By: Ricardo Abud
There is a disturbing paradox in our time: the more visible technological power becomes, the less we understand its true nature. We have grown accustomed to watching the spectacle of digital titans fighting in public, hurling accusations at each other, and buying social media networks like expensive toys.
But while we watch that media circus, the real reconfiguration of power is happening on another stage, with other protagonists who have learned that discretion is not weakness but strategy.The Ellison family represents something new in the history of capitalism. They are not the first millionaires, nor even the first to dominate entire industries. But they are pioneers in something more subtle and troubling: they have understood that in the 21st century, power is not exercised by possessing things, but by controlling the invisible layers where human experience itself is processed.
When we read that Larry Ellison has become the richest man in the world, our minds tend to process that information as if it were equivalent to saying that someone has the biggest house or the most expensive car. It's an understandable but dangerous cognitive error. The number distracts us from the underlying mechanism.
Oracle isn't simply a successful software company. It's the translation layer between analog reality and its digital representation in thousands of critical institutions. When a hospital records your medical history, when a bank processes your mortgage, when a government manages the voter registry, there's a very high probability that Oracle is mediating that transaction. You don't see its logo, you don't think about its existence, but it's there, silent and omnipresent like oxygen.
This invisibility is its greatest strength. Unlike Facebook or Google, which constantly spark debates about privacy and ethics, Oracle operates at such a deep level of the digital infrastructure that most people never question who controls those systems. It's like asking who manufactures the pipes that carry water to your city: technically important, but far removed from everyday awareness.
The move into TikTok reveals a sophisticated understanding of how power truly operates in the digital age. Larry Ellison didn't need to own a social network. For decades, controlling the infrastructure where the data resided was enough. But something changed in the last decade.
The digital economy has fragmented into two distinct territories: the territory of data and the territory of attention. You can have all the data in the world, but if you don't control where people look, your power is limited. TikTok resolved this dilemma in a brutal way: it created the most efficient machine ever designed to capture and direct human attention.
TikTok's algorithm isn't just smart. It's radically different from anything that came before. Facebook showed you content from your friends and pages you followed. Instagram expanded on that with visual discovery. But TikTok completely eliminated the need for you to decide who to follow. From the very first second, the algorithm is working, learning, adapting, building a psychographic profile of you that's more accurate than the one your own family has.
The fact that Oracle now hosts that algorithm and is also a major investor in the platform means that the Ellisons simultaneously control the container and the content, the infrastructure and the flow. It's like someone owning both the roads and the cars that drive on them, both the electrical grid and the appliances that use electricity.
David and Megan Ellison's move to Hollywood wasn't a business diversification. It was a recognition that technological power without cultural legitimacy is fragile. Silicon Valley learned this the hard way: you can create the most powerful tools in the world, but if the culture is perceived as a threat, your power becomes unstable.
David Ellison's acquisition of Paramount is significant for what it symbolically represents. Paramount isn't just another studio. It's the company that defined what Hollywood meant for generations. It possesses an immense cultural archive, from classic films to children's programming that shaped entire generations. MTV didn't just broadcast music; for decades it defined what was cool for teenagers. CBS is the network that millions of older Americans consider a reliable source of news.
Meanwhile, Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures conquers a different but complementary territory: the cinema considered "serious," the award-winning kind, the kind that intellectuals and critics defend as true art against commercial entertainment. This pincer movement is brilliant: controlling both mass culture and prestige culture means that no matter what cultural niche you move in, you'll eventually find content with the Ellison name in the credits.
To understand what's really happening, we need to think historically. Medieval feudalism wasn't just an unjust economic system. It was a specific way of organizing space and power. The feudal lord controlled the land because land was the fundamental means of production. Peasants could work hard, develop skills, and improve crops, but at the end of the day, all that productivity reverted to the landowner.
The perverse genius of technofeudalism is that it has recreated precisely that relationship, but in a new territory: the digital realm. Platforms are the new fiefdoms. Users are the new serfs, constantly generating value through their data, their attention, their content, but without ever owning the means by which they produce that value.
The crucial difference is that this new feudalism is invisible. Medieval peasants knew they were working on someone else's land. We believe our digital interactions are free, spontaneous, and our own. We post photos thinking they are our content, when in reality we are generating training data for algorithms. We watch videos believing we are choosing entertainment, when in reality we are being categorized into increasingly precise market segments.
The Ellisons didn't invent this system, but they're perfecting it. They've understood that true power lies not in owning a platform, but in controlling multiple layers of the entire stack: the infrastructure where the data resides, the platforms where attention is generated, and the narratives that give meaning to all that frenetic activity.
What makes this type of power particularly problematic is its complete disconnection from any democratic accountability mechanisms. When Larry Ellison decided to financially support Donald Trump and promote narratives about voter fraud, he wasn't simply exercising his right as a citizen. He was using resources accumulated through control of critical infrastructure to influence the political process.
This isn't a partisan issue. The problem would be exactly the same if I supported the opposing candidate. What's worrying is the structural imbalance: one person who controls systems on which millions depend has an incomparably greater capacity for political influence than those millions combined.
And here's the catch: this power doesn't need democratic justification because it's technically private. Oracle is a private company. TikTok, under this agreement, has private investment. Paramount is privately owned. The free-market argument suggests that if you don't like it, you can choose alternatives. But what alternatives actually exist when the infrastructure itself is concentrated?
We live under the illusion that we have infinite options. We can choose from hundreds of television channels, thousands of streaming movies, millions of TikTok videos. This apparent abundance masks a radical concentration at the deepest levels.
It doesn't matter how many movies you watch if they're all distributed by a handful of studios. It doesn't matter how many videos you consume if they all go through algorithms controlled by the same corporations. It doesn't matter how many digital services you use if they all depend on the same server and database infrastructure.
The Ellisons have built power at those deep levels where their concentration of power is invisible to the end user. When you open TikTok, you don't think about Oracle. When you watch a Paramount movie, you don't think about the family that controls the studio. This invisibility is precisely what makes their power sustainable in the long run.
The uncomfortable question is what happens when a single family accumulates control over such fundamental dimensions of the social infrastructure. History offers little reason for optimism. Any extreme concentration of power eventually generates distortions, even when those who wield it have good intentions.
The problem isn't that Larry Ellison is evil. He's probably a complex human being with mixed motivations, like everyone else. The problem is structural: no person or family should have this level of control over systems upon which the functioning of entire societies depends.
But dismantling this kind of power is extraordinarily difficult because it's embedded deep within the technological and cultural infrastructure. You can't simply "stop using Oracle" like you can stop using Facebook. Oracle is embedded in critical institutional systems. You can't boycott TikTok when it defines the cultural conversation for an entire generation. You can't ignore Paramount when it controls franchises that are part of the collective imagination.
This is the new face of power: invisible, infrastructural, seemingly inevitable. And perhaps the first step in confronting it is simply to name it, to make it visible, to acknowledge its existence. Because power that remains invisible is the hardest to challenge.
The Ellisons understood something fundamental: in the 21st century, power doesn't need to advertise itself. It only needs to quietly build the systems through which the rest of us experience reality. And when you wake up one day and discover that those systems are already built, it's too late to question whether they should exist.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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