The billionaires of today are unusually aggressive in their hoarding of cultural and technological influence, according to Mordecai Kurz, a Stanford economist whose research connects monopoly power with political and economic inequality. In his new book, Private Power and Democracy’s Decline, publishing 19 May, he argues the US is living through an extreme version of a pattern that has repeated itself since industrialization: technological power concentrating in the hands of a few, which is eroding democracy.

According to Kurz, technological moguls have long seen themselves as superior beings whose natural role is to shape society – so they have no problem disrupting the institution of democracy. During the first Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, as the US was enjoying its first ascent as an industrial powerhouse, wealthy industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller “invented all kinds of theories about human evolution”, twisting the logic of social Darwinism to convince themselves that their success was a sign they had been selected by nature to influence society, Kurz explained. Now, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, has suggested his technology has a mystical potential to become a transcendent good. He has also openly acknowledged it could lead to mass unemployment.

Voters turn towards fascist leaders when democracy no longer serves workers, Kurz says. “New Deal” reforms during the Great Depression limited monopoly power and provided benefits to the vulnerable. According to Private Power and Democracy’s Decline, these reforms precipitated a “half-century of sustained innovations, rapid economic growth and stable income distribution”. Reagan-era reversals of those reforms led to what Kurz calls the “second Gilded Age”, when technological firms could accumulate monopoly power and wealth while most Americans, especially blue-collar workers without college degrees, saw their wages stagnate as the cost of living rose. It was this economic disenfranchisement, rather than cultural forces, that led to the rise of Maga, according to Kurz.

The book describes how today’s tech giants are diminishing voter power through both economic and cultural influence. Small tech startups and bigger tech companies like Microsoft and OpenAI prefer to collaborate with one another rather than compete, Kurz says. New technology companies are now formed not with the intention to challenge existing players but with the explicit aim of eventually being acquired by one. This is a symptom of monopoly power so extreme and entrenched that no innovator can survive without an established monopoly’s blessing. David has no choice but to work with Goliath. This same monopoly status gives tech giants enormous lobbying influence. Politicians who rely on their money are unlikely to rein them in.

“When you use strategies designed to manipulate knowledge to create market power, you go way beyond what we should be willing to accept,” Kurz said.

Tech giants use the force of their largely unregulated social media networks to further drive polarization to serve their bottom lines, Kurz says. “[Social meda] activity is profitable, and sometimes you generate activity by creating falsehoods, which are not good for democracy,” he said, adding that tech companies should be held legally liable for misinformation on their platforms. Unregulated AI could also further entrench disillusionment as it seeks to displace an even larger swath of workers, he projects – not just those without college degrees but doctors, lawyers and engineers as well.

Still, Kurz is optimistic that a better democracy will rise again, though it might be a difficult road. “Trumpism will not go in a whimper,” Kurz says. “There may be a big recession or a big depression or some other crisis before we can complete a new reform cycle.”

Kurz says that extreme consolidation of technological power has eventually led to reform in the past, and conditions are ripe for it to happen again. “If you talk to any normal, intelligent American, they will tell you something is wrong in America and something has to change,” he said. The Maga coalition is a combination of old-fashioned Republicans, white supremacists and former blue-collar workers who have been disenfranchised, says Kurz. Very specific economic circumstances led this group of people to come together, and they will fall apart again.

When the time for that reform comes, Kurz outlines what it should look like in Private Power: the government should tax and redistribute excess wealth that tech firms accumulate due to monopoly power. When workers are displaced by AI, education to help them learn new, more relevant skills should be government subsidized, as should companies who hire them. And new policies should ensure that AI technology assists workers but doesn’t replace them.

“We want capitalism to support democracy. Capitalism has to become more humane. It has to be more regulated. And in democracy, we don’t leave anybody behind,” he said.

“V13” was the code name used by those who attended the monumental court proceedings that followed the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people died and 350 were injured. V13 (vendredi 13) stands for Friday the 13th (of November). The date is engraved on our collective memory: on an unusually balmy autumn evening, carefree youth out celebrating the weekend ahead were massacred in a series of coordinated shootings claimed by Islamic State. The target, it has often been said, was a way of life, the insouciance of terrasse culture and rock concerts, just as the Charlie Hebdo massacre months earlier had been an attack on a way of thinking, on freedom of expression.

Amid the vast cultural production line that the deadly attacks spawned – memoirs, testimonies, documentaries, fiction, film, not to mention the new Museum and Memorial of Terrorism, scheduled to open in 2027 – Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 holds a special place. It chronicles the high-security trial that was unique in its scope and length. Opening on 8 September 2021, it unfolded over 10 months in a room within Paris’s Palais de Justice that was purpose-built to accommodate some 2,380 plaintiffs, 350 or so lawyers, and the media. An author, screenwriter and film-maker, Carrère sat on the uncomfortable press benches to cover it for French magazine L’Obs, and was one of the few who had the dedication and stamina to witness all sessions.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial is the full-length version of his weekly columns. The trial opened with the testimonies of those who lost a loved one, or an arm, a leg, their sleep, sanity or simply the will to live. Together with this litany of loss came a gruesome forensic examination of the shootings – the mud of splintered flesh; the deathly silence; the hellish four hours of those kept hostage in the Bataclan concert hall, with the constant fear of imminent death. Also the trembling voice of a seasoned policeman quoting the assailants’ justification: “You can blame your president, François Hollande. He’s bombing our brothers in Syria and Iraq, we’re here to pay you back.” But there are other stories of kindness, altruism and the strange intimacy of comforting a dying stranger. As victims take to the stand, we delve into their trauma or their unexpected resilience. “We live in a victim society, one which is happy to confuse the status of victim and hero,” Carrère reflects. And yet, he adds, all these young people strike him as heroes.

The killers all died – except for Salah Abdeslam, that is, who was recruited as a suicide bomber but bailed out at the last minute – so the 14 accused were mostly accomplices in the planning, facilitating and execution of the attacks. The trial only fleetingly addressed intelligence failings, acknowledged by the secret services themselves. Its ambition lay elsewhere: to acknowledge the traumatic memories of the victims and to scrutinise every detail that led to the massacre as well as the motives, personalities and routes of radicalisation of the accused. And “to form a collective narrative”, as one of the victims put it, when asked by the court about his expectations.

Among the victims were those who tried to understand the jihadists. Nadia Mondeguer, an Egyptian mother, who lost her daughter, Lamia, concluded her gripping testimony by addressing the defence lawyers: “Do your job, do it well. I mean it.” Georges Salines advocates for a restorative justice that seeks dialogue between victims and perpetrators. His daughter, Lola, died at the Bataclan, yet he found the strength to co-author a book with Azdyne Amimour, the father of one of the suicide bombers. Others, such as Antoine Leiris, a bereaved husband and author of the book Vous n’aurez pas ma haine (You Will Not Have My Hate), which then became a slogan, refused to look for vengeance, wanting only “a fair trial”.

So did the trial succeed in delivering restorative justice? Has it fostered any rapprochement or understanding between victims and perpetrators? The then prime minister, Manuel Valls, vented righteous indignation (“Understanding is already justifying”), to which Carrère responds by quoting philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” Carrère’s pared-down, forensic style reflects this fine balancing act between ordering facts and spinning them into a narrative, between empathy and critical thinking, engaging with an adversary’s stance and making moral judgments.

Matters turn more political when Hollande is called to the stand – a legal aberration incidentally, since he is neither victim nor accused. Carrère concedes the point made by defence lawyer Olivia Ronen when she addresses Hollande on an issue of chronology: he admits France struck Syria prior to the threats issued by Islamic State. Drawing an equivalence between terrorism and supposed state terrorism in this way forms a recognisable strategy – namely a “rupture defence”. But is it fair to call into question the authority of the justice system itself?

Defence lawyer Isa Gultaslar similarly argued that it is not fanaticism that pushed so many youths into the hands of the IS, but a legitimate anger against Assad’s regime and France’s military interventions in Syria. But can the attacks be requalified as war crimes rather than an act of terrorism? Carrère’s understanding stops short when Abdeslam, after deploring the fact that many Muslims were killed in the attacks, demands that dialogue be left open, a claim as embarrassing as Adolf Eichmann’s proposal for a reconciliation committee between Jewish survivors and Nazi perpetrators.

Hannah Arendt’s legacy hovers over V13. But “the banality of evil”, the notion she coined, doesn’t really apply to jihadism. For jihadism, evil is not to be silenced, nor responsibility dispersed in a faceless bureaucracy. Rather, it is about the glorification of sadism, as IS propaganda has sadly shown.

Carrère’s account adds to the commemorative dimension of the trial, its elegant prose bringing back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail. When it attends to the victims’ suffering, the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating.

With each historical crisis, the law and the judiciary need to reinvent themselves. Literature may contribute to that process. As Carrère compares the courtroom rituals with the liturgy of a “modern church”, where “something sacred” takes place, he adds a small piece to the puzzle. As one of the victims concludes, the trial and perhaps Carrère’s account too has given them “a place and time, all the time needed to to do something with the pain. Transform it, metabolise it” into a collective narrative: a space and time to work through, to remember, in the hope that history does not repeat itself.

Henriette Korthals Altes is an associate research fellow in the faculty of medieval and modern languages at Oxford University