Owned:
How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
by Eoin Higgins (Bold Type Press)
Inelegantly, our continuing Decision ’24 coverage could be summed up as: what the fuck is going on?
No book so far captures that sentiment as Owned. Possibly with the appending of a “dude.” The book is a micro-biography of two journalists, Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and a nano-biography of silicon svengali-i Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. The book focuses on their rightward shift, including questioning whether it is a shift, but what stands out by the end of the book is the eeriness. How does someone like Greenwald, who bust open a legitimate government conspiracy, end up now doing laundry for chemtrails-grade conspiracy-advocates?
The standout here is the author’s journalistic effort. He tries to let the principals speak for themselves, especially Greenwald, who to Greenwald’s credit seems to have engaged in an extensive, candid, and far ranging interview with the author. Taibbi seems to have told him to fuck off; first briefly, then at length. The author is plain about when they are right, not just in their careers before the flop, but also afterwards, and when the author feels that they have been maligned unfairly on some point at any time. This applies more generally in the author’s treatment of his sources. He is clear about his own feelings on the matter, but tries to get out of the way and let the people’s words work for themselves. Decent reporting: who knew it could still get you published?
The weakness of the book is necessitated by its brevity. There are a few topics – Russian attempts at U.S. election interference, the status of free speech rights in the U.S., and the curated releases from Musk about Twitter policy are the standouts – where the author is too summary, and relevant context is elided. I also expected more about the reactionary centrist infrastructure. (remember when this was a joke?) and figuring it into the context of these journalists and crypto-monarchist finance.
I liked the book less at its start. Parts feel aimless, or without any sort of theory. I wondered if this book is too soon to write, that we need more perspective to reach consensus on what the fuck. But a thesis starts to resolve, which is how the inclusion of the tech conservatives matters. Yet it is not the one promised by the subtitle, which takes the book away from a tepid go at salacious exposé and into challenging content.
Is this personality? Or is this politics?
How much of…of….everything, every single thing that is absurd right now in the U.S. is driven by kayfabe gone awry, where personality is policy? Alternately, is it Velma pulling off Taibbi’s face to reveal William F. Buckley, Jr.? Is it that the subjects of the book have always been reactionaries, and now have achieved a place to act out that agenda?
The book presents both arguments, resolving its own answer in a sort of lateral approach that would be cowardly if it were not functional. The shocking part is that the personally-based argument comes off as colorable. Particularly across the reach of their biographies, the Greenwald and Taibbi come of as useful assholes, pseudo-contrarians who are capable of providing social good if pointed away from user. They are not even in it for the money, but who are people doing that one thing they are best at: playing knight and being as expert agents of the post-information age itself.
Oh, and who think that trans people are icky.
The same operable thesis works for the billionaires as well, (including the Fear of a Queer Planet). For all the ideological notions, Thiel and Andreessen come off as ‘what if Amy Dunne got into D&D’ enacting trivial revenge at a Enlightenment-busting scale, the distinction being that Greenburg & Taibbi swim in the water that Thiel and Anderseen drown.
There is a lot to say on the topic, all of which extends past the scope of a review. And that is why this is a good book. It has a solid basis in interesting and well-reported information. It has structural flaws, mostly related to context. It is mis-subtitled. But it is a detailed discussion prompt to a topic of immediate international importance.
My thanks to the author, Eoin Higgins, for writing the book and to the publisher, Bold Type Books, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 
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