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This week, the “Abundance” campaign held its flagship conference [ [link removed] ] in Washington. The campaign’s proponents, led by prominent authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, echoed the main complaint from the project’s namesake book: Democrats have become too focused on redistribution and corporate regulation and have lost the ambition to build. They called for a “new progressivism” to unleash the power of technology and free markets to create a world of plenty.
What they did not do is talk about one of the primary obstacles to their own stated goals: Big Tech.
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On the surface, Abundance is both a smart term and an unobjectionable vision, particularly during a global cost of living crisis and an era of destructive polarization. Who doesn’t want to see a wave of innovation that magically fixes our economic stagnation and, as a result, our political dysfunction? It is curious, then, that its proponents have so little to say about the industry that is largely responsible for both problems.
A look at the conference’s list of co-sponsors helps explain the omission. The campaign’s focus on cutting regulations, its myopic obsession with the local governance issues plaguing places like San Francisco and New York City, and its downplaying of the dangers of monopoly power are perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporations and people who patronize the groups who first sketched out the Abundance “vision.”
Many of those groups, like Niskanen Center and R Street, have long had a cozy—and sometimes lucrative—relationship with the tech monopolists. But it is the role of the Chamber of Progress, one of the select sponsors that provided direct funding for this week’s conference, that really gives away the game.
Chamber of Progress is a classic Washington interest group funded by a Who’s Who of the tech industry, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. The group describes itself as “center-left,” and “pro-progress.” But its main purpose is to lobby on behalf of its corporate funders for policies that cannot reasonably be considered progressive or liberal.
For instance, Chamber of Progress has consistently opposed virtually all attempts to apply antitrust or consumer protection law to Big Tech, and it has played a leading role in thwarting new regulations. This includes leading opposition [ [link removed] ] to a bipartisan package [ [link removed] ] of antitrust bills introduced in 2021 by a large and ideologically diverse group of House members—including Ken Buck, Hakeem Jeffries, and Pramila Jayapal—that aimed to foster innovation and curb the monopoly power of the Chamber’s Big Tech bosses.
Chamber of Progress’s founder and CEO, Adam Kovacevich, is a case study in the power relationship between Big Tech and Washington. Before launching his influence shop, Kovacevich spent years as a top lobbyist for Google, where he helped build its formidable influence operation in the capital. Before that, he helped elevate corporate-friendly politicians, including ones now working to undermine the government’s ability to perform basic functions, let alone invest in a plentiful future. That list includes his college friend Tom Cotton, who Kovacevich supported during his initial runs for Congress, and current House Judiciary and Big Tech overseer Chair Jim Jordan, who Kovacevich donated to as recently as 2018. Early in his career, Kovacevich also worked as an aide to former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who left the Democratic Party after primary voters rejected his pro-corporate politics in 2006.
Kovacevich now collects a base salary [ [link removed] ] of a half million dollars per year leading the effort to pressure Democrats not to regulate the tech industry. In recent months this includes several initiatives to push the Democratic Party back towards Bill Clinton-style laissez-faire, including a new publication called “The Rebuild,” which mixes praise [ [link removed] ] for the Abundance agenda with screeds [ [link removed] ] against advocates seeking to rein in these corporations.
Those efforts neatly complement the writings of Klein and Thompson, whose work has been broadly [ [link removed] ] criticized [ [link removed] ] for a glaring lack of curiosity about the role of corporate power in shaping our lives and society, as well as antagonism towards people and organizations working to rein in that influence, including local community organizations and unions.
In response to charges that his view of the world is naïve, even dangerous, Klein recently felt obliged to write a treatise [ [link removed] ] explaining Abundance’s “theory of power.” One pillar of this theory is that the influence of immense world-spanning dominant corporations is rivaled or even surpassed by that of grassroots activists. “Corporations sometimes serve the national interest and sometimes betray it,” Klein wrote. “The same is true for governments, for unions, for churches, for nonprofits.”
Whether by design or by tacit acceptance from its leading voices, Abundance has become the perfect Trojan horse for Big Tech—a collection of inspiring but vague truisms tech bosses are eager to latch onto in order to further their own interests. This is not to suggest that Klein and Thompson are themselves on the payroll of Big Tech. But their intellectual framework, if one is generous enough to call it that, is deeply sympathetic to Big Tech’s interests and ripe for co-option.
An honest vision of Abundance would recognize that digital industries are the key arbiters of wealth and personal well-being in the modern world. Believers in such a vision would therefore strive to structure dynamic, competitive digital markets designed to protect the liberty and dignity of the individual, in part by helping new products and ideas to flourish. Yet the tech monopolists have built precisely the opposite reality: a walled garden guarded by a vast legion of lawyers and mercenary intellectuals, in which the already dominant incumbents decide who wins and who loses. This is not a recipe for a vibrant, abundant economy—it is a blueprint for stagnation and the further enrichment and entrenchment of a handful of oligarchs.
Look at Kovacevich’s former employer Google, for instance. Through its dominance in search, Google acts as the gatekeeper to the internet, and it has systematically—and illegally—used this power to crush potential competitors and favor its own services. All the while, the corporation uses the data it collects from those services to bolster its AdTech monopoly. That monopoly has pushed publishers big and small to the point of collapse, as Google hoards the advertising revenue that for more than three centuries supported [ [link removed] ] the authors and editors of high-quality information.
In other words, Google has created the conditions for the private takeover and management of both innovation and free thought, in the form of a curated reality where the most visible choice is always a Google product—often one that is dramatically inferior to the few alternatives that still exist elsewhere. This description, while dramatic, is not conjecture. In the last year, Google has been found liable in two [ [link removed] ] separate [ [link removed] ] cases before federal courts of illegally monopolizing these core parts of our information system.
And Google and its peer corporations play for keeps. When governments in Australia [ [link removed] ], Canada [ [link removed] ], and California [ [link removed] ] attempted to rebalance the playing field by requiring Facebook and Google to give a sliver of their earnings back to news publishers, the giants threatened to withhold local news content from their platforms altogether. And now they have enlisted the Trump administration to leverage the threat [ [link removed] ] of devastating tariffs to try to stop the European Commission and other independent democracies from regulating their monopolistic and manipulative behavior.
In short, these corporations have contributed as much as any group to undermining democracy in America and around the world. And that is before you consider how the advent of generative AI stands to accelerate these negative patterns. Yet on the rare occasions that Abundance advocates like Thompson and Klein do acknowledge the dysfunction created by these world-spanning power systems, they have lazily dismissed [ [link removed] ] any call for regulatory reforms to rein in the industry, instead advocating for modestly helpful but comically insufficient policies like banning phones in schools.
For a time, the gravity of Trump’s attacks on American democracy seemed to neutralize the Abundance campaign’s quest for influence. While many liberals appear to accept the narrow and vague points Abundance proponents make about the need to build more affordable housing and clean energy infrastructure, their blindness [ [link removed] ] to the harms of concentrated corporate power, weak grasp of political economy [ [link removed] ] and American history [ [link removed] ], and inability to detail how they would craft [ [link removed] ] workable policy undercut their support even among [ [link removed] ] many thinkers [ [link removed] ] who might be predisposed to their worldview. It also didn’t help that poll [ [link removed] ] after poll [ [link removed] ] has found that Democrats and Americans at large are unconvinced by the campaign’s pitch.
Yet in certain respects the Abundance campaign today appears to be regaining some momentum. This is not because the useful intellectuals who helped attract attention to these ideas have suddenly developed a more coherent philosophy. Rather, the reason lies in the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flooded policy shops, advocacy and lobbying groups, and influence projects aligned with the Abundance campaign over the past year.
Some of this cash has been directed towards policy research—mostly of a distinctly neoliberal flavor. Some is being used to pay for a suite of new astroturf efforts, including a college initiative called Students for Abundance [ [link removed] ] and a consortium of local Democratic officials called the Abundance Elected Network [ [link removed] ]—both of which were announced on the eve of the DC conference. Some is even being used to fund a flashy new “pro-Abundance” publication to serve as a home for members of the cohort of writers working to push this campaign into the mainstream.
More concerningly, a vast amount of cash is being readied to directly buy influence over individual candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole. Fore example, in a recent appearance [ [link removed] ] on the Joe Lonsdale podcast, billionaire LinkedIn co-founder, tech investor, and prolific Democratic donor Reid Hoffman said he intends to direct the millions of dollars in political contributions that he makes annually to support Democratic candidates who are aligned with the Abundance agenda.
Perhaps most concerningly, Trump megadonor and tech mogul Marc Andreessen, who published a manifesto [ [link removed] ] on the principles of Abundance in 2023, has promised to open his wallet. In partnership with other Silicon Valley heavyweights, like OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Andreessen intends to steer $100 million [ [link removed] ] directly into electoral politics through a new network of super-PACs called “Leading the Future.” (Coincidentally, Andreessen’s firm a16z is also a funder of Chamber of Progress.)
In all, the amount of Big Tech and Abundance-aligned campaign cash may soon rival or even surpass the eye-watering amounts currently being deployed by top influence brokers like the cryptocurrency industry and AIPAC.
So, as attendees in Washington break off for cocktails following the week’s events, observers who believe in democracy, innovation, and shared prosperity should pay as much attention to what was not said as what was.
We saw no discussion of the innumerable ways that tech monopolists constrain innovation, suppress free speech, starve the press, crush entrepreneurship, or help widen the fractures in our society. Nor did we hear a more coherent plan about how this neo-neoliberalism will actually deliver us from the brink of disaster.
The elephants who helped pay for the room—and their politically and economically destructive economic power —were conspicuously off-limits. That’s not an oversight, it was the price of admission.
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