Some More News - Some More News: How Right-Wing Tech Billionaires Took Over The World -

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Hi. Big tech companies are now so powerful and integrated with our government that it's not very surprising that they're embracing, or at least okay with, fascist authoritarianism. You know what will help us analyze this? Amazon's new "War of the Worlds" movie. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by David Christopher Bell and Rachel Van NesProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by John ConwayPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comIt’s time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that’ll last you a lifetime. Visit http://HENSONSHAVING.com/SMN to select the razor that suits you, and use code SMN to receive a complimentary pack of 100 blades with your purchase– that's enough for 2 years of shaving. Just make sure to add it to your cart.If you’re 21 or older, grab 25% off your first order plus free shipping with code SMN at http://www.indacloud.co. Code SMN — 25% off, free shipping, and snacks suddenly taste like an adult-Michelin star meal.Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oh, hi, it's Cody. We met last week. Listen, now that you remember me, I want to tell you about a hot new overlord infecting every aspect of our lives. The power of movies. Movies are back, you see. We love them. Finally, we can forget about this wasteland of stupid politics and tech billionaires and escape into the magic of make-believe.

Like, wow, did you know there's a new War of the World's movie out? I mean, that's gotta be fun. You got your aliens, and the pew-pue, and spoilers, Achoo. And Ice Cube is in it. Let's watch a clip to forget our troubles. Boy, this is a top secret military installation. They don't let thumb drives in the building. Faith can load it here, and I can get it to you.

Prime Air. Right here. Oh. Okay. Well, that's odd. But let's keep watching. Maybe an alien joins the Zoom call. Oh, it's the future of delivery.

They've been training us for months. I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone. Nice. Oh, I get it now. We're in hell. I'm so sorry. It took me a second to remember. We're all in hell.

Okay, so it turns out that Amazon made a War of the World's film and then stuffed it with Amazon products, as well as various tech tie-ins to Microsoft Teams and Gmail and even Tesla. And together, they save the day from aliens. Because you see, tech is the new hero. That's why the next Amazon presents James Bond is going to save the day by beating a union rep to death with an Alexa. Also, Jeff Bezos' wife will be there, I guess?

It's confusing. Again, until you remember that we're all in hell. Then it makes a lot of sense, because here's some news sure feels like we're just surrounded by tech companies now. They're in our movies, our homes, our government. They're trying to get in our brains. In fact, perhaps it's not the power of movies that's taking over our lives, but a different worst thing. I mean, not worse than Amazon's War of the Worlds, but pretty close. How right-wing tech billionaires took over the world. Seriously, there's a scene where he saves his daughter with Tesla Autopilot.

They heavily imply that it's good that Teslas are hackable in case somebody else needs it in an emergency. Don't watch it, not even ironically, it's not fun bad, it's just regular bad. The hero is a Homeland Security Surveillance Officer. Don't watch it. Stop. No, stop, stop, stop. Don't. Don't do it.

Anyway, big tech billionaires. You know them? Zucco, the Bez, ex-Nazi, Palantile, Professor Bing. We didn't ask for them. No one likes them, but we have them. Like the Amazon War of the World, starring Ice Cube's face. And sometimes everything below his face, because he gets upset and he stands up. He's like, ah!

The aliens! And then the scene continues. The scene continues, and then he sits back down. You see the entire movie takes place with him at his computer because he can't figure out how to get through a glass door. Thrilling stuff. Anyway, it's worth exploring how and why this happened. Not the Amazon War of the Worlds, but rather how tech billionaires took over all aspects of our lives.

So actually, yeah, including Amazon's War of the Worlds, because while we've always, had corporations budding into the government. We've come a long way from the, let's call it, quaint days of Smith & Wesson buttering up the GOP to send thoughts and prayers. We now have a white supremacist tech billionaire openly threatening politicians on a social media site he was and is allowed to own, and that same billionaire literally standing behind the president at his desk like a political cartoon. We have Jeff Bezos buying up newspapers and movie studios, Meta handing over their AI models to the military. Apple presenting Trump with a weird golden plaque.

That same president guy doing Tesla ads on the White House lawn. The vice president having any success, thanks to the dark lord himself, Peter Teal. It seems that tech companies and our government have fused, and even more troubling, they've been infused with Trump, like the brundle fly, except less charming. And that actually brings me to an initial question. here? Do you remember when the tech industry was seen as left-wing? What happened there? Apple and Facebook and Tesla, a green energy car company, seemed to have made a massive ideological shift in the past decade or so. Why is that? Are they simply kowtowing to whatever party is in charge,

or is it the natural progression of any industry as it becomes more powerful? Or, more likely, is it both? Back in the 2000s, these tech companies still had an underdog, innovative status that progressives flocked to. Obama was almost immediately entwined with tech, having developed a symbiotic relationship with Google and Facebook for his campaign. He would become the first internet president. And during his first election, this was both good for his popularity as a cutting-edge candidate and for these budding companies looking to grow. To quote Eric Schmidt, then-chair and CEO of Google, Senator Obama's plan would help make sure that the internet remains a free and open platform, and that America maintains an atmosphere of high-tech growth and innovation.

We particularly share his aims of getting more Americans online, using the internet to increase government transparency, and applying high-tech know-how to thorny problems like education and healthcare. And boy, that's ominous when you read it today. He's basically saying that he's excited for Obama to keep tech unregulated until it takes over essential parts of the government, which is exactly what happened. But at the time, no one was that concerned, it seems. Because they were cool innovators. They pretended to care about the planet and had fun, not at all ominous in retrospect

mottos like, don't be evil. They were the underdogs, punk rock tech liberals. After all, these tech moguls supported socially liberal causes. progressive-ish taxation, incremental welfare programs, and Democratic candidates. Bill Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mark Zuckerberg launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Even Elon Musk signed the Giving Pledge in 2012, promising to donate at least half of his wealth to philanthropic causes after his death.

Because if there's one thing Musk is known for, it's keeping his promises and following through on them. At the same time, they were dowsy. the Democrats with money all the way into 2020. You can sort of see why the GOP was so pissed with big tech for such a long time. Democrats and their cool cigarette-smoking president were surfing this tech wave dick first into the Tron future. It didn't matter how big or overpowering these companies got because they were delivering that pure Star Trek smack right into our veins.

iPhones and video games and social media and all this sleek innovation, until one day, it all just kind of... Now, we know there are people in the world who do have some analog old connected devices out there. So we've also made this. It's an adapter, lightning to minifono audio adapter. And we're going to include that in the box with every iPhone 7 and 7 plus as well.

Oh. Yes. They made an adapter to fix a problem that they caused. Right, so this is where it all went wrong, because you can only innovate for so long. Eventually, you stagnate, often by choice. To quote Harvey Dent, you either die a MySpace or live long enough to see yourself become Facebook. Suddenly, these hip underdogs were bloated corporations simply existing to exist. Public opinion began to turn.

Word got out about child labor. We realized that social media ruins girl's self-esteem and was a breeding ground for incels who ironically wouldn't be breeding and Nazis, not to mention the 2016 Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal. And as the monopolies bloated and these scandals increased, the Democrats and Biden eventually turned on big tech. Rightfully so.

Biden appointed our once and future queen Lena Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission. Together with the Justice Department, Kahn and the FTC went after Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft with antitrust cases. And for the record, it wasn't even really a bloodbath. The FTC and DOJ collectively investigated only 2 to 3% of the thousands of deals proposed each year. But somehow, this was still enough for these tech companies to get all whiny about it. Adding insult to venture capital injury, Biden's Security and Exchange Commission regulated the craft. out of cryptocurrency and impose an executive order on AI safety.

Then Biden put the final nail in the coffin with a tax proposal on the unrealized capital gains of Americans with more than $100 million in wealth. You might notice that everything that the Biden administration attempted was good. Good for the country, good for the people, and good for you, one of the person parts of people. It's good to keep these large corporations in check. But for these companies, it sort of seems like a deal was broken, right? Not a good deal, mind you. Here's venture capitalist Mark Andresen talking about what he thought the deal was.

The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company. You could invent a new technology. In this case, you know, the web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great. And by the way, we got, you know, glowing press coverage. Everybody loved us. It was great. And then you could go public.

you could make a lot of money. Also great. That was great. You know, you would pay your taxes and that was fine. That was, obviously, you know, keep part of the social compact, you know, within the context of a progressive tax system. That was fine. And then at the end of your, you know, career, you would be left with this giant pot of money. And then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy. Along the way, the press loves you, you know, you get invited, you get honorary degrees at all the universities.

You get invited to all the great parties. You get invited to Davos. You get invited to Aspen. You get to come in and, you know, sit with the New York Times at a tour. board, um, you get, um, you know, the dinner parties are spectacular. And basically what, what, what happened, what I experienced and what I experienced was they, the people in charge of all this basically broke the deal, um, in basically every way that you possibly can. Right. So, so basically every single thing I just said is, you know, for the last decade has been now held

to be presumptively evil. So that's a disgustingly wealthy man complaining about how people aren't nice to him anymore. And he's no longer automatically guaranteed the kind of social capital he had gotten used to. Money isn't enough, you see. They need constant adulation, and any criticism of their actions or their companies is morphed into his interpretation of, oh, so we're evil? And first of all, yeah, a little bit. But also, Andresen seems to forget that he wasn't some underdog innovator in his garage, creating something brand new on his own, and he deserves awards and dinner parties for it. The web browser that he made money off of was NetScape, which was just a version of another browser he and a team of people helped make,

Mosaic, which was developed at the government's national development for supercomputing applications with funding from the government's High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was also based on somebody else's browser, voila WWW. So just keep this in mind as we continue. This idea that these people and their hurt feelings think they deserve everything aren't getting. hitting everything as much as they used to and are revolting. But for the longest time, the Democrats were extremely okay with allowing this industry to explode unchecked, while simultaneously exploiting their resources. They created a monster, used that monster, and were now trying way too late to stop the monster.

It's kind of like every movie about AI or technology running amok, except for Amazon's War of the Worlds, which is about sweet corporate synergy. Like this scene where Ice Cube uses Gmail to write a Read This If I'm Dead Apology Note to his family. Thrilling stuff. He writes it throughout the movie so the audience reads it several times so he doesn't have to do the acting and we can just sort of like act for him while reading it.

But then at the end he reads it out loud for us, so why'd they do that? Anyway, for the big tech billionaires, Democrats had begun to turn, and at the exact same time, these companies were contending with the wake of misinformation under Trump. They had also rightfully censored or pulled a ton of right-wing misinformation, which was now being spun as anti-conservative bias. They were essentially on the shit list of both major political parties, but only one of them actually wanted to limit their ability to profit and grow exponentially.

Oh no, which one will they choose? It could go either way, so let's find out after these ads. It's a cliffhanger, you see. You're not going to, you can't guess. You couldn't possibly imagine what they choose. Cliffhanger. Hello, all you shavers out there. Face shavers, leg shavers, other region shavers.

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The news is Lose. Loose. Clifhanger over. That was thrilling. Literally more thrilling than anything in Amazon's War of the Worlds. Before the break, we explained how wealthy tech dudes had to choose between a political party that was pushing for heavy regulations, or the party that loves corporations and just wants to say the R-slur again. Also, some fascism, maybe, please?

So, yeah, during the Biden years, a bunch of high-profile Silicon Valley venture capitalists beeline for Trump. A prime example is the All-In podcast, which is hosted by for such money ghouls. Just five years ago, these guys were calling Trump garbage and unfit for office following the January 6th Capitol riots. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he is, I think most people see that he's culpable. And I even think most-

Is that the end of his political career? I think he's disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level again. The premise of the podcast originally was like they played poker and talk. It's like, all in, which is a good idea for a podcast. But they don't do that. They just talk on their Zoom.

They don't play poker anymore. Change the name of your podcast. Anyway, that's David Sacks, known ghoul. And also, Trump's current AI and Cryptozar, fake job, talking shit about him back in 2021. Dude went from calling Trump disqualified as a president all the way to fundraising for him only a few years later. Gee, it's almost like these guys don't actually believe in anything.

like a ghoul would. To be effed. The tech world was still largely Democrat leading up to the election. Their workforce was, and probably still is, leaning to the left. And with the exception of that one Nazi guy, most large tech donors supported Harris up until the end. It was 120 million to her versus 30 million to Trump, not including Musk.

With Musk, Trump got way more money than Harris from tech. But even while the Dems were pushing regulations, most of the tech industry really wanted her to win, probably because that's still better than a stupid, unpredictable fascist. Alas, the other thing happened. You know the thing. Thanks, Elon. And then we get Zuck and Bez and the others standing there like dry dildos at the Trump inauguration, donating to his inaugural fund, doing all the stuff Trump wants.

because he's the scam president, right? The deal maker guy. So if Zuck needs the EU to lay off of him with their pesky antitrust regulations, all he has to do is boot his fact-checking, go on Joe Rogan wearing what can totally be described as an outfit he feels comfortable in, and talk about how society is woke or neutered now.

You know, dangle some gold keys for the idiot baby, at least in theory. Because for Zuck, at least, not working. The FTC is continuing to go after Meta, despite Zuckerberg offering to pay to make it go away. Shoulda talk more about how woke is bad, Mark. You should be like, oh, woke is, it's worse than bad. It's woke, which is a synonym for bad to a lot of people. Incredibly, Meta's defense is that they can't have a monopoly on social networking because no one literally networks online anymore. Yes, Yes, they've moved from the Stop Hitting Your Self-Defense to the I'm Not Touching You argument, you see?

And so, to the question of whether tech got more right-wing, ultimately, it's up in the air. On the one hand, much like people, when a company gets big and rich, it tends to act more evil and conservative. It tends to have less care for its workers and lean toward the party that will protect their money. On the other hand, they're corporations, otherwise known as cowards, and will public side with whatever they deem is popular. In other words, they were never actually left-wing either, right? Maybe they thought they were revolutionary underdogs, but Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to rate the girls at his school. Of course, we're not here to talk about Facebook or one tech company, or even Trump. We're here to talk about the Amazon War of the World's movie, which features

a scene during which Ice Cube hacks his daughter's fridge, tells her to eat better, and that is apparently an endearing quality of his, she's pregnant, you see. And they do this thing where she gets critically injured and goes into labor and Ice Cube can only watch. Except he doesn't actually watch. She just has the baby off screen, sends him a text about it, and everything is resolved without him. Good. Thank God. Thrilling stuff. Wait, no, I remember now. We're here to talk. We're here to about what led to the tech industry having godlike power over the fate of the country. And I want to circle back to the innovation problem. See, there are only so many times you can

revolutionize the world during any span of time. With the internet, we got spoiled. It gave us the ability to reinvent a bunch of things and that felt innovative. Phones, TV, movies, the method by which we complained about movies. Movies like Amazon's War of the World, a film where Ice Cube learns that his own son is hacking the government. How could you, man? How could you? My own son is hacking the government. Thrilling stuff.

Anyway, lately, it feels like we hit a wall with innovation. Lately, it feels like everyone is just waiting for the next big thing that never comes. A few years ago, it was VR and the Metaverse. Remember that? No, that's fine because we're now over it and on to AI, which is really good, which people like. Sometimes it's just annoying, but sometimes it helps teenagers kill themselves. Yes, some aspects of AI are likely here to stay.

But most of these things are fads that these tech companies and venture capitalists are pumping full of money, hoping they catch on. But of course, there have always been moments of stagnation with innovation, right? For every airplane, there were like 20 stupid flying machines that didn't get off the ground. We can't be innovating all the damn time. Remember how many cell phone concepts came before the iPhone. Remember the Nokia 7600. Do you like talking into hockey pucks? The thing is, right now, it's more than just a lull.

Because for the last 20 or so years, not only have these companies ballooned into monsters, but they've actually grown in such a way to ensure that no one could follow in their footsteps. Ironically, they're the ones stifling innovation. In a lot of ways, it doesn't really matter if they suck up to Trump or not. because they will probably last far longer than him, or rather what he represents. Because the man himself, it's not looking too good. Pretty sure your next phone will outlast him, unless it's a Trump phone, of course. But what I'm getting at is that instead of thinking of the next big thing,

for the past decade or so, these companies largely spent their brain power on keeping their rivals small. After all, if you're, say, Google, which owns the way we search for things on the internet, Well, then you can control what things get found, right? In fact, Google was accused by the DOJ back in 2023 of spending $10 billion a year to keep competitors out of the search engine market. You know, unless they played ball. There's a good phrase for this, co-opting disruption. It's that season one Black Mirror episode, not the pig-fucking one, the one where Daniel Kaluya takes a stand against the corporate dystopia up until they purchase and commercial.

his revolution. It's also kind of like the pig-fucking one. So, for example, one way these companies operate is by identifying the smaller disruptive tech, then investing in those startups, developing them, but only just enough. Or they simply buy and absorb everything. Google did this in 2011 when it acquired Picasso, a popular web-based image and photo sharing app and then shuttered the app in 2016 to redirect people to Google Photos. People were not happy about it, especially people who, you know, like having functioning access to their photos. At the same

time, they can push for internet regulation that they know will hurt smaller companies. My name is Aaron. I've been with Facebook for two years now. I'm a product policy manager. Without regulation, we're really navigating that space as best we can. I think a standardized approach would help platforms all across the board define what the bounds of those rules should be. I'm super not against regulating corporations. But when it's the corporation cheerleading the regulations, we should be very suspicious. In this case, Facebook was pushing for regulations that would moderate content in a way that they were already doing. That's not actually pushing for regulation, that's getting ahead of regulation by controlling it. And the added bonus

is that smaller companies might not have the resources to follow them. And a And of course, this is all going to happen with VR and AI. AI is particularly vulnerable to this since people have legit concerns about it. Eventually, the only companies that could deal with the red tape will be the big ones. It'll just be Amazon and meta and Christ, X, making the future sex bots of tomorrow. Cool and great. I bet some of them will be racist. Some of them are already pedophiles. You get it.

they got on top, thanks to unchecked growth, and now they went to pull the ladder up. Who amongst us wouldn't do that, assuming we're a bloated and evil corporation? There's a good article from MIT Technology Review that highlights a company called Nuance Communications. Unfortunately, that's an oxymoron now. But in the late 2000s, they began to develop speech recognition software that was quickly used by Apple and Google and Amazon. But instead of becoming the next big company, nuance was picked apart by these companies, stealing their talent and then each of them developing their own proprietary technology, such as Siri and Alexa. Proprietary tech is a major factor in this. These companies don't outsource, they just poach and build their own shit internally.

And for things like AI and voice recognition, they have a larger customer pool and more resources to perfect it. It's X, the everything app. But by being everything, they don't really have to be good at anything. And that's the other factor, of course. What we've learned is that when an internet or tech company does something good enough, not great, but good enough, it often stays on top simply because people get used to it. Like, are you really going to get a new email address if you don't have to? No, you're going to use Gmail because it knows everything already.

And you may as well also use Chrome since that also knows everything. already. These companies are becoming digital infrastructure. They don't die easily. Facebook has over 3 billion monthly users. Google operates in over 200 countries and territories. Microsoft Office and Windows have reached over 1.2 billion and 1.4 billion users. These companies make up roughly 34% of the total stock market value of S&P 500 companies, and their individual value is greater than the GDP of some countries, including Canada and Italy. The weirdo countries! And they all have their own toys they refuse to share. It's why antitrust laws are pretty darn important and specifically should apply to proprietary technology because they absolutely won't do it on their own. When Bell Labs

invented the transistor in the 1950s, they licensed that technology to a bunch of other companies for a low price. Not because they wanted to, but because the government was in the process of making them do it. That transistor technology would go on to help grow companies like IBM, General Electric, freaking Sony, and the biggest gaming company of them all, Texas Instruments. The TI-81 ruled my summer, bro. I guess I was more of a Ti-84-plus Silver Edition kid myself. Can't stress enough how we need actual regulations and antitrust efforts. Because not only will the companies not do anything, but we won't either. I mean, here we are on YouTube owned by Google.

Because what else can we do? Are you gonna watch this on LiveLeak? It's infrastructure now, controlled by a handful of private companies. A few corporations get to decide what information you access on search engines. What issues earn our attention? They decide if there's a genocide in Palestine or not. Hint, there is. They decide which political candidates we pay attention to.

Google has funded over 300 research papers, primarily ones that support policies that would benefit them. As of 2016, Facebook had partnered with 17 universities, and nearly all of these companies originally teamed up to drive research toward ethical uses of AI, which I'm sure concluded that it's super good, and these companies should use it. I don't know. Call me Captain Milky Big Beard, but I don't think the company's probably, profiting off the tech should be in charge of deciding the ethics of using that tech. Seems like one of those conflicts of interest dillies, you know?

Case in point, when a Google employee and AI ethics researcher wrote a paper stressing the environmental concerns of AI, she was fired by Google, not praised, the opposite of praised, in fact. Fired. So no, they don't care about ethics. They don't care about antitrust laws. You have to make them care. And while it seems really obvious, I guess we have to say that you can't also put them in charge of that stuff. And this is where we get to the part where big tech worms its way into our government. The same way the aliens and Amazon's War of the Worlds are trying to worm their way into our data centers. Yes, that's what the aliens want in Amazon's War of the Worlds, a film that stresses how important our data is. without our most precious resource, our data. Thrilling stuff. That's what the movie's about, by the way. How without our data, we will crumble as a society.

Extremely funny how they keep saying the word data, as if we all talk casually about our data. Oh no, my data. It's taking my data, the heroes shout. Because this movie was clearly workshopped by Amazon executives. Ice Cube loses the data of his dead wife on Facebook, and it looks like this. No, no, no, no, no, no!

Remember to take out the trash today and be nice to the kids. I love you, baby. Remember to take out the trash today and be nice to the crew. Thrilling stuff. Why would it slow down like a cassette tape dying? I think it might be a bad movie. Anyway, how did it get to this point? I specifically mean a point where Amazon could make this weird propaganda movie

that includes a fake tweet by Tucker Carlson, treating him like a legitimate journalist. The important, real, breaking news about the world being saved is portrayed by tweets from Tuckercarlson.com and Joe Rogan. Well, after the break, we'll talk about how these companies butted into our governments and what that means for us. Be sure to not watch Amazon's War of the Worlds while I'm gone. Do you ever sit down to watch just one episode of

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I think it's time for Katie to eat some nerd rope gummies again. Seriously, they're really good. Help! Help! I'm stuck in the summer of cinema, and I can't get out! It's been only a few months for you, but it's been 99 years for me. 99 years of only the hottest summer action movies, and I can't get out of the summer cinema time loop! They should make a movie about it, because if they did,

it would definitely go on Pluto TV. It would fit right in with all these other hot action movies I tell you about every week. Movies like Gladiator, Beverly Hills Cop, Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol, Die for Death, The Bountiful Boys of Bridgeport, Subtraction, the legendary discovery of a second operation, Good Burger, fill my tongue with Xanthum, Bloodsport Five, Kumate Resurrection, Star Trek, Four Brothers, The Sharpest Tooth, The Weakest Tung, Other Mouth Stuff,

Weekend at Bernie's Three, a very prone companion, and stealth. With movies like these, would you even want to leave the summer of cinema? cinema. Nah, bra. Nah, bring the action with you and stream for free on all your favorite devices. Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. Oh, I can get out. Hey, did you not watch it? Did you not ironically watch the bad movie during the break? Don't watch it. It's not fun. Did you watch it? Don't. Okay, back to big old techo. So, unchecked growth and cutting out competition was step one. They became monopolies that were essential to our daily lives. Step two was for tech companies to become vital to how governments function. Seems like that's pretty much done, right? We could probably run down

a huge list of government functions that just Elon Musk is involved in, including satellites that make or break international wars and events. We did a whole episode about the next space race and how it will be corporate run. They did it. They did step two. And the secret was their dependability. The stuff that we see as good things also created a situation where we relied on these companies in order to function as a society. Look at COVID. During the pandemic, Apple and Google teamed up to make contact tracing tools for various agencies. Facebook made disease prevention maps that also became vital during COVID.

Those aren't villainous things, but things that should have been done by the government, but a tech company got to first. It's, of course, the entire point of Doge, which aims to whittle down the government so that it can't function, and then tech companies swoop in to save the day, which is a tempting idea when these companies have monopolized innovation and prevented any growth outside of their corporate spheres. I think disasters will continue to play a big part, too. If you live in any fire-prone area, you probably use the watch duty app that showed where

the fires are. That app is, thankfully, run by a small team and is a non-profit. For now. But what happens when Google starts their own map or buys out that one? Because they will. Depressingly, that's a popular app. It's very similar to how in other countries, philanthropy allows groups like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Gates Foundation to undercut and even replace official means of providing aid. It's hard to get mad at philanthropy or technology designed to help us in an emergency.

But here I am mad because these are the... roots by which these companies become bigger than the government's designed to regulate them? How can you really regulate something if it's essential in an emergency? That's like complaining about a fireman's cologne as he's saving your life. Should have used axe! Get it? Firefighters use axes? Fun fact, that joke was better than everything in Amazon's War of the Worlds. It's just a weird moral situation as all. These companies are in charge of

the very infrastructure our government needs to function. They're also global corporations filling the needs of other governments as well. And the Turkish government asked X to block and censor a bunch of tweets and accounts from political opposition during their election. They did. X did the same for India's Modi government in their 2023 elections. And it's not just X. Google will gladly work with authoritarian governments to censor information.

How do we contend with that? How do we contend with these giant corporations that have more control over geopolitics than any one country? And of course, it's only going to get worse as they begin to inject AI into our infrastructure. It's happening everywhere, but most notably, we have GROC's new military contract. Apparently, XAI was going to get even more contracts with our government, but it turns out the Nazi stuff kind of soured the deal there, which is honestly surprising, and partly why you other AI companies have jumped in as well. And now these companies are going to be even more embedded within world governments. And this is when we get to step three, when the billionaires start coming out and directly supporting political policies. After all, why shouldn't they have a say?

They run everything now. People like Zuckerberg and Musk have put themselves in positions where what they think actually matters because they are the gatekeepers. They can decide to make a president's policy feasible or not. They can sway the public on a court case. They can decide if a political candidate is visible. They can choose where to invest infrastructure and boost jobs around the world. They can have billions of dollars in government and military contracts for their data and surveillance software while openly not believing in democracy and installing one of their goons as vice president. They are an unelected and small group of people who have more power over our government than we do. And there's another word for an institute.

with this kind of power, a branch of government. Tech companies are essentially a fourth branch of government. And hey, that sucks. If you're looking for someone to blame, I guess blame the Democrats. I mean, not completely on them. But back when online tech was new and exciting, the Democrats kind of gave them the keys to the kingdom. And by the time we thought to moderate things, it was already too late.

The damage was done. Because there's just no undoing the fact that Amazon made a War of the World's movie, a terrible one, a movie that I wanted to talk about, needed to talk about, not just because it sucks, but because it appears to be a window into what tech companies think we are and what they are to us. And it is a grim opinion. There's a scene, a real scene that people made with cameras where they bribe a homeless man with an Amazon gift card. for him to risk his life saving an Amazon drone. Wait, wait, give him an Amazon gift card for $1,000. Hurry! Thrilling stuff.

That homeless man risks being killed by aliens for a motherfucking Amazon gift card. Also, they do a little joke about how he owns a phone. Oh, those unhoused people aren't actually suffering, you see? They've got phones! And that's how they see us. As bums who will do their work for them, give our lives for a minimal amount of money.

And the entire premise of the movie is that you can save the world by sitting at your computer and watching everything happen around you. In this case, watching Washington get completely demolished while the tech companies save the day. These tech companies are our saviors you see, as opposed to the government, which is treated like an evil entity spying on us.

Unlike big tech. It's more important things to do than to worry about what's in people's Amazon card. I don't understand. I'm done watching us. From now on, I'm watching you guys. Thrilling stuff. Don't look over here at Amazon. Look at that pesky big government! Ice Cube joins this elite hacker whistleblower group led by his son to combat the government and completely ignores all the innocent corporations that they used throughout the movie as useful

and convenient tools in order to save the day. You know how underground has, backers love corporations? And like, sure, I also don't want the government spying on me. Except the thing is, they're now the same entity as big tech. Who do you think is giving them the means? When the credits roll for Amazon's War of the Worlds, the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Public Affairs is listed in their special thanks?

Twice. I think by accident, because the movie sucks. But boy, is that a Freudian slip. Also, I'm sorry. Spoilers. for Amazon's War of the Worlds. I'm so sorry. I know a lot of people are sensitive about that stuff these days, so...

Spoilers! I was gonna do like an improvised rant about Amazon's War of the Worlds here. There's all the extra stuff we didn't mention, but it's just bad. It's just a bad movie. It's so bad. Everyone's so bad in it.

The daughter, the actress who plays the daughter is really good. She's, like, killing it. She's, like, just acting her ass off. She's doing such a good job. Everything around is so terrible. They do say War of the World's in it. It's very funny. The President is, like, we've got to fight this war of the worlds.

And all the news organizations are like, we've got to fight the War of the Worlds and stuff. It's so, oh, yeah, it's thrilling stuff. Look out. Get your Amazon drone, the future of delivery out. Get him! Ah, get him! There's a main character in the movie who is an Amazon delivery driver. He just happens to be a delivery driver. They don't really use it like in the movie much, but it gives you an emotional connection to Amazon the company. It's really

blatant propaganda. Also at one point they have they have like cameras in the delivery truck because you have to have cameras otherwise there can't be a movie because Ice Cube is just like at his desk watching all these all these like cameras and there's like five cameras in the Amazon truck and you're thinking Amazon made this movie. Are they telling us that they've got like five cameras and all their delivery trucks just watching their employees? Or did they have to do that for the movie? Because you need all the angles for the movie. I don't know which one it was, but I do know it's bad. Thanks for watching this video, though. Make sure to like and subscribe on Google's YouTube.com. We've got a podcast called Even More News. It's twice a week here or at the podcast places. You can listen to this show.

as a podcast if you want, or you can watch it again. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got merch at a merch store. You can look at some examples here, and you can look at other examples when you go to the URL on the screen. Make sure to have them delivered by the future of delivery,

the life-saving Amazon delivery drone from Amazon's War of the Worlds. thrilling stuff.