Well, I originally regarded myself as in the pragmatic centre of the spectrum, more or less social democratic in outlook. My reorientation came with an expansion of the kind of questions I was prepared to accept as legitimate. So whereas five years ago or so, I would be content to search for better, more effective ways to regulate the likes of Google and Facebook, today it’s not something I spend much time on. Instead, I am questioning who should run and own both the infrastructure and the data running through it, since I no longer believe that we can accept that all these services ought to be delivered by the market and regulated only after the fact. [...] no plausible story can emerge unless Silicon Valley itself is situated within some broader historical narrative—of changes in production and consumption, changes in state forms, changes in the surveillance capabilities and needs of the US military. There’s much to be learnt from Marxist historiography here, especially when most of the existing histories of ‘the Internet’ seem to be stuck in some kind of ideational irrelevance, with little to no attention to questions of capital and empire.