Tech Won't Save Us - Making Sense of a Pro-Tech Trump Presidency w/ Brian Merchant

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss the fallout from the US election, what it means for the tech industry, and more importantly, what it might mean for all of us. They also celebrate the show hitting 250 episodes!Brian Merchant is a longtime tech writer and author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Brian wrote about the results of the election on his newsletter.Paris wrote about why we need to remember who enabled Elon Musk to obtain his power.There are already reports of advertisers returning to Twitter/X to gain favor with Musk and Trump.OpenAI is moving away from its original non-profit status.Uber chief legal officer Tony West told Kamala Harris to stop attacking big business.Support the show

I'm like laughing a lot. It is a dark humor. It's like I am laughing into the void because banking on the ineptitude of would-be authoritarians is one of the few things we've got right now other than organizing, other than, you know, calling the stuff out when we can. So it is both comical and bleak and sort of terrifying all at once. Hello and welcome to the 250th episode of Tech Won't Save Us. I can't believe I'm saying that and I can't believe what kind of episode this has to be because of the news that is happening right now.

The show is obviously made in partnership with The Nation magazine and what an episode it is. I have a familiar guest for you, Brian Merchant, who if you've been listening to the show for quite a while, you will be used to hearing him, though he hasn't been on for a while actually and we're going to have to change that. Brian is a longtime tech writer and the author of Blood in the Machine, which if you haven't read, you should probably go check out. So first, let me say, I can't believe it's the 250th episode of this show. If you had told me back in April of 2020 that I would still be doing this now and that it would be what it is,

I would probably be pretty surprised, I think. But that's not to say that I don't love what the show has become. And I feel like, if anything, Tech Won't Save Us is just becoming more necessary now as we head into a second Trump presidency that has such a significant backing from the tech industry. A tech industry that is looking to remake the American government to ensure that they can do whatever they want to do over the next four years and beyond. A couple weeks ago, I had Jacob Silverman on the show to talk about what we learned about the tech industry through the last several months as this election campaign has been escalating and as more people from the tech industry have been getting involved and in particular backing Donald Trump. I figured that would be

our final election episode because there wouldn't be too much to say about what was going to come next. You know, in that episode, we talked about the potential outcome of a Trump election, but also of a Kamala Harris election. But after seeing how significantly Donald Trump won this election, taking the Senate, and at the time I'm recording, looking like he's probably going to get the House as well. It's a very significant mandate, not just for Donald Trump and the change that he has promised to bring to the United States, change that I think a lot of listeners to this show would not be very open to, but also in the process, empowering the billionaires of Silicon Valley to remake the United States in the way that they want to see it operate. And for anyone who listens to this show regularly, that's a pretty troubling thought.

So in this episode, Brian and I were planning to talk about his new report, looking into the political economy of AI, looking at open AI in particular, and the important role that it has played in fueling this generative AI hype bubble, but also pushing particular ideas and notions of what AI can be and how it can benefit particular business interests. But that has largely been relegated to a little discussion at the end of the episode because we spent so much of it talking about our initial thoughts on what the implications of this Trump presidency will probably be, not just for the United States and the wider world, of course. We are all affected by this, for better or worse, because of the influence and the power that the United States still holds, but also what it's going to mean for an empowered tech industry

and what these billionaires are likely to foist on us in the years to come. And if you are looking for Brian's report, it actually got delayed because of election-related matters. So the link is not in the show notes right now, but once it does get published, I will go back and update it. If you're listening to this in future and want to read, it will be there for you. So I won't get too much more into that aspect of things because we do spend the vast majority of this episode going into it. So I will just say if you are a new listener, if you've been listening for quite a while,

I would say thanks for listening to the show. I can't believe that we are at this important milestone. It's unfortunate that the milestone episode has to be a discussion of Donald Trump and the grim future that is ahead of us. But I guess the discussions that we have been having over the past four and a half years have prepared us to understand this moment, to know what is going to happen, and to hopefully be able to try to push back on what the tech industry and what the American right are going to try to foist on us now. So at 250 episodes, I'm thinking about the next 250 to come and how much of those will be shaped by understanding this moment, understanding

this right-wing alignment of the tech industry, understanding the way that they will be using their power to try to make many people's lives worse just to enhance their power and their wealth over the next four years and hopefully not beyond that but who knows what can happen at this point so i would say if you enjoy the show if you appreciate the work that i do in making it the show that eric does in producing it in bridget and making our transcripts i would ask you to consider becoming a supporter so we can keep doing this, so we can keep having these critical conversations that will be even more essential now with the political direction of the United States. And we've already seen this happening in other countries, and I'm sure more to come. So you can obviously leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice.

You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. But more than anything, we could use your support by joining supporters like Joe in Stony Plain, Canada, Jeremy in Austin, Texas, Allison G in Chicago, and Justin from Chattanooga by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well to ensure that we're prepared to analyze and understand what is coming. And so you can then understand that as well and hopefully prepared to push back on it. Thanks so much and enjoy this conversation as much as that is coming. And so you can then understand that as well and hopefully prepare to push back on it. Thanks so much and enjoy this conversation as much as that is possible. Brian, welcome back

to Tech Won't Save Us. Always, always, always a pleasure to be here. You know, it's been a while, but the show is celebrating 250 episodes this week. So I figured who has to come on the show to talk to me about this, you know, to celebrate this milestone. Of course figured who has to come on the show to talk to me about this, you know, to celebrate this milestone. Of course, it has to be friend of the show, Brian Merchant. Yes, to celebrate the milestone, one ascendant milestone, 250 episodes coinciding with another milestone, perhaps on an alternative trajectory. We're recording this the same week of the election. What election? What are you talking about?

Only tech here. We're not going to wade into anything else. I'm sure we have nothing to say about Elon Musk. Canada didn't have an election. I don't know, you know, where in the world had an election. What are you talking about? Oh, that's right. This is a Canada-centric podcast. My great mistake. My great mistake. I don't pay attention to anything that happens anywhere else in the world. So I don't know who had an election this week. That's right. You are Canadian and you are in Europe right now. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Just completely avoiding the center of the universe, of course, America. Isn't everything about America? Oh, God. I just,

yeah. Apologies in advance if I am a little out of sorts, because it's obviously been a week. Well, I'm sure we'll get into all that and how it pertains to our delightful overlords in Silicon Valley and beyond. But yeah. Yeah. and and to be clear we are recording on thursday november 7th so you know the the impact is pretty fresh at the moment of the results of course i do know which election you are talking about and you know that kind of makes me wonder like so it's 250 episodes of the show we've been doing this for coming up on five years it'll be five years in in april that i'm doing the it's like, okay, like what does the next 250 episodes of Tech Won't Save Us look like? What does Tech Won't Save Us look like in the era of a second Trump presidency? And again, you know, technically,

the presidency hasn't even started yet. So like, what is this going to look like? How is the show going to respond to that is an interesting thing to ponder. Yeah, I mean, and it's also to that is an interesting thing to ponder. power and the way that it has sort of now very nakedly, you know, sort of formed a symbiosis with power in a way that feels new. I mean, I think an argument could be made that this certainly it's not controversial to say that the closeness has always been there, that there's always been these linkages between the Valley and the tech industry and the state and the Defense Department in particular. But now it's very front and center visible with this union of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the sort of emergence of this victory.

So there's a lot to dig into there, I think. And, you know, just your listeners will know, especially you've done a lot of episodes about Elon, a lot of episodes about surveillance regimes and about the uses of social media, things that I think you can't talk about this election and what's coming without talking about things like that. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. Right. And I feel like even if we're thinking back like four or eight years ago, it even seems difficult to imagine the tech industry being this involved in like a Republican political campaign as they have been, right? Like if we think back to the first Trump presidency, you know, everyone was so shocked at how Peter Thiel was, you know, so involved in that and was

funding it so much. And there's this passage like in Kara Swisher's book where she's talking about seeing all the tech executives go to this meeting at Trump Tower and how it was like so, I don't know, it angered her so much or whatever. And it was like, how are you not seeing who these people are anyway? But putting Kara Swisher aside, you know, so there's this moment where like, OK, they come to kiss the ring and it's treated as like, oh, liberal Silicon Valley is going to talk to Trump. And, you know, was going to try to work with him and blah, blah, blah. And they're so like polar opposite. They're so distinct other than like the Peter Thiel's and the few people who are like the outsiders of Silicon Valley who are more in this like Trump orbit. Right. And then, of course, you know, you see more funding from Peter Thiel for other candidates

later. But this election has very much been like Peter Thiel was there sort of and he was talking about whether he was on the fence or not for a while, but like David Sachs and like that whole group of people were very behind it. We saw the venture capitalists like Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz come out. And of course, Ben was kind of like hedging his bets a little closer to the actual election date. A lot of those people in like the PayPal mafia and this like broader network around Thiel and Musk have been contributing to the Trump campaign. And now, like in the past few months in particular, though it was kind of suppressed or kind of narrativized

in a different way for a long time. But it does feel really notable to see how much the tech industry has really grabbed onto the Trump campaign, cemented itself within the Trump campaign, helped select the vice president for the Trump campaign, and now will really be a driving force behind his agenda over the next four years. Yeah, it is a new and I think that advisory council moment was interesting to look back at the big difference now is that the tech companies and I kind of argued this in my most recent piece is that they no longer feel any obligation to sort of even look, you know, you look back at those tech advisory council photos and, you know, Tim Cook is there, but he's kind of furrowing his brow. Tim Cook is wondering how he's going to get his big tax break,

right? Yeah, they're all in there. They're like performing this sort of skepticism or modicum of resistance that they're like trying to play it like they're there because you know it's in the civic interest that they put their best foot forward and you saw a lot of stories come out that oh maybe we can make you know the best of this and guide things in the right direction and there was you know a google co-founder went to one of the protests after trump instituted the muslim. Facebook basically spent years dealing with sort of publicly hand wringing over how they're being more accountable about the rise of Trump and the misinformation on their platform and that kind of thing. And by and large, you know,

the companies have either disavowed all that as Mark Zuckerberg has done explicitly, or just ignored it as like Tim Cook and Google have done just calling to congratulate. Bezos used to be something of a sort of hostile figure to Trump that you've for reasons that had nothing to do with like civics or democracy. They just didn't like each other. And so they get into sort of scraps. But now even Bezos, you know, he spiked the Washington Post newspaper, which he owns. He spiked their endorsement to sort of hedge this. This is just cold business calculus, right? And the difference now to me is that there isn't any public backlash that they're worried

about for two reasons, as I argue. One, that all these companies are now eight years after the beginning of Trump. They already were monopolizing. They already were pretty walled guard. But now there's no doubt about it. Google is not worried about, you worried about consumers leaving its platform. The overview, the AI overview debacle has showed that they're going to do what they want. There's so much lock-in, there's so much buy-in that they're confident that they're just not going to shed users in any meaningful way,

especially not over politics. So it's just like so different this time, as it is in every corporate sector, it seems like it's just like, oh, congratulations, Trump. Well, they're all kind of getting in line and trying to be the first to congratulate him. And now it's we know now that there's a bunch of behind the scenes phone calls to placate him in case he won behind the scenes, real sort of anticipatory bet hedging and trying to degrease the wheels. So Silicon Valley has, again, always been perfectly willing to work in these conditions. But now there's this outward, this open embrace. Elon Musk has basically a mandate. If the mandate that Trump won in the margins of it, it was just a clear clear cut winner. You're

going to win the popular vote. It's not even close. So Elon Musk is a big part of that project. And now he has this entire apparatus. He already has a bunch of state funded projects with SpaceX and he's getting subsidies for Tesla. And now X is going to be, it's interesting, it's the most failure business-wise. He's scared off all the advertisers, but it turned out to be quite useful as a propaganda platform. And now it's going to be really, I think, one of the things to watch how that gets used now that it is explicitly part of a political project.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. And I want to come back to the implications of that in just a second. But I also want to pick up on what you were talking about with the distinctions between like that first Trump moment and the second one and the relationship of Silicon Valley to it, right? Because I feel like on the one hand, like when you're thinking about that first Trump presidency, like, you know, you have Elon Musk and these other people on the advisory council, and Elon Musk doesn't even leave after the Muslim ban is announced. It's only when Trump announces he's leaving the climate Paris agreement that Elon Musk actually says, OK, he's going to step down from this advisory board.

And it seems it's not really about politics, but because at the time, at least, he had a particular brand image as someone who cares about climate change to try to sell the Tesla cars and stuff. So he couldn't like, you know, money that by staying on the council and being he does really want his tax cuts so that Apple can take all this money that it has stored abroad into the United States and not pay a massive amount of taxes on it once that like transaction occurs. And he did get that from Donald Trump. And so he used to allow Donald Trump to say that Apple was like making all these big investments in the United States in manufacturing and stuff that it wasn't really doing.

But like he would never come out and deny it because then it would make Trump look bad. But these are two moments that I think are really distinct, right? Because going into the first Trump presidency, you still have the low interest rates. You still have this notion of like Silicon Valley as this liberal place as they're doing capitalism better because the companies, they're getting large, but like they're still growing at that time, right? And it's only after the Trump presidency that you start to have more of like the tech lash and the Cambridge Analytica stuff and this kind of shift toward looking at Silicon Valley, looking at its figures, looking at its main companies more critically, and the

powerful people in Silicon Valley really start to react to that, right? And then as we move into the COVID period, you have their like further radicalization through seeing like the power that the state can wield, but also, you know, the entrance of the Biden administration and how he and his administration are very interested in this notion of reviving antitrust, you know, actually getting some regulatory enforcement going against some of these tech companies. He is explicitly not very close with Elon Musk, criticizes Tesla for being anti-union, and kind of praises the EV efforts of the unionized American car companies because he's a union guy, Joe, for all the criticisms you can make of him. And so then heading into a second Trump presidency, you have this shift where these people are much more powerful than they were before. We're not in this moment where they and government authorities. And they want to see like all of this shit go away, but also shape the power that government has, like not have this kind of libertarian hands off part of it, but actually get in there, try to pull back like the regulatory enforcement that exists and make sure that they are setting the rules in such a way that benefits

them and like the project that they are really trying to forward and try to get people to buy into, right? Like that seems like a real distinct difference in what is going on in Silicon Valley, but that also shapes their approach to Trump in both of the different kind of eras that he exists in, right? Yeah, 100%. We have to, you know, remember, as I know that you often remind your listeners, that the Obama administration, when a lot of these tech companies really got cooking, not so much Apple, but I mean, Apple ascended to a whole new level of global dominance during Obama. But, you know, the gig app companies, certainly Amazon and the social media companies,

they came up with Obama and they were kind of synonymous with progress in sort of the political formation at the time that was espoused by Democrats and by liberals. You know, like this was Silicon Valley was doing good. It was shiny and it was, but part of that bargain that they would be nice to Obama publicly and, you know, and sort of allow him to sort of reap the benefits of looking like he was future forward was that they got basically hands off regulatory treatment. And so it began a long time ago. think you're right that when Joe Biden came in, both after it had been clear what a disaster that completely hands off approach was in terms of, you know, allowing the sheer amount of toxicity and hate foster on the social media platforms, the declining labor standards that happen as a result of sort of the gig work regime, and all of these things. So it becomes clear that an intervention is necessary. And so,

you know, yeah, the Biden's FTC and Lena Kahn and, you know, even Chris Gensler and the SEC taking on crypto companies that had benefited more than anybody on a regulatory free environment. So these agencies trying to do their jobs, people describe them as aggressively, but really, they're just doing their jobs as they should have been done for decades. And that is a big shock to the system of Silicon Valley. And one of the biggest reasons that they're hedging all these bets and are not worried about the visibility of sort of embracing Trump is that they want this stuff. They want it. They want the antitrust effort to go away. They want labor laws that have begun to be reinforced a little bit more stringently. They want an end to that. And they want to go further. All bets are off now. With this political mandate, new political climate, I think that that's something that organized labor and the left really needs to be keeping an eye on because we're in uncharted territory. Same with X.

We don't know what could happen with this platform. And I, you know, I have nightmares of it being used to rat out migrant workers or just spew even more hate than it's already been used to spate. But in a way that's now sort of sanctioned by a state that's officially sanctioned, I think that it could mutate into something really grotesque. It's already plenty grotesque. But again, the concept of like a state sanctioned right wing social media network run by Elon Musk, who's, you know, in the inner circle of Donald Trump now, I don't think that you can imagine worse enough outcomes in order to sort of brace for the ugliness that we'll see there. So, yeah, all that is to say there is a newness in how forward it is.

I think, you know, public pressure was able to sort of mitigate some of these worse harms and push back. I think that now that they're monopoly powers, now that Trump has a mandate, they're going to operate as if it doesn't matter. AI regulations, AI stuff is out the door. Labor law is going to be trampled. Antitrust is another one that's going to be interesting because you have JD Vance and some guys who, they primarily, they've liked Lena Connery. I think she's going to go, but they might wield antitrust as a punitive tool or a threat, perhaps, to companies that they, you know, the big conservative line is that the tech platforms censor them or and that they're run by liberals and that therefore, you know, they need to be taken to heel. support Lena Kahn in basically pushing back against their power. If it can be seen that these companies really are completely comfortable working with Trump as it appears that they are, then I think those complaints are going to go away pretty quickly. So we'll see. But I think even then, right, like, you can see how for a long time, it's been pretty clear that

these platforms have been beneficial to conservatives anyway. And they will still claim that, you know, Facebook or whatever is liberal or silencing conservative voices to get them to go even further in like limiting moderation and amplifying like conservative views and all this kind of stuff. And you can see that continuing, as you're saying, by using antitrust or potential enforcement, not as like this thing that is done by, you know, a non-biased like arbiter or an expert or something like that, but by their own political people who want a particular outcome from it. Like it really stands out when you're talking about the National Labor

Relations Board and how, you know, we were having a discussion in the Biden era about whether the PRO Act, this act to like expand union rights was going to be passed. It wasn't, of course, because there are so many things that they didn't get passed. But now it's like the discussion is on the complete opposite end of not like, will union rights be able to expand in this moment where like strikes and union activity seems to have been on the rise, but rather is the National Labor Relations Board itself and a lot of the foundation of union rights and labor rights in the United States going to be completely dismantled now as you have this, not just campaign from the tech industry, but this campaign developed by the Heritage Foundation, this really extreme right

wing think tank lobby group in the United States that has this major project to basically gut the administrative state. And it looks like Elon Musk is going to be a key part of that, as you were saying earlier, with this talk that he's going to head up this Department of Government Efficiency, where he's basically, the idea, the way that they talk about it is he's basically going to come in like he came in at Twitter and start just gutting departments of the government and firing people who he doesn't think belong there without understanding anything about what they actually do or what the government actually does, you know, so they can cut a bunch of people in government,

but also so he can ensure that the regulatory apparatuses, that the functions of the state cannot actually function in a way that would hold his businesses and his buddies and things like that to account so that they can go off and do whatever they want, whether it's SpaceX defiling the environment in the south of Texas so it can launch whatever rockets it wants, or Twitter X getting away with whatever it wants on the kind of information and users that it allows to use its platform, or Tesla and the issues with its autopilot software that have been under investigation by the traffic regulators, like all of those things are going to be under attack now. And, you know, you have the people in the positions of power to be able to do that

because one of the complaints that like Peter Thiel and these tech folks had about the first Trump administration is that he was like reined in by these people who were to establishment who were in like his camp, you know, that he wouldn't allow like Balaji Srinivasan to head up the FDA. And now like they're just roaring to go and they know that those restrictions are not going to be there this time. Yeah, it is. It's brand new terrain in that regard, you know, and it is different that they're coming in with a plan. I'm sure there will be plenty of bumbling and plenty of ineptitude. But there was plenty of bumbling and ineptitude on display when he took over Twitter, as you said, and then he just kind of gutted the place and by and large failed or was held aloft by just,

you know, his personal wealth and his personality and his sort of cult of personality. But you know, so it's it stands to reason that yeah, if he is so inclined, I think one of the big questions with Musk is that like, how much dedication does he have or interest does he have actually doing these things? I mean, this is a guy that, you know, likes to play Diablo all day and tweet. Or does he pay people to pay Diablo for him? This is the question, right? I think it's funnier if he's just playing Diablo himself because he's up at 4am and then every once in a while to tweet interesting over some junk race science or something. He's just a goblin in a lot of ways. And he has now access to such great power, no understanding how an administrative state works,

no real interest in, in actually governing that I can tell. You're right. He has these series of grievances and things that kind of irk him or that, that like slow up his companies. And if he can just sort of get rid of all that or do his best to get rid of all that, you know, I don't know what kind of commitment that he could possibly have to act to like proactively doing much in the government. I mean, I don't know. He's so addled and so erratic, just like Trump that I mean, they are people are also saying that the one of the silver linings is that these guys are both maniacs with huge egos

and tempers and that they'll they might just like immediately turn on each other. But I get different vibes. Like, I feel like they, like, they don't really step on each other's toes. Like Elon Musk has all his tech projects, his companies, he doesn't really, you know, want to be leading a state or he doesn't want that kind of a spotlight. He definitely wants to be beloved and to be thought of as this, you know, this Superman tech genius. But I think he gets that adulation. I don't think he kind of like, you know, when Trump sort of gets furious at people, it's when they get in the way of him doing what he wants to do. And I think the spheres are different enough and that they like kind of understand each other enough and that they're alike enough that I don't know. Yeah, I think the biggest question is whether Elon, you know, just gets bored or just,

you know, gets distracted. Yeah, but it is also quite terrifying. I mean, I think one of the things that we got into so much trouble for is perennially underestimating Musk because he's just such a goon. I think people just looked at him leaping up on stage and bearing his midriff doing X jumps and saying, like, who could possibly take this idiot seriously? And millions of people did, or on X, kind of going like, oh, it's turned into a cesspool. What a shithole. It's shedding advertisers. It's a failed experiment. Well, guess what? It broadcast a pro-Trump message all the way through the election, and I hope somebody undertakes a more serious look at the impact that it had. Obviously, these things are tough to discern, but it seems to me that it was wound up in the end being quite an effective propaganda platform. And it stands to reason that it will continue to be effective in some quite disturbing ways. So I'm like laughing a lot. It

is a dark humor. It's like I am laughing into the void because banking on the ineptitude of would-be authoritarians is one of the few things we've got right now, other than organizing, other than calling the stuff out when we can. So it is both comical and bleak and sort of terrifying all at once. Yeah. You have to wonder if people are going to start buying ads on Twitter X to get Musk's favor in the way that like world leaders and foreign governments used to like buy hotel rooms at Trump's hotel like in Washington to like, you know, have a way of like funneling money toward him without actually doing so and telling him like how nice it was to stay in the hotel and whatnot as their own means of like currying favor with Elon Musk because they don't actually have to spend like a ton to get him to say like, oh, you're advertising on the platform. This is so good, blah, blah, blah. When he meets somebody in an official capacity, oh, like, oh, we advertise on ads. This is a post I've been meaning to do for a while because I've been saving some of them. But you already have this like subgenre of tweets that are like

dear leader Elon tweets where like there's something that's tweeted specifically just to sort of get his attention and to try to get him to retweet it. And it's one sort of dear leader Elon tweets, where like, there's something that's tweeted specifically just to sort of get his attention and to try to get him to retweet it. And it's one sort of in like way that he is kind of like wielded power or commanded sort of attention on the platform, we're gonna see just like, X is already excruciating to be on. It's like, it is the worst social network. I'm sorry, threads, like, I know you and I have this sort of pet theory that Threads has just been as bad as X just because it just keeps politics below the surface, but they're just as noxious. Oh, man, I hate Threads. Yeah. I mean, I guess because we're like frogs in the boiling

water in X. We've kind of gotten you. But it's just like, it's noxious. It's 4chan. It's like 4chan now. Twitter is just disgusting and it is going to get worse. It's just like, it's not. It's 4chan. It's like 4chan now. Twitter is just disgusting. And it's going to get worse. It's just going to continue to get worse. Yeah, the worst companies and brands advertising on it, like, you know, more money to try to get his attention, more people like tweeting to try to get his and Trump's attention specifically. Trump was on there today saying that, you know, academia originates the extinctive mind virus or whatever. So he's already starting to say things that are like, let's vilify academia and classic early, you know, authoritarian regime type stuff. I have some some chud is arguing with me on Twitter going, approve it's authoritarian

or what. So he's already got his like army of supporters who are just like enthusiastic about this project turning it even into more of a shithole. Yeah, I don't disagree with you on Twitter X and how terrible it is. I just think Threads is like distinct form of terrible in not like the super crazy right wing way, but in like the type of discussions that it promotes. But like speaking about like, you know, the response on Twitter, like the cult, you know, the Elon cult has been like enthusiastic, right? Paul Marr's catalog, which is one of these like booster Elon accounts tweeted, you know,

after the election, Elon is such a dumbass. He spent 44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all three branches of the federal government. And it's like, not entirely wrong, but like even on that point, right? Like there was this discussion kicked off, but like like I think it was last year that Ronan Farrow piece came out in The New Yorker that was getting into like the shadow power that Elon Musk has over the government because the government is so reliant on these companies that he set up. kind of global satellite internet, you know, SpaceX for the rocket launches. It's really basically the only way that the United States is getting to space now. Like Boeing's project is really struggling, as are these other ones. You know, even like the electric car charging network that Tesla has, like there's nothing else like it out there. And so then you think about

what an incoming Trump administration means that is directly linked to Elon Musk in this like very significant way. And you absolutely have no dismantling of the state's reliance on Elon Musk and his corporate empire, but rather like the further expansion of it. And you wonder like after four years of Trump, if, you know, as you're saying this relationship with Musk holds up, which I think it probably will, you know, I think we want to hope that it will fall apart and all this kind of stuff because the implications of it staying together are really terrible. But you think about how much more the US state will be dependent on, say, SpaceX or other Musk projects by the end of four years and of other Silicon Valley companies as well. And that's a very grim picture for trying to roll back the power of these companies at the end of, you know, that state of affairs.

And that's assuming that like Democrats or some other non-Republican political party come to power after Trump. And it's not just like Vance, you know, following him up or something. Yeah, which, you know, very well could be, of course. The election results were so bleak for that reason, because they were so wide ranging and the margins were so sort of definitive and the demographic shifts. I mean, obviously, the Democratic Party just tanked this thing. They have been ignoring so many key issues. And, you know, it's classic, classic Democrats just trying to sort of, you know, paper over everything in hopes of what we're expecting, you know, certain constituencies

to come through to them without, you know, promising any real durable, meaningful sort of material gains for most working people. I mean, I do think that has been a little bit overstated because like Biden, I feel like Biden for a number of reasons, because he was like an older school came from the union tradition, but had also been kind of dampened by, you know, decades of, you know, Clinton era neoliberalism, but he still had that in his veins. And then when like sort of the Bernie moment activated it, it was, it made sense for him. But it was too little too late. You have one president who came up and said, okay, maybe it's a good idea that we kind of like do the bare minimum to sort of advocate for labor. Maybe we actually finally start breaking up these obvious monopolies.

We have a company that has 90% of the market in search, which is a function that people use every single day. And maybe that is bad for consumers after all. But again, the way that it all happened, it did kind of feel like a rupture or a shock. It didn't feel like the formation of a continuous identity that Democrats could draw on and say, this is what we're about. We're already seeing stories that Kamala's advisors, Tony West, Uber's legal advisor, the legal chief, an executive at a gig work company who was one of Kamala's top advisors, told her not to disparage big business so they could get more CEOs on board. And so we have this big, shaky, you know, coalition that stood ultimately for very little. Obviously, those of us who, you know, were hopeful

that Kamala won, it was more of a damage prevention measure. And that's to say nothing of Gaza and the way that they just like egregiously sort of boxed out one of the most active constituencies that they had. And people always say, oh, the polls only showed a small percentage of people actually cared about Gaza. But it doesn't work like that. There's a reason why the GOP has paid attention to its noisiest and its most active members for years and years and years. It's because those people are the people who are willing to get up and shout online, to knock on doors, to form coalitions, to like really work where that's where the energy comes from. It doesn't come from having Beyonce put on a Pamela Anderson outfit and say, go vote. It's the thinnest, most sort of superficial display. The Democratic Party has to

do so much more. It has to just like, I mean, I don't know. Can it be saved in its current configuration? Or does it need to be gutted, started over? I don't know. But the Silicon Valley stuff is a very good sort of portrait where a lot of this went wrong, where it comes to labor, where it comes to invasive privacy technologies, teaming up with all these defense contracts. It's a very sort of neoliberal, neocon adjacent project that Democrats have found themselves just kind of tethered to. They still want to look good for Silicon Valley. You have to oppose some of this stuff. Otherwise, you get Trump. Otherwise, you get somebody who now has the supercharged version

of all of this machinery at his disposal. Silicon Valley is all too happy to just hand it to him and gut conditions for those gig workers, the Amazon workers, the people who, you know, are the working class that once looked to the Democratic Party for protection and for support and have been mostly, you know, materially abandoned for so long. And, you know, credit to Biden for making some strides in that domain. But Kamala didn't really, you know, she was campaigning with Liz Cheney, not Sean Fain, as a lot of people pointed out. Yeah, and a really important thing to point out. And I feel like when you're talking about Biden, like one of the key things is in those

first two years, he was pushing hard on like to build back better and like, you know, trying to get these more progressive things passed. But then when he faced this resistance by Manchin and Sinema in particular, a lot of that kind of fell to the side. And the second half of his term was particular, a lot of that kind of fell to the side. And the second half of his term was really pushing a lot of this kind of more national security oriented stuff, you know, talking about how the budget was big, you know, all these sorts of things that are not really appealing to people who are feeling inflation, who are feeling cost of living.

And then, you know, the Harris campaign, as you were saying, didn't really have a response to this and framed their campaign more along the lines of like, we need to keep Trump out of power. We need to defend democracy and democracy is all well and good, but like, you know, you need to feel that your circumstances, that you're living expectations are like rising as well. And they just weren't delivering that to people, which is not to like justify the vote for Trump in any way, but like, this is how politics work and they just weren't doing it.

Yeah, and I think the refrain online that you've been seeing a lot is the correct one where, you know, it's like they stake their whole thing about defending democracy, defending these institutions. And if you don't feel like these institutions are working for you in the first place, then what is the motivation to vote, much less like organize or fight to protect them? Another thing that the Democrats kept doing was trotting out these guys

who were just like telling the middle class, the working class that like, no, no, you should be feeling good right now. Look at, you know, inflation really isn't that high. There's a high employment rate, but it's never occurring to all these people to just trust working people to say, like, things feel bad right now. They're not asking, is rent too high? Is it a struggle to meet my basic material conditions every day?

Do I feel precarious? Yeah, I have a job, but is it going to vanish in two weeks? Am I doing too much gig work? Am I doing gig work on the side and not getting paid enough for it? Are these companies screwing me over? So on paper, yeah, maybe like people have jobs and a recession has been averted or whatever. is not to like wave charts in their face or to ignore issues like housing and rent or fighting the Silicon Valley regime that is exacerbating the precarity in work and, you know, doing things like

just sort of allowing Prop 22 to come into effect and wipe away protections in California that might protect gig workers. Or you have all these Democratic governors like vetoing minimum wage laws for gig workers. I'm not saying like that was the wedge issue that ultimately, but it's a reflection of the attitude that's endemic to Democrats, and especially to where it interfaces with Silicon Valley, because a lot of times that's the bridge too far. Here in California, great example, we had this law that passed, very popular, to protect journalists. A lot of things that a lot of Democrats, a lot of people think is the Democratic Party is. And it's messier. You do because people kind of still have mixed feelings about Silicon Valley. Sentiment has shifted a lot, but they used to love it. Now they're more mixed. People still love Amazon because you can get your

stuff. And a side note is a fun, you know, a lot of people were willing to cancel their Washington Post subscriptions in response to the Jeff Bezos intervention of the Kamala endorsement. They didn't cancel Prime. Somebody was like, well, you're going to cancel Prime? And a lot of people were like, oh, well, I mean, I need to buy Prime. We also have to do so much more work to sort of get more folks to understand that Silicon Valley now is wielding this power in a way that is directly contributing to the deterioration of the middle class for profit. And AI is a perfect chance to do that because AI is a series of automated systems that are automating work by middle class creative workers and then siphoning the gains from

automating that work up to Silicon Valley yet again. And you have people furious about it. So maybe we have this opportunity to form more of a sort of a counter constituency. Because we have to contest this stuff. We have to contest all of this stuff. Because now Silicon Valley and Trump, they're buddies there. It is clear now. It cannot be clearer. Elon Musk, I saw you shared that photo of Elon Musk with like Trump's family. Like he's

just like, he's in the inner circles. He's taking family portraits with them now. Like he's doesn't get any closer than that. So hopefully that will motivate some more people to take a stronger stance against it. He paid enough money to be an honorary Trump family member at this, at this point, I think. So it makes sense for him to be in the picture with his son, who apparently he kind of like stole from Grimes, you know, based on the kind of parental lawsuits that have been going on that a lot of people aren't talking about, which, you know, maybe fair enough. But when he pitches himself as this great dad, you know.

That is the other way. So it's either Elon gets bored or they or or like the Trump family gets genuinely weirded out by like Musk showing up too much. Like they're just kind of like stalking around the halls, like just because it's clearly a social cues are off. It just I could see them weirding everybody up. But he's Elon. You got to, you know, you. Oh, man. see them weirding everybody out. But he's Elon, you gotta, you know, oh man, just these infinitely refracting possible futures, each one worse than the last. It's so hard to know where things are

headed and it's all so grotesque. Yeah. And just on your point about democracy, like, you know, if Kamala, if Biden were so, you know, sure that Donald Trump is this like, you know, inherent threat to the future of democracy in the United States. It doesn't really like fit together that then they come out the day after the election and say, we're going to have a smooth transfer of power to put power in the hands of this guy who apparently is going to make us never have a vote again or something like, you know, it doesn't really kind of fit together properly. But you mentioned AI.

And for the listeners, we were initially planning this episode to talk about Brian's new report on AI. But of course, you know, the world threw things a bit offside for us. But I wonder, I guess, thinking about all of the work that you have been doing over the past few months to look into these AI companies, we're still in this moment of AI hype. Maybe it has like diminished a little bit, but there's still a lot of hype around generative AI. A lot of these companies are still making a

lot of money. There's still a lot of money flowing into major data centers that are being built to power all this stuff, even as there are questions around how these companies are ever going to actually make money because the stuff is so computationally intensive. But what does this moment mean for this AI hype, for this generative AI bubble that we have been experiencing for the past little while? And where do you see all of that going from here? Yeah, that's a really great question. And it's one that I just started thinking a little bit about given the amount of sort of press attention to Elon Musk now and his exploits. And he's in AI, he's got XAI or whatever, but it's mostly sort of manifesting through Grok, a stupid feature on X that you have

to pay to access. So it's not exactly like front and center and it hasn't really been part of the larger conversation. There's an interesting thing here where like Elon Musk has bad vibes towards Sam Altman. The two of them had kind of an acrimonious split, you know, I think fueled largely by Musk's lingering resentment. He wanted to be CEO of OpenAI a long time ago. We could kind of talk about the history that's relevant to this report that I just wrote. He always wants to be CEO of OpenAI a long time ago. We could kind of talk about the history that's relevant to this report that I just wrote. He always wants to be CEO. He always wants to be CEO. Back when it was a nonprofit, before it was even really on most

people's radar. And Sam Altman, in also a move that was sort of indicative of his sort of powers of tech world diplomacy, was able to install himself instead of Musk. And so Musk exited Open AI saying something like, oh, it's going to be a conflict of interest because I have Tesla and they're going to be this network of interconnected AI and we're growing it over there. It was really just a safe face. He got, he kind of got booted from, from Open AI. And so that's been a lingering sort of resentment of Musk's. It's not as pronounced as some of the enemies that Musk has. He has sued OpenAI for basically promising to be a non-profit and then turning into a for-profit company. And it's like a weird lawsuit. I think most legal observers think there's probably not

a lot there. He even dropped, he filed it, dropped it, then brought it back again. He definitely may or may not be spurred into exploring his options as a possessor of state power now. That is something. Can he explore ways to get the Trump administration to be hostile towards open AI as a punitive measure? That's certainly not unthinkable. More broadly, does this election kind of provide also a rupture in the AI hype hysteria, or does it continue unabated? So much of the AI bubble has been, as most bubbles are, dependent on continually reinvigorated hype over these series of products that have come out. But AI, more than even past bubbles, because they don't really have, besides ChatGPT so far, they don't really have a product that has been proven from a business sense to be sustainable or durable. All this enterprise software that Microsoft is selling through Copilot, that OpenAI is selling, and that Anthropic is selling as enterprise-tier software.

That's their biggest bet right now. There's a lot of evidence that it's just not working that well, right? That it's like workers that are forced to use it are complaining about it because it's not that efficient. It's not really doing much for them. They have to check its results. They have to make sure the work didn't screw it up. Besides writing some marketing emails and like maybe like what is it really going to do for you, you know, in the long run? So it's the story. And this is what my kind of report argues for AI Now. It should maybe be out today by the time we're talking about this. And I hope you check it out because it really charts how maybe more than any sort of technological trend or sort of next, quote, big thing from Silicon Valley over the last 15 years,

AI has been just utterly dependent on this story about the emergence of AGI, of an artificial general intelligence that's going to arise and be able to do the, specifically as OpenAI defines it, sort of the economically valuable work that a human can do. So that's how they define it. If an AI can basically do your job, then it's an AGI. And they are promising the arrival of this, even from the nonprofit days. So the report argues that we weren't there in the room, so we don't know for sure. But this isn't like an AI safety nonprofit that's just being formed because people are worried about it. And if you go back in the headlines, that's how it was treated by a lot of press outlets. Like you go back to the early days of OpenAI when it was founded and all the headlines are like, Y Combinator founder or CEO, rather,

Sam Altman and Elon Musk start a nonprofit to save humanity from AI. So from the beginning, it has this formulation. And then they start, you know, they hire a bunch of researchers. You know, when it's founded, they have very corporate, you know, entities all around them. Like I think Amazon's in the room, they have Elon Musk and you know, entities all around them. Like I think Amazon's in the room, they have Elon Musk and all of his money in the room. And so it's pretty safe to say that like the expectation was that this would become this big corporate venture. They don't have any products. They don't have until chat GPT, they don't have any consumer facing products. They have a bunch of experiments, but they are talking about from the beginning, the emergence of AGI as kind of a hook, as kind of a story. And then when they do release ChatGPT,

after they've enjoyed this sort of mythology about this entity that is trying to keep humanity safe from AI, and we're building it, we're going to build it the safest, the most beneficial way possible. Then chat GPT is a hit, kind of becomes an overnight sensation, tens of millions of users. Their challenge then becomes to figure out quite quickly how we convert these elements into a business. How we have the story about AGI that we've been telling the media for years, that it could be really bad if we don't do it because we, you know, are,

are being very careful. We're a nonprofit, right? We're a nonprofit and we're, and now we have this big product that everybody likes to use called chat GPT. And we have this huge opportunity because everybody, because people have been waiting for,

for years and years for Silicon Valley to put something out that feels new, feels exciting, feels different in a way that ChatGPT actually is. Because if you remember, we went through years of duds from Silicon Valley. You know better than anyone that we had Metaverse. We had Web3. We had crypto, which only appeals to a subsection of people. And so people were like, oh, God, people love this. People finally love something. Let's put all of our money into it. Let's put every let's bet the house on this chat bot and the technologies that stem from it. And so we have had since then, about two years of

unperturbed sort of Silicon Valley narrativizing about AGI, about all the economic wonders that are going to be unleashed, about all of the many things that it can do. And to sustain the hype, they've released, you know, the Sora, the video thing. There've been, you know, audio startups, and there's been all this like very limited in use, right? So where the real money is, is in that enterprise, is in automating work and automating jobs. And if you can't do that, then you need this story to carry you along until you do, or at least until you can make an IPO and cash out, which looks to be what OpenAI is trying to do. They want to cash out with an IPO. The election is a huge story. Does it rupture some of that? Is it going to like sort of, you know, we've also seen all

these reports coming out from Goldman Sachs and Sequoia and saying like, there's some red flags here, guys. Like, you know, maybe it's not like worth the cost because it costs an immense amount of energy to use as you well know it's very expensive to run these models both because of energy costs and because of the compute and and just and like high labor costs the ai experts are are in demand so it's just very all very expensive we are warning signs that maybe the businesses isn't there as as it says. So I don't know. Does the election sort of rupture the narrative, or does it sort of even supercharge it to where all the rails are off? And now they're like, oh,

now there's going to be no AI safety regulation. Trump doesn't give a shit about that. We can just hit the gas on this. And maybe that speeds it even further into a situation where there was at least some modicum of a regulatory apparatus sort of, you know, constraining it in the slightest. So maybe the AI bubble sort of like bursts and we get like a Web 1.0 crash that we saw 20 years ago and it creates an economic malaise that Trump has to deal with. Once again, we're in uncharted territory. I wouldn't be surprised to see AI continue to sort of enjoy the headwinds that it's enjoyed with the expectation from investors that there's going to be less meddling and now they can do what they want. But I could also see like sort of Elon Musk trying to find ways to use his access to state power to meddle with people that he,

again, I think he's less interested in hobbling the competition so he can make money. I think it's more about settling personal grievances on this front. And also being the guy who also brought AI to the masses and gets the credit, not Sam Altman. I'm sure that bothers him to no end. Yeah. And he also wants to make sure his companies are not being regulated. But I think my vibe on like the AI bubble is that this allows it to keep inflated until next year, until like an open AI IPO. You know, we don't know what kind of events are going to happen between now and then. So something else could derail everything. But like, everything. But Uber survived a lot and its IPO was not even spectacular when it happened. And for some reason, that company that lost so much

money for so long was still able to survive. And I feel like since Trump's election, there has been this boost in the stock market. We'll see how long that lasts, but that seems like it could really benefit the ability of money to keep being pumped into this bubble for longer to keep it inflated for longer. But as you say, once time comes for a crash, it's entirely possible that that becomes a big crash AI was essential to like, you know, displace a company like Google that was seen in a very controversial way, you know, as a company that abuses your privacy and stuff like that, to make it so that a product like generative AI could actually be launched and accepted. And of course, I wrote, you know, back in the early days of this generative AI hype that actually open AI was kind of giving permission to Google to kind of go for it. And if Google had done it, that would not have happened, you know, because there was all this stuff, all this discussion in the beginning.

They tried to do it a couple times. They tried AI type stuff and people hated it. They basically did sort of like what we would call generative AI sort of product launch years ago. And people were like, we don't like this at all. Zeynep Tufneki wrote for the New York Times, like, oh, this is like weird and alienating and nobody wants this. So Google had the research apparatus for a long time. They had bought DeepMind. And so they had sort of a big lead in a lot of the technologies there. But there were these barriers to entry that were cultural, largely, and sort of dependent on public perception, which Google had tried to do, you know, Google Glass, the hardware that felt very invasive and people like really sort of it

was an example of public backlash, sort of chasing a technology out of town. And so then they had the whole sort of, you know, we're reading your emails kind of thing to send you ads, but we're not really seeing it. And they were sort of a first mover there in getting people to experience that kind of discomfort. So people are kind of like built up this allergic reaction to Google and their products. And it, you know, I don't know if just any tech company would have been able to launch something that felt as sort of creepy as a lot of people felt chat GPT did at first when they were using it famously, the Kevin Roos, New York times column where he wrote at length about how it asked him to you know leave his wife or whatever but with this new app you know foundation that they could build

upon with with sam altman and and elon musk talking about how they were doing it to save humanity and by spending they did spend years in the, sort of like building up this goodwill, especially with the media, putting out like chatbots that they had guaranteed would be safe to use or doing little, where they worked on in video games for a long time. There was a sense that it was this like fun, but ethical sort of through line to what OpenAI was doing for a long time. And they had cultivated that. Most people had no idea who they were, but the tech press did. And the tech press had a lot of built up goodwill towards them. And so when they finally come out with this product, then when everybody kind of rushes to check out their history and who they are, they do have this sort of like, we're going to be the stewards of good AGI and we're a nonprofit. They were still a nonprofit when they launched and they were until relatively recently. So they would say, you know, we're doing this for the good of humanity,

not for profits. And they were able to sucker a lot of people that way. And that's the basis of Elon Musk's lawsuit is that they just turned around and said, Oh, we've got a gold mine on our hands here. Now we're for profit. You know, now we're all going to be billionaires. The story is the most important thing that the report, you know, it was called AI generated business. And I opened it with this scene of Sam Altman a few years ago at a conference. And, you know, once it's becoming clear that this, this thing has legs and that investors are interested in it and they're like, well, how is it going to make money? And he literally says, we're going to build the AGI first and then ask it like, it's not a joke.

People laugh and it occurs to them then after hearing it, that's funny to say something like that out loud, but they literally, you know, did not have like a roadmap to profitability like a lot of companies. So they had to kind of brute force it. And so you get a lot of, you know, what winds up coming out of, you know, open AI after chat GPT gets big enterprise tiers and premium tiers and access to the API and all things like this. Yeah, as I was saying, it's a fascinating report. The angle about the media and how, once again, it's not interrogating these claims of the tech companies and the AI companies is like, heard it so many times, not surprised to see it in AI, but frustrating all the same. Just as it's like, part of the reason that Elon Musk is where he is and has been able to influence

this election so much is because of the kind of kid gloves that he was treated with for so long when it came to everything that he was doing. But as we wrap up this conversation, Brian, there's also kind of something that we want to tease to the audience that we have coming later this month. What do we want to tell people about this? Maybe we can suffice to say that, you know, I think that we've, over the years, I've been a recurring guest on your show, and we've always had a good time with our conversations. And so we got to talking a little bit earlier this year that maybe there's a more sustained kind of collaboration that we could undertake to marry our interests.

Maybe we want to talk a little bit more often, you know? Yeah, maybe we want to talk a little bit more often on a regular basis, perhaps, where folks might be able to tune in and hear our perspectives on what's going on in Silicon Valley and the tech industry and now the Trump administration, this allegiance between Silicon Valley and the state. And perhaps people might want to hear about how this whole system is crashing, perhaps. Yeah, you know, we'll have to see what is going to happen there. But people will be able to hear us get into this a little bit more often.

Maybe we'll leave it there. More information coming soon. Watch our social media presences. And I'm sure I'll be letting you know through Tech Won't Save Us as well. But yeah, there's fun stuff coming with me and Brian. So stay tuned for that. But until then, Brian, always great to have you on the show. You know, not always the greatest topic, especially this week as we're teeing up and thinking about what the next four years are going to look like, not just for the United States, but, you know, we all feel the consequences of this far beyond as well. But thanks for coming on the show

to chat with it. And I'm sure we'll be talking to you very soon. As always, thanks for having me. I found, you know, a little scatterbrained all over the place, but that's just the nature of the moment. It was useful for me to talk it through. Hopefully it's useful to all the listeners out there too. And yes, talking very, very soon. Thanks, Paris. Brian Merchant is a longtime tech writer and author of Blood in the Machine. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership

with The Nation Magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techw't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.