[Salon] Cecilia Rikap: Corporate power in the age of ai and the Cloud

Who really rules the world we live in? Not governments. Not voters. According to award-winning economist Cecilia Rikap, it's a small cluster of cloud hegemons (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) whose intellectual monopolies over knowledge, data and narratives now shape global capitalism itself.

Rikap reveals how even giants like Disney, McDonald's, Nike and Walmart depend on these tech rulers to extract value through ai and discipline their own workforces. States, too, are watching core functions slip from their hands. Innovation, in this telling, is not a free and neutral game - it's a hierarchy, and someone is always at the top of it.

To get there, Rikap went straight to the source: 112 interviews with people inside the world's largest firms, combined with hard data on venture capital, acquisitions, open source, ai conferences and patents - piecing together a vivid map of who holds power today and what's at stake.

However, this is not a story without an exit. Rikap's counterimage insists technology can still be developed by the people, for the people and the planet, through democratic planning rather than predatory concentration.

Come hear how we got here and how we might take the cloud back.

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ABOUT The Speaker

cecilia Rikap is an award winning economist and currently Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the Ucl Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She is also a researcher at the Conicet, Argentina's national research council and a researcher at University of Technology of Compiègne. Her research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetisation on the knowledge commons and development.