The journalist Mark Ames explains how apparently disparate political interests, especially in the context of Silicon Valley, can be seen to work together. Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that

even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash.

Google—like Facebook, like Koch Industries—wants a government that’s strong enough to enforce its dominant private power over the economy and citizens and protect its wealth, but too broken and too alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.