple congressional districts, making opposition to defense spending equivalent to opposing local jobs.
The Institutional Capture Process
Step 1: Create financial dependencies across government, academia, and regional economies.
Step 2: Establish revolving door relationships that blur lines between public and private interests.
Step 3: Use technical complexity to make oversight difficult while claiming special expertise.
Step 4: Frame any opposition as threatening national security or economic prosperity.
The Direct Parallel to Big Tech
The military-industrial complex playbook is being executed almost perfectly by today’s tech industry:
- Revolving door relationships between tech companies and regulatory agencies
- Academic dependencies through university funding and research grants
- Political investment creating professional risks for politicians who challenge tech power
- Regional economic leverage through strategic job placement and investment threats
The crucial difference: While the military-industrial complex influenced defense policy, the tech complex influences information policy that shapes all political discourse.
The Unchanging Human Pattern
Across all these historical examples, the pattern is identical:
Phase 1: Technological Promise
New technology emerges with genuine potential to benefit society. Early adopters and innovators create useful applications that improve people’s lives.
Phase 2: Concentration of Control
Market dynamics and network effects lead to concentration of control over the technology in the hands of a few human actors.
Phase 3: Power Conversion
Those controlling the technology convert their market position into political influence through systematic cultivation of relationships across government, academia, and civil society.
Phase 4: Institutional Capture
The influence operations achieve institutional capture, where regulatory and political processes serve concentrated private interests while maintaining the appearance of democratic legitimacy.
Phase 5: Resistance and Reform
Eventually, the concentration of power triggers political resistance that leads to regulatory reform, antitrust action, or structural changes – but only after decades of democratic erosion.
Why We Keep Making the Same Mistake
Technological Complexity: New technologies are complex and difficult for outsiders to understand, creating dependency on industry experts who have conflicts of interest.
Innovation Narrative: Concentrated power is justified through narratives about innovation, efficiency, and consumer benefit that deflect attention from democratic concerns.
Regulatory Lag: Democratic institutions move slowly while technology companies move quickly, creating windows of opportunity for influence operations to entrench themselves.
Cognitive Bias: We tend to fear the technology itself rather than examining the human incentives and power structures surrounding it.
Scale Blindness: The gradual nature of influence operations makes them difficult to detect until they reach critical mass.
The Stakes Are Higher This Time
While the pattern is identical to previous cases, the stakes are higher today because:
Information Infrastructure: Unlike oil or steel, today’s monopolies control the information infrastructure that underpins all democratic discourse.
Global Scale: Digital platforms operate globally while regulators remain largely national, creating unprecedented opportunities for regulatory arbitrage.
Speed of Change: The pace of technological development outstrips regulatory adaptation, giving concentrated interests more time to entrench their positions.
Data Advantages: Control over data provides predictive insights that can be used to anticipate and influence political and economic outcomes.
Algorithmic Opacity: The complexity of algorithmic systems makes accountability more difficult while providing cover for manipulation.
The Pattern Points to Solutions
Understanding this historical pattern also points toward solutions:
Early Action: Previous monopolies were most vulnerable in their early stages. Waiting until institutional capture is complete makes reform much more difficult.
Focus on Human Agency: Regulatory approaches that focus on human accountability rather than technological constraint are more likely to succeed.
Democratic Strengthening: The solution isn’t controlling technology but strengthening democratic institutions and accountability mechanisms.
International Coordination: Global problems require coordinated international responses that prevent regulatory arbitrage.
Public Education: Breaking influence operations requires public understanding of how they work and why they’re harmful to democratic governance.
Tomorrow: Your Action Plan
History shows us that concentrated power can be challenged and constrained, but only through sustained effort by informed citizens working through democratic institutions. The question isn’t whether change is possible – previous generations successfully broke up telegraph monopolies, oil trusts, and military-industrial complexes.
The question is whether we’ll recognize the pattern in time to act before institutional capture becomes complete.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore the practical steps you can take to fight back – from immediate actions that protect your privacy and autonomy to long-term advocacy that can restore democratic accountability to our digital infrastructure.
The window for effective action is still open, but history suggests it won’t stay open indefinitely.
Yesterday: The Human Data Cabal Series – Part 2 of 5
Tomorrow: Part 4 – Fighting Back: Your Action Guide
Historical sources: Academic analyses of Western Union monopoly, Rothschild banking network documentation, Standard Oil antitrust cases, and Eisenhower administration records on military-industrial complex warnings.