Silicon Robber Barons: How Big Tech's Gilded Age Greed Threatens Autistic Lives and Livelihoods
As an autistic person, I'm deeply concerned about the recently introduced ‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’ (the Act) and its potential to ban TikTok in the United States. For me and so many others in the autistic community, TikTok has become an absolutely essential platform for self-expression, community-building, and advocacy. The prospect of losing access to TikTok feels like an existential threat to the vibrant autistic spaces we’ve created there.
TikTok's short-video format and highly visual nature make it uniquely well-suited for autistic creators to share our experiences on camera in relatable ways, and connect with each other through various hashtags. For many of us, TikTok’s more direct style of communication feels easier to engage with than other social media platforms geared towards neurotypical users. Autistic creators on TikTok are breaking down stereotypes, spreading acceptance, and forging vital bonds of mutual support and understanding.
Banning TikTok would rip away the primary platform many autistic people rely on to express ourselves authentically and find real community in an often unaccepting world. It would cut us off from the digital spaces where we feel most seen, validated, and connected to our autistic identity. Losing TikTok wouldn’t just be a minor inconvenience - it would be a devastating blow to autistic people’s mental health, social ties, and hard-fought visibility.
As lawmakers debate this bill, it’s crucial that they consider the human impact on vulnerable groups like the autistic community who have built thriving spaces on TikTok. We need to speak up and make sure our leaders understand how much is at stake for us in this fight. This bill may be framed around abstract concepts like national security and data privacy, but for autistic TikTok users, it’s an intensely personal battle to protect the online communities we cherish and depend on.
In today’s article, I’ll be diving into the details of this concerning bill and breaking down its potential impacts on the autistic community from my perspective as an autistic TikTok user. I hope to make it clear just how devastating it would be to abruptly amputate the vital autistic spaces we’ve cultivated on TikTok. We need to come together as a community to oppose this bill’s dangerous overreach and protect our digital homes on our own terms.
First things first …
Before diving into the dire implications of the Act for the autistic community, we need to take a hard look at the political and economic forces driving this bill. The legislation’s lead sponsor, Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), has deep financial ties to Google, one of TikTok’s biggest competitors. Google, it turns out, is Rep. Gallagher’s second largest campaign contributor.
This bill’s favorable treatment of U.S. tech giants raises serious questions about whose interests are really being served here. Are lawmakers like Rep. Gallagher truly concerned about protecting Americans’ data privacy and national security? Or are they doing the bidding of Silicon Valley oligopolies eager to hobble an innovative foreign competitor by any means necessary?
The fact that Rep. Gallagher’s bill would effectively force TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a nationwide ban looks an awful lot like the kind of shakedown scheme you’d expect from a protection racket, not a democratic government. It suggests a desperation to put TikTok in U.S. corporate hands by holding the app hostage through the threat of state power.
This is a deeply disturbing example of the thorny entanglement between corporate interests and government power in what’s increasingly looking like a new Gilded Age. More and more, we’re seeing lawmakers’ supposed “public service” amount to little more than the ruthless advancement of the private agendas of their corporate patrons. This bill is a prime case study in how monopolistic U.S. firms wield state power as a bludgeon against competitors under the guise of national security.
As the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco warned, the merging of corporate and state power is a core feature of fascism. When lawmakers become the enforcement arm of Big Business to stamp out threats to their market dominance and ideological hegemony, democracy and liberty are in grave danger.
For the autistic community and other marginalised groups who have found a home on TikTok, this kind of state-backed corporate censorship and overreach is especially chilling. It sets a precedent that digital communities can be unilaterally wiped out overnight if they become inconvenient to the powers that be in Silicon Valley and their servants in Congress.
Before we accept Rep. Gallagher’s TikTok crackdown at face value, the American people (and you, dear reader) deserve a searching examination of his bill’s corporate backers and their real motivations. We must stay vigilant against attempts by aspiring oligarchs to seize control over our online public squares, especially when it threatens vibrant communities like autistic TikTok. Our digital rights are too important to be auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder in Congress.
Who benefits?
So who wins if Congress bans TikTok or forces its sale to American owners? Certainly not the millions of users, including countless autistic creators, who have found joy, friendship, and purpose on the app. The real beneficiaries are giant U.S. tech firms, especially Google, who would love nothing more than to defang one of their most dangerous competitors.
Let's follow the money. Google is one of the most prolific political spenders in corporate America, shelling out tens of millions each year on lobbying, advocacy groups, think tanks, and campaign contributions to both of the majority parties. That investment has paid off handsomely, with Google alumni staffing the upper echelons of government (aka, regulatory capture) and the company’s policy wish list reliably sailing through Congress.
So when Google sees its core search and YouTube businesses threatened by a foreign upstart like TikTok, it knows that its friends in Washington will spring into action. In Rep. Gallagher, Google found an ideal water carrier - a hawkish China critic happy to drape monopoly protection in the stars and stripes of national security.
The anti-TikTok frenzy drummed up by Rep. Gallagher and his allies conveniently aligns with Silicon Valley’s commercial interests. If D.C. can bully TikTok out of the U.S. market or into a fire sale to domestic owners, Google and friends can neutralise a fierce competitor and scoop up its valuable technology and user base on the cheap. In the process, they get to look like patriots defending Americans from the CCP bogeyman.
Meanwhile, Google and YouTube would love to see TikTok’s explosively popular short-video format and recommendation algorithms either driven out of the market or coopted by U.S. owners less willing to share the spoils with creators. With TikTok tamed, YouTube Shorts can swoop in to dominate the space and keep even more ad dollars in Google’s coffers. Convenient how that works.
Autistic TikTok users should be especially wary of any Silicon Valley-approved “solution” to the platform’s “Chinese ownership.” The U.S. tech giants have a dismal track record of censoring and demonetizing neurodivergent creators in service of advertiser-friendly sanitisation. We can’t trust Google and its ilk to safeguard the vivid autistic communities that have flourished on TikTok.
The ugly truth is that powerful platforms like YouTube see TikTok’s democratic, creator-centric model as an existential threat to their chokehold over our digital public square and their ability to hoard profits at the expense of the independent creators who make their platforms worth visiting. They fear the precedent TikTok sets for empowering marginalized voices and cutting users in on the considerable rewards.
This moral panic over TikTok has been carefully cultivated by tech titans and their proxies to eliminate a competitor and bring a thriving corner of the digital commons to heel. The losers are the millions of creators and users who have found a home in TikTok’s diverse ecosystem. The winners are the Silicon Valley oligarchs who can extend their stranglehold on our digital lives and cultural conversations.
Autistic people know firsthand how online communities can be lifelines in the face of an unaccepting world. We must think twice before we let opportunistic tech giants and their pet politicians use xenophobia and security theater to blockade our digital homes and drag us back under their thumb. Our spaces to freely congregate, create and connect shouldn't be collateral damage in a monopolist's power play wrapped in the flag.
The New Gilded Age
The unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Government to quash TikTok is straight out of the Gilded Age playbook. In the late 19th century, robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan amassed staggering fortunes by leveraging their political connections to crush competition, exploit workers, and bend public policy to their will. Today, Silicon Valley titans like Google’s Sundar Pichai (a McKinsey & Co. alum) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are writing the same story for the digital age.
Just as the railroad and steel magnates of old bought off politicians to subsidise their empires and shield them from accountability, today’s tech oligarchs deploy armies of lobbyists and showers of campaign cash to co-opt our democracy. Gilded Age tycoons pioneered the use of charitable foundations to launder their reputations and defang reformers; today, Big Tech billionaires follow the same script with flashy pledges to “connect the world” and “cure all disease” - all while zealously guarding their monopoly power.
The result is a new Gilded Age where corporate behemoths like Google and Facebook wield state power as a weapon to expand their dominance at the expense of the public good. Just as Standard Oil strong-armed railroads into preferential shipping rates and price-gouged consumers, U.S. tech giants are bullying Congress into hobbling foreign competitors like TikTok under the guise of national security.
And just like in the Gilded Age, it’s the most vulnerable and marginalised Americans who suffer most under the consolidated rule of monopoly capitalism wed to the state. Steel workers and coal miners toiled in deadly conditions for poverty wages while plutocrats grew fat off the fruits of their labour. Children as young as five worked 12-hour days in factories while the government looked the other way. Immigrants, African Americans, and poor white farmers were pitted against each other to fuel a racialised politics of resentment that distracted from their shared exploitation.
Today, autistic creators and other neurodivergent communities are seeing their digital homesteads on TikTok threatened by profit-hungry tech giants and geopolitical brinksmanship. Just as 19th-century monopolists enclosed the rural commons that sustained small farmers, Silicon Valley is salivating to seize control of the vibrant digital commons that TikTok has helped cultivate.
Autistic TikTok users, who have carved out precious spaces for authentic self-expression and mutual aid on the app, are once again treated as acceptable casualties in the profiteers’ quest for dominance. Our hard-won visibility and community is a small price to pay for appeasing the oligarchs and the China hawks. Erasure and silencing is the eternal fate of those deemed disposable in the unrelenting pursuit of empire and capital.
But history also offers hope. The Gilded Age was met with a Progressive Era of mass social movements and bold reformers who took on the monopolies and fought to reclaim democracy for working people. Muckraking journalists exposed the depravities of the robber barons and inspired public outrage. Labour unions, farmer’s alliances, and women’s suffragists organised the oppressed and won transformative victories.
In our digital Gilded Age, the autistic community has a proud role to play in this tradition of grassroots resistance. We must channel our fury at the TikTok ban into collective action to rein in Big Tech and defend our online public squares from the dictatorship of capital. In solidarity with other marginalised digital communities, we can expose the oligarchs’ agenda and break their grip on our technological commons.
Autistic people have always been at the forefront of the struggle for a more just and humane world, even as we've borne the brunt of the powerful’s abuses. Once again, we’re called to be progressive thorns in the side of today’s robber barons and their political enablers. The fight to save TikTok is a crucial battle in the greater war to preserve the digital autonomy and free expression of society's most silenced voices. Let us spearhead this New Progressive Era for cyberspace - our liberation depends on it.
What’s lurking in the shadows?
When we examine Big Tech’s callous treatment of the autistic community, it’s hard not to suspect a more sinister motive than mere indifference. Many of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley have well-documented ties to the modern eugenics movement, which seeks to “improve” the human race through selective breeding and the elimination of those deemed genetically “unfit” - including autistic people.
Eugenics may seem like a relic of a darker past, but it has found new life among the tech elite. Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have poured millions into “longevity” research that echoes eugenicist obsessions with engineering “superior” humans. Thiel has even expressed interest in harvesting the blood of the young to extend his lifespan (source) - a vampiric fantasy straight out of the eugenics playbook.
Big Tech’s boardrooms are littered with members and donors to “charities” like the Pioneer Fund, which has promoted discredited race science and advocated for the forced sterilisation of the disabled. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has hobnobbed with notorious eugenicists and funded research into population control in the Global South. Google has partnered with Autism Speaks, an organisation that some say seeks to eliminate autism (after all, what’s a cure but an elimination) and has compared autistic people to missing puzzle pieces in the past.
This context casts Big Tech’s assault on autistic spaces like TikTok in a more ominous light. Are these monopolists simply indifferent to the collateral damage of their power grabs? Or is there a more deliberate agenda to erase and exclude neurodivergent voices from the digital public square? Given their eugenicist sympathies, it’s not unreasonable to fear the latter.
For adherents of eugenics, autistic people represent a “defective” population to be managed and minimised in service of optimising humanity (eg., no place for autism). Our unique ways of being and communicating are seen as bugs to be patched out, not features to be celebrated. The idea of autistic autonomy and solidarity is antithetical to the eugenicist worldview, which seeks to impose a narrow conception of human worth and eradicate diversity.
In this light, the war on TikTok looks like the latest battle in Big Tech’s eugenicist crusade against neurodivergence. By strong-arming TikTok out of the market or into the hands of U.S. tech giants, they can choke off a vital lifeline for autistic expression and community-building. It’s a way to corral and contain a population they deem undesirable, to force us back into the dark.
But just as autistic people have been at the forefront of the fight against eugenics and ableism throughout history, we must lead the charge against Big Tech’s eugenicist agenda today. We know firsthand the stakes of allowing a powerful few to dictate the parameters of personhood and exterminate difference. Our resistance is not just about preserving our digital homesteads - it’s about defending the right of all humans to thrive in our infinite diversity.
As the tech oligarchs and their political puppets conspire to ban TikTok and strike a blow against autistic visibility, we must name and shame the eugenicist ideology that animates their actions. We must build solidarity with all those targeted by Big Tech’s optimisation obsession, from other disabled communities to the Global South populations exploited in the name of “progress.”
Autistic people have always been the canaries in the coal mine of society’s most pernicious prejudices. Once again, we find ourselves on the front lines of the battle against the techno-eugenicists and their dystopian designs. By exposing their agenda and fighting like hell for our digital autonomy, we can help forge a world where human diversity in all its forms is cherished, not censored. The survival of our community - and of a plural humanity - demands nothing less.