Americans feel they have lost agency over their lives, increasingly blaming large corporations. Last week’s $18bn Meta settlement, imposing time limits on teen use of Facebook and Instagram, marks an inflection point in the backlash against Big Tech. This follows TikTok’s $400mn settlement for alleged children’s privacy violations and agreements by Amazon and Google on consumer protection and monopoly power.

These legal actions reflect a broader political trend: 61 per cent of Americans now oppose data centres being built in their backyard, per the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Candidates in the upcoming midterm elections from both parties are portraying supporters of data centre construction as beholden to corporate interests, as seen in Texas where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa accused her opponent of serving moneyed interests. The core issue is a decades-long erosion of personal agency, where algorithmic curation on platforms like Google and Amazon limits user exploration—only 0.44 per cent of users go beyond the first search page.

AI intensifies this effect by distancing users from original sources. As Eli Cook argues in his upcoming book, *Choose Your Captivity*, today’s digital choice architecture is the culmination of a century-long corporate strategy, from 1920s “pay to play” supermarket displays to the 1970s Pepsi Challenge and Purdue Pharma’s pain questionnaires in the 2000s. These mechanisms not only serve corporate profit but reinforce a neoliberal ideology that frames economic outcomes as individual choices, ignoring structural inequality.

Critics argue these “nudges” serve corporate interests rather than public wellbeing, prompting voters to question the foundations of democratic capitalism.