The Library is pleased to partner with our friends from The Bookstore to present journalist and historian Eoin Higgins as he discusses his brand new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, in conversation with Dan Neilson, Co-founder and Faculty, GCAS-Jehan Master’s in Politics and Assistant Professor of Economics at Simon’s Rock.
Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and new journalism. In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence. Their cronies are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—once known as idealistic and left-leaning voices, now beneficiaries of Silicon Valley largesse. Together, this new alliance aims to exploit the failings of traditional journalism and undermine the very idea of an independent and fact-based fourth estate.
Owned examines how this shift has allowed spectacularly wealthy reactionaries to pursue their ultimate goal of censoring critics so to further their own business interests—and personal vendettas—entirely unimpeded while also advancing a toxic and antidemocratic ideology.
A rich history of the decades-long rise of this new right-wing alternative media takeover, Owned follows the money, names names, and offers a chilling portrait of a future social media and news landscape. It is a biting exposé of journalistic greed, tech-billionaire ambition, and a lament for a disappearing free press.
About the Author: Eoin Higgins is a journalist and historian from New England. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The New Republic, The Nation, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Common Dreams, The Outline, Splinter, Deadspin, and many others. Additionally he writes for Morning Brew’s tech newsletter, IT Brew, with an audience of over 120,000.
Higgins was raised in the Berkshires and returned to the area as an adult when he began his journalistic career. Prior to that, he achieved an MA in US History from Fordham University and did his thesis on Lenox’s own Julius Rockwell, the Republican Party’s first candidate for governor in Massachusetts. Much of the research for that project was done at the Lenox Library.
Dr. Daniel H. Neilson’s work studies the financial relationships and institutions of contemporary capitalism. He is the author of Minsky (Polity, 2019), which builds a theory of financial capitalism based on the work of monetary theorist Hyman Minsky. He writes Soon Parted, a newsletter about central banking, monetary theory, and fintech. Dr. Neilson’s previous research has focused on China’s financial markets, on the structure of the global monetary system, and on the evolution of the Federal Reserve. Previously, Dr. Neilson was an economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, where he helped created a global research program to promote novel and critical theories for understanding issues of financial stability. Dan teaches political economy classes with the GCAS-Jehan Master’s in Politics, including most recently Artificial Intelligence as Relation, Discourse and Material.