Score another win for presidential speechwriters aiming to etch their words into the annals of history. President Joe Biden’s farewell address, with its cautionary nod to the dangers of a “tech-industrial complex,” struck a deliberate chord, echoing Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex. Yet as I watched, I couldn’t help but notice what Biden’s phrase left unmentioned: the decades of post-WWII analysis on the rise of the prison-industrial complex, now expanded into the carceral state and surveillance capitalism. This apparatus, as some have warned, is poised to be weaponized by the anti-immigrant party entering power. Biden retreated from the momentum of 2020 (remember his calls to fund the police? Or Kamala Harris’s vow to maintain the U.S. as the world’s most lethal military force?) and his administration mismanaged immigration policy—most notably by failing to challenge the dehumanizing rhetoric of nativists more forcefully.
I don’t object to naming and confronting oligarchy. Big Tech exacerbates every one of these crises. But Biden cannot exit Washington cloaked in a magical Bernie Sanders guise: his record is one of acquiescence to the brutality of capitalism, not resistance to it. His attempt to channel anger against inequality now feels too little, too late. After all, he’s not a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. Biden has walked the corridors of power for half a century. And like Eisenhower—whose military career underlined the irony of his own warning—Biden now critiques systems he helped shape. His focus on tech oligarchs feels hollow in this historical light. Today’s platform billionaires wouldn’t exist without Bill Clinton’s decision to open the internet to private investment or Barack Obama’s deep coziness with Silicon Valley, which rested on the misguided belief that wealth concentrated in tech could be kept in check. Both assumptions unraveled spectacularly.
What stood out most to me in these final days wasn’t Biden’s warning but the emerging split between the presidency and Congress on how to handle surveillance capitalism on a global stage. Consider Congress’s bipartisan clamor to ban TikTok—a move framed as protecting national security from Chinese influence. In contrast, both Biden and Trump have waffled, treating the app as a bargaining chip in their geopolitical games with China.
This divergence reminds us not to focus solely on the visible machinery of governance but also on “the man behind the curtain,” the invisible hand pulling the strings. Adam Smith used this phrase to describe market forces, but computational capitalism adds a new wrinkle the good Scottish philosopher could never have foreseen.
Biden’s career exemplifies the tension between rhetoric and action in American leadership. His critique of tech oligarchs sidesteps a deeper truth: these platforms are not just vehicles of disinformation but products of a systemic logic stretching back to the financialization of life. Failing to link Big Tech to the military and prison-industrial complexes renders his critique incoherent. As wildfires rage in Los Angeles, we should all be revisiting Ruthie Gilmore’s Golden Gulag—as I wish someone on Biden’s speechwriting team had. Gilmore demonstrates how racial capitalism thrives on speculative economies of extraction, with incarceration feeding the surplus while warehousing populations deemed disposable.
I don’t expect the president to deliver an American Studies dissertation, but I do yearn for a more robust analysis to confront the clear and present danger of oligarchy, American-style. I worry about the trend toward shiny new buzzwords—yes, I know oligarchy is an ancient term—that lead us into nominalist quagmires. Is it oligarchy? Fascism? Or simply the inevitable outgrowth of longstanding contradictions in American political life that remain unresolved?
Biden’s administration achieved notable victories—from infrastructure to climate change to the fragile but overdue ceasefire in Gaza. Yet his presidency was marked by a refusal to champion transformative movements. His failure to embrace Black Lives Matter or support calls for justice for Palestine were not just moral lapses but strategic miscalculations. These moments could have redefined his administration and the Democratic Party’s legacy. Instead, his leadership felt like a holding pattern, managing crises but never imagining new possibilities. As June Jordan once wrote, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” The transformative leadership we need will not come from speeches like Biden’s; it must emerge from grassroots movements and collective struggles, which he consistently failed to uplift.