Dickson C. Igwe. Photo: VINO/File

These are primarily US businesses. They are vast digital and technological platforms that humanity must engage with in order to access any idea of a modern existence. 

Power is no longer with markets and profits as capitalism has progressed from the feudal type of the 1700s when land ownership was the decider of wealth. At the time, capitalism became industrial and technological, where the landowner took on implements and then machines and technology to generate wealth. 

The Industrial Revolution of the 1700s was a transformation of capitalism from the feudal landowner to the bourgeoisie factory owner. Industrialisation went on for over 200 years to its most modern phase in the Twentieth Century

This 2025, capitalism has changed altogether. Wealth and power is in what one economist has termed cloud capital. Industrial capital has become digital capital. 

Digital platforms of fiber optic cable that cross-oceans and link with vast networks of servers driven by the ubiquitous microchip have offered the internet to a handful of men who own super corporations such as Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, NVidia, Oracle, Tesla, Space X. Thinkers see this new form of capital as a latter day mutation of capitalism. 

In essence, the consumer is a serf who has no choice but to engage with these platforms. 

These platforms are arguably arms of the US military-industrial complex. They collect data on the consumer in every way conceivable and hold a wealth of information from users of these platforms. 

This information is another aspect of what one economist terms cloud capital. It offers even greater power to the oligarchs. 

The USA holds a vast library of information on billions of users of these digital platforms, courtesy of these super corporations. 

Our habits, likes, interests, vices, and demographic information all exist in the cloud: on servers inhabiting a vast infrastructure centred in Silicon Valley. These oligarchs produce our digital networks, internet access, and news information. 

In the Virgin Islands and the wider Caribbean, for example, these platforms are all household names we engage with daily, whether we want to or not.