If you're the kind of person who's ever wondered, "What the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald?" or "Damn, I liked Matt Taibbi during the Iraq War, but what happened?," then Eoin Higgins' new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is the book for you. In Owned, Higgins paints a harrowing portrait of the internet's dramatic rightward shift over the last decade, illustrating the ways that the once-fringe libertarian ideas of a few Silicon Valley billionaires blossomed into—well, all of this.
Most of the book focuses on the very clear and public political shifts of writer-pundits such as Greenwald and Taibbi. These are voices who were once beloved by a certain swath of leftists (or at least civil libertarians), who once spoke truth to power, and have since succumbed or been seduced by the power of capital. Specifically, those same libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires who believe themselves to be the most oppressed class in America, and will gleefully throw their money at any solution that allows them to not only broadcast this complaint to the rest of the world, but to force people to listen to them, too.
Throughout the book, Higgins writing is crisp and succinct. He simplifies and sums up the early relationships between people such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen; and clearly connects their shared grievances to the post-GamerGate takeover of the social internet. If you, like me, are Extremely Online™, you may already be familiar with some of the topics here, such as the overlap of private equity and Neo-Nazi pressures on places like Substack. But even if you (like me) weren't following these events in real-time, Higgins expertly distills and preserves them for the historical record. I feel like this is a book I could hand to my 75-year-old dad and say, "Do you want to understand what's happening in the world right now? Read this, instead of doomscrolling on your AppleOS News App, and it'll all make sense."
Another strength of Owned is that Higgins doesn't shy away from that faux-objectivity of much more journalism. He's a human, with a clear perspective on events. In fact, in many ways, he's a character in his own story. Higgins has written for The Intercept; he worked for a time for Callin, the live-call-in-podcasting app that was funded by right-wing billionaires and ultimately folded into the same right-wing-alternative-media-ecosystem as Rumble. He even has a relationship (to a degree) with Greenwald himself, to the point that Greenwald is willing to speak with Higgins about a book which is very clearly painting Greenwald in a negative light. (Taibbi was, erm, less willing to participate in Higgins' research.) Higgins does a phenomenal job chronicling how these civil libertarian, anti-authoritarian voices could both be gradually seduced by power; and also how such a heelturn was always inevitable, because it was always intrinsic to their belief systems, in a way that's made even more clear in hindsight.
Owned is by no means light reading; it's a real-life horror story, detailing a turn of events that felt both abrupt yet inevitable. And Higgins does a fantastic job of curating that story. There's also something strangely comforting (for lack of a better word) about reading the book at a time like this. It's an educational and enlightening alternative to the constant churn and "flooding the zone" of the news cycle—all of which results from the events that transpire in this very book. If anything, Owned left me feeling better prepared for the current state of the world. It might be a chronicle of recent events that I had already followed closely, but Higgins articulates those happenings with a distinct moral clarity that even I struggled to explain as it all unfolded.
Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left [Eoin Higgins / Bold Type Books]
