President Joe Biden’s farewell address from the Oval Office was largely unremarkable, save for one element. He took direct aim at what he called “the tech-industrial complex.”
The president began his address to the nation by crediting his administration for the negotiations that led to the just-announced Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement, which, if it holds, would end the brutal 15-month war in Gaza. He added that he made sure the incoming Trump administration was kept apprised of the negotiations, because “working together as Americans” is “how it should be.” He said he wished the next administration “success.”
He called out the cadre of tech industry billionaires who either latched on to the Trump bandwagon during the 2024 campaign or are desperately angling to be invited aboard.
Biden listed some of his administration’s accomplishments and dashed off some bland bromides about the enduring power of American ideals. More substantively, he called for term limits and ethics reform for the Supreme Court and beseeched Congress to “amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president, is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office.” He also stressed the importance to the country of the peaceful transfer of power, something his predecessor and successor, Donald Trump, didn’t participate in when he tried to overturn the 2020 election, incited the Capitol riot and then left Washington without conceding his defeat or attending Biden’s inauguration.
Still, Biden didn’t take direct shots at Trump. Rather, he called out the cadre of tech industry billionaires who either latched on to the Trump bandwagon during the 2024 campaign or are desperately angling to be invited aboard.
Biden warned of “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex” and of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people.” He said, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
It was a clear echo of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address to the nation — during which the former supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II presciently warned his fellow Americans about the growing “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”He didn’t name names, but it’s safe to assume one of the people Biden likened to “robber barons” is Elon Musk — who spent over a quarter-billion dollars on Trump’s campaign, who personally led the charge to kill a Republican-negotiated spending deal last month, who is already influencing policy in a way that benefits his businesses and who reportedly will have his own office in Trump’s White House.
Using the phrase “tech-industrial complex” was most likely a conscious choice by Biden’s speechwriters — a direct response to Musk and his MAGA allies, who said the Biden administration’s jawboning of social media companies during the Covid pandemic made them leaders of a “censorship industrial complex.” (Those same self-styled free speech warriors have been curiously silent about jawboning of social media and tech companies by Trump’s pick for chair of the Federal Communication Commission just last month.)
Biden warned of ‘the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.’
More than six decades after Eisenhower left office, few would deny that the military-industrial complex plays an enormous role in shaping America’s domestic and foreign policy, as well as its economic policy. Biden’s warning to the American people of a creeping oligarchy — a “tech-industrial complex” — was apt, and he’s correct to sound the alarm. Trump and Musk are bullies who boast of using their wealth and influence to attack their perceived enemies. Together, one of them holds more wealth than anyone else who has ever lived, and the other is about to hold arguably more power than anyone else in the world. This concentration of extreme wealth and overwhelming power is all the more disturbing given its association with a xenophobic, right-wing populist political movement.
“We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future,” Biden said in his final speech as president. If there’s one thing bullies hate, it’s people who aren’t afraid of them. We saw that last summer when MAGA world clutched its pearls over one of its politicians’ being called “weird.”
That’s why I hope “tech-industrial complex” sticks. It’s to the point while also making a mockery of MAGA’s delusions of a mass censorship regime focused solely on it.
If Biden’s brief farewell address left us with anything that’ll endure in the public’s memory, it might be that pithy and punchy phrase.
