In contrast to the late futurist Alvin Toffler’s hoped for “demassified media,” we see increasingly centralized control by a few companies. Nearly two-thirds of readers now get their news through Facebook and Google. Long after Trump has retreated to his world of golf links and gold-plated faucets, an embarrassment at best, oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and Lauren Jobs, widow of the late Steve Jobs, will have gained ownership over the nation’s fading traditional media.

But the main vehicle for oligarchical wealth comes from the exploitation of personal data, what Alibaba founder Jack Ma calls the “electricity of the 21st century.” These “super platforms,” as one analyst noted, “now operate as “digital gatekeepers” lording over “e-monopsonies” that aim to monitor our lives in ways even the snoop-crazy Chinese would admire. Firms like Facebook and Google seek to ferret out “psychographic” profiles as part of their core business.

We are already headed toward a world controlled by these super-snoopers. With their enormous financial resources and control of the key digital channels, they are positioned to dominate older industries like entertainment, education, and retail, as well as those of the future: autonomous cars, space-exploring drones, and most critically artificial intelligence. Particularly vulnerable to “disruption” will be Wall Street, long the epicenter of American wealth, but increasingly threatened by the rise of “quant jocks” and “fintech” firms, who may well be shifting much of the financial industry’s weight from New York to the Bay Area.