In his farewell address, President Biden spoke of a rising “tech-industrial complex,” evoking Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning of a "military-industrial complex" forming in America.
But Biden’s callback to Ike’s phrase falls flatter than January 2nd champagne. The “military” in Eisenhower’s complex is the Defense Department, the “industrial” are arms manufacturers, and he cautioned against the two working together to influence Congress to bloat the defense budget against the best interests of the country.
In Biden’s phrase the “tech” is presumably Silicon Valley, but what is the “industrial”? Who is working in cahoots with whom, where is the government involved, what is the "complex"?
There answer is there is no complex, and what Biden wanted to express is that the tech sector is dangerously powerful — in today’s world they control the most important media platforms (social media) and the most powerful new technologies (satellite launches, AI, quantum computing). What's more, the vast wealth accruing to their founders and executives gives them even greater ability to influence US affairs. In short, beware the rising American oligarchy, as Biden warned earlier in his address. So why not just leave it at that?
Because politics, like virtually all endeavors, is a sales job. Biden and his speechwriters liked the ring of Ike’s prophetic phrase and echoed it in an attempt to give their man and his anemic 32% approval rating more oomph — and it may have worked. Media reports of the speech lead with "tech-industrial complex," and none that we saw pointed out the senselessness of the phrase.
It reminded us of the federal prosecutor who in late 2008 brought a major fraud case against a prominent lawyer. The indictment had it all — a very wealthy man using fake email addresses, fake documents, fake identities, and even at times physical disguise to dupe even richer people into giving him large amounts of money for nothing.
In announcing the charges, the prosecutor said the accused was “the Houdini of impersonation and false documents.” This analogy falls flat too, since Houdini always escaped, and the accused definitively did not. The prosecutor knew the flaw in analogy, but his case, announced days after the Bernie Madoff charges broke, needed a memorable tagline if it were to get any attention. To paraphrase (someone who is probabaly not) Aeschylus, logic is the first casualty in a public relations war.
