Tech Won't Save Us - What the TikTok Ban Reveals About US Tech Policy w/ Jacob Silverman

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss the motivations behind the proposed TikTok ban and what the effort tells us about US tech policy.Jacob Silverman is a tech journalist and the co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.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:Paris will be speaking in Montreal on March 23 and March 26.Jacob wrote about the GOP megadonor who could benefit from whatever happens to TikTok.Paris wrote about the geopolitics of the TikTok ban and what it says about US power.Taylor Lorenz broke down some of the disputed claims being made about TikTok.Sam Biddle wrote about how Facebook knows they violated Palestinian human rights.Byron Tau explained how US government agencies are getting people’s personal data from data brokers.Support the show

There doesn't seem to be a very positive outcome here. Again, we are talking about a company with more than a billion users. This is like determining the fate of a monster tech company that activates many of the same concerns that the big U.S. tech giants do, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is a good friend of the show, Jacob Silverman. Jacob is a tech journalist and the co-author of Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. He's also working on a new book now about Silicon Valley and the political right. I'm sure you saw, but the U.S. House of Representatives is considering a TikTok ban once again. They passed a bill last week that would effectively ban TikTok if it gets passed by,

you know, allowing the president to designate it as a national security risk and then give it a certain amount of time before it would have to sell or pull out of the US market altogether. So in effect, it's a TikTok ban. And so the question is, is this something that should be happening? Is the arguments that are being made in favor of it actually things that we should be buying? Are they credible arguments? And what's the bigger picture here? What does this say about the US role in the world and its approach to technology? I thought Jacob was the perfect person to have on to discuss that because we can not only get into the nitty gritty details of what is happening in the US Congress,

but also talk about that bigger picture of, on the one hand, what the US right is looking at in regards to TikTok and what they hope to achieve by either banning it or forcing a sale of it, and whether that is in all of their interests and even the divides that exist there between them. And then at the same time, how this effort to ban TikTok but also have this broader restrictive relationship to Chinese technology says about the U approach to tech and what its goals have always really been about pushing US technology on the globe and whether especially people outside of the United States and outside of China need to start looking at this divide, this US-China divide and this choice that we're increasingly being offered between Chinese tech or US tech and whether

that makes any sense at all and whether it's time to opt out of it completely, and say that neither of this really works for everybody else. And it's time to reject this binary, reject this desire to push these tech monopolies of these two powerful countries onto everybody else. And to say that actually, we need a tech ecosystem, we need a way of developing technology that works for the entire globe and not just for the traditional superpower and the rising superpower. Before we get into this week's episode, just a quick heads up that if you are in Montreal, I have a couple upcoming events. On Saturday, March 23rd, I'll be doing an event with Rob Russo and Nashua Khan, where we'll be getting into the Canadian media and some of the problems with it.

It's a follow-up to an event that we did a couple months ago that people seem to enjoy. So feel free to come along. There'll be information in the show notes. And then on Tuesday, March 26th, I'll be doing an event at Concordia University called AI Futures. Can we imagine otherwise? And again, if you want to check that out, there will be information in the show notes. So as always, I thought this was a fantastic conversation with Jacob. Always love having him on the show. And I think that he has a lot of great insights to share in this conversation. I hope you really enjoy it because I did. And of course, if you did, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And you can, of course, share it on social media as

well. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, as well as getting access to a bunch of premium interviews on Elon Musk and his business empire and what he's been up to lately, you can join supporters like Zoe in Toronto, Olga from Poland, Jeremy from Oakland, Ian Davis from Durham, North Carolina, and George in New York City by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jacob, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me again. Always excited to dig into all these topics that you tend to cover, especially the focus on

the right and tech fits so much into what we talk about on the show all the time. And of course, you know, listeners will not be surprised to learn that the US has TikTok in its crosshairs once again, has passed a bill that, you know, a lot of people are calling a TikTok ban that at least the text of the bill is not explicitly a TikTok ban, but it looks like it's structured in such a way that, you know, it would basically be that even though it's not explicitly that. You know, what is this bill that the House recently passed and what would it mean if it does come into law? Sure. Well, it's interesting. I mean, it's called the Protecting

Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, one of these typically cumbersome names for a piece of legislation. And it's both about TikTok and it's not. I mean, it's not a very long piece of legislation, a few pages maybe, but it mentions TikTok and ByteDance at the beginning. It talks about successor applications. But as you say, it's really about this broader kind of class of applications and services and software that are being defined almost for the purposes of this legislation. And it talks about prohibiting foreign adversary controlled applications. I think they say anything with a million or more users in the prior month, with a fair amount of discretion being allotted to the President of the United States to

determine whether a company has to abide by this act. Anyway, the legislation basically says a company that fits under this criteria, of which TikTok is the only named one, would have, I think it's 165 days to divest from its ownership. So if this passes sometime soon, which we can talk about, it's no sure thing this week compared to last week, but it would probably mean that by September, TikTok would have to find a new owner. Yeah. Obviously, as I was saying, we know that the United States has talked about a TikTok ban, and there have been previous bills that have suggested that there might be one. This kind of talk of a potential TikTok ban began under the Trump administration a number of years ago

and has kind of reemerged at various moments. Is it likely that something like this, because, you know, as we say, it was passed by the House, but it would still need to make it through the Senate and then, of course, be signed into law by the president. Is it likely to continue through those steps or does this just look like some kind of political statement by particular people in the House of Representatives? It's hard to say in some ways. I mean, last week, people seemed pretty sure because you had Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader who helped set the agenda of what the Senate actually considers, seemed somewhat positive about it. Also, the chair of the Commerce Committee in the Senate, Senator Cantwell,

was sort of indifferent to positive. But that's what you're starting to see now is these Democrats who were on the kind of hawkish anti-China side and who are willing to help push this forward, along with their Republican counterparts. Some of them are now sounding a little more uncertain. Ron Wyden also, I believe, said that, you know, it needed a little more consideration. And there hasn't been a lot in the Senate that I've seen, especially among Democrats, where they're saying absolutely not, but they seem a little more diffident, I guess, and willing to slow roll this. You know, I can't read the tea leaves entirely and tell you how that's going to shake out. But on the other hand, I think it could still very well happen. I think it's a bad idea for reasons that we'll get into. And I think it's a bad idea politically when, you know, a lot of

people like TikTok. It has a lot of users. It doesn't just have young users, which some recent research has shown. It has a lot of middle-aged and older people on it too. So it seems like banning something that people like, even though you may have geopolitical reasons right before an election is not a great idea. So maybe you could put a 50-50. The other relevant factor is that Biden has said he would sign this and he's been encouraging it. So, you know, it does seem like right now it's kind of in the Democratic Senate leadership's hands and that no one is really forcing them. I mean, I think Biden would sign it. Maybe someone might nudge him and say, is this really the highest priority for you?

By the end of this week, we may have a better idea of its ultimate fate in the Senate. But I would say that TikTok is going to live to at least fight on for another couple more weeks. And they're also hiring tons of lobbyists, which is worth noting, from all these different lobbying shops on all sides of the political spectrum. So that kind of potentially works in the company's favor over time. Yeah, I saw the CEO, Xu Zhichu, he was, I guess, at the house, it must have been recently, and he was like, using a line that I'm sure I've heard Mark Zuckerberg say in the past that, you know, if TikTok is banned, it's going to impact 170 million Americans who use our app, it's going to impact 7 million small businesses. And I hope their voices are heard. Like,

this is a line that the other tech companies and social media apps have used in the past. And I guess it's kind of not surprising to see them rolling it out now. But it's also not the kind of argument that at least really hits home with me at all as like a reason not to move forward with this, even though as I agree with you, I think it's a bad idea and shouldn't happen. Yeah, I mean, I'm not really one to criticize the ban because TikTok is so useful or small businesses run on it. That was at least a little more visibly clear with Facebook that small businesses rely on, for example. But, you know, at the same time, yeah, it is just broadly speaking about popular culture

and social media and where TikTok fits in. People like it. I don't think, at least before the latest war or the Israeli campaign in Gaza, the genocidal attack there, I don't think it had much of a political valence for a lot of people, for a lot of Americans. I mean, it had, we knew it was Chinese and, but this is one reason why it hadn't really been banned before. I would argue, despite several attempts is that, you know, they tried to paint as this Chinese threat and this like espionage foothold that the CCP has in the US and, you know, being able to spy on 100 million US users. But that didn't seem to hit home for a lot of people, perhaps because a lot of Americans don't think

about a war with China or are certainly not eager to get into one. So this idea that China is spying on us doesn't seem, even if you buy it at sort of face value, doesn't seem like an immediate threat or concerning in that way. Yeah. Unless you get a spot on, you know, a cable news show and you can be a pundit on there, then that might be of greater interest to you starting a war with China, it seems. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those distant concerns that like, I mean, obviously it can get you a job in national security or in affiliated media, but like, you know, if this ever actually happens, one, the U.S. will probably lose, but everyone's going to lose. Like, I just, I don't know, you can sound a little naive or something or, you know, hand-waving in being anti-war like this, but is this really something we want to take seriously? Do we want to run back another Cold War like this?

I mean, I know we're going to get into some of the broader issues later, but this, I think, also does speak to broader attitudes towards China and the chip war against China, which I see as somewhat misguided. It's like, where does this kind of stuff end? Are you going to only choose TikTok? Are you going to go after WeChat and other services? Like, if you really want to fight this kind of trade war, economic war against China, which could become a hot war if we're not careful, it has very wide potential applications. I mean, they're still kind of the workshop of the world. So this isn't just

a one-off thing, potentially. Yeah, absolutely. And I completely agree. And we'll definitely get into some of those bigger issues. And I wanted to start because you mentioned there the recent stories that we've been seeing over the past number of months that TikTok is explicitly pushing out kind of pro-Palestinian messages and even anti-US content. And that this is something that is being engineered by China by kind of affecting the algorithms and stuff like that. Like this is one of the charges that is being made by people who are opponents of TikTok and people who believe that China is trying don't understand how this tech actually works. But what do you think, like, you know, obviously we're seeing this TikTok ban or whatever you want to call it move forward right now. Do you think that that story about pro-Palestinian content being pushed by the platform in a way that people believe, or at least the media is suggesting that is not happening to the same degree on other platforms? And I think that there've been stories that suggest that that's not necessarily true just because a lot

of the public opinion in the United States and other countries does not align with where the political leadership and things like that are. But do you think that that content and those stories about TikTok pushing out pro-Palestinian voices is something that is shaping the debate or pushing forward this TikTok ban right now? Or do you think that that is more so being used as justification for a broader desire that has been there for a longer period of time to try to kick this app out the door, basically? I think I see it a little more as kind of in the background or greasing the wheels a little bit to sort of mix metaphors or images. You know, I've heard some leftists, understandably, I think, say, you know, this is very much about Palestine. I admit, I'm not as inclined to agree. But I think you did hit on something important, though, which is that there's a big gap between how a lot of

Western leaders and elites see Israeli actions in Gaza. I mean, they've basically sanctioned it or outright supporting it, of course, with the U.S. and how most people do. And so I think that just alone is this wide gap in public belief and public opinion between everyday folks here in the U.S., as we've seen in lots of polling, and in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. And that gap between them and their leaders explains some of this. So, you know, there's a simple fact that people on TikTok, the people who use it, just like people on other social media platforms, are perhaps a majority of them are very upset about create and what gets shared and everything like that. The sort of related issue is that a lot of people now, almost two decades into the social media era, people have an understandable suspicion of platforms or dynamics and algorithms. But I think they don't always know through no fault of their own, but they don't always know how to talk

about this stuff. I think maybe there are some decent quantitative studies out there or some soon to be done about TikTok trending topics and what's promoted and kind of algorithmic influence on the platform side. It's really hard to gauge. So people do fall into a little bit of conspiracizing and speculation, I think. And that's where you also get some of the, well, this is really about Palestine stuff. So while I think it's just sort of a cultural background level and what probably some of these political leaders are seeing day to day, I'm sure they're bothered by, you know, the pro-Palestinian sentiment on TikTok. But to me, you know, I would situate it

in the larger context of China and of this also just simply being a competitor to U.S. social media companies. I mean, maybe if this company were German, we'd be having a different kind of conversation. But I still think there would be some suspicion of it as a competitor to U.S. social media companies. So, you know, I don't want to ignore the Palestine stuff. It's also worth noting, perhaps, that TikTok has been a great source of these horrific Israeli videos

of the IDF soldiers kind of cataloging their own war crimes or simply documenting some of the thingsF soldiers kind of cataloging their own war crimes or simply documenting some of the things that they've done. And sometimes it's just callousness, sometimes it's looting and war crimes and some stuff very serious. And that stuff's showing up on TikTok. It seems to be the dominant medium for that besides Telegram, perhaps. So the politics of TikTok, I think, and the kinds of political material that people put on there can cut various ways. So I think it's worth paying attention to how Israel and Palestine relates to this stuff, but I would not claim it as the driving factor of the moment.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think, you know, I completely agree with what you said there. And I think the other thing to add to it as well is that on the one hand, you have these pro-Palestinian sentiments being echoed on TikTok, in part because the user base is feeling that way. So naturally, that is the kind of things that are going to be spreading more there. You know, there was a story by Taylor Lorenz in the Washington Post the other day, suggesting that actually on Facebook and Instagram, things are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian as well,

just that doesn't get the same degree of attention that it does on TikTok. And of course, we know that US social media companies have for a long time had kind of a censorship regime on pro-Palestinian content and sentiment, where if you use certain words or phrases, they would easily be kind of picked up by the algorithmic content moderation systems that they had to be suppressed or removed in a way that a lot of more pro-Israeli content or just content talking about what's going on in Israel was not to the same degree. And so I think that's potentially notable as well, where it doesn't seem like TikTok has that. Listen, I'm not a total expert on TikTok, but it doesn't seem that TikTok

has that same degree of overt desire to silence these Palestinian viewpoints as, say, Facebook and Instagram have had for a long time. Yeah. And I think also, you know, in kind of a grim way, we've had years of experience with Facebook and Instagram and these other conflicts and to some degree, Twitter slash X. We have both the experiences of Palestinian activists and their supporters being suspended or banned or having content deleted going back 10, 15 years. And then also there have been some useful leaks from inside those companies of their kind of content moderation standards and things like that. I think Sam Biddle might have done one related to Israel and Palestine for The Intercept

in the past. But that kind of information, those leaks, while hard to come by, can be very important because they do validate those suspicions and they validate people's experiences. So it would be great to get, frankly, to get some leaks from inside TikTok and have a better understanding. Both of the things that, you know, kind of the Western NatSec crowd worries about, whether to prove that or disprove it. And I know there's been some reporting on that and who might have access to data there, but also to understand better how they moderate content and what the policies might be underlying this stuff. It is kind of hard to critique this stuff in the

dark or in the semi-dark without that kind of information. Yeah, it would be really good to know. And that would be, you know, potentially something that could be regulated to say you need to be not just TikTok, but all these social media companies need to be more transparent about the way that they, you know, do content moderation on their platforms. You know, maybe a certain legislative body could look at that. Yeah, well, I think that actually gets at something really useful, which is, I mean, you can just glance at the text of this bill and see how broad it potentially is. I mean, it mentions ByteDance and TikTok and their subsidiaries and successors, but also says any company controlled by a foreign adversary or that is determined by the president present a significant threat. Like this is a very sort of quick and broad and dirty solution to something where whereas there are people like Ro Khanna, who's a member of the House of Representatives, basically covering Silicon Valley. He was saying in an interview, I think, with ABC, why don't we use this opportunity to and can actually be based on, you know,

there are years of scholarship, of political activism around this stuff. Like people, I'm sure the legislation is sitting on someone's shelf. What we really need, I think, is more, you know, a series of bills around issues like data protection and privacy and data sovereignty and all these other things and surveillance capitalism, the ad economy, some of which are not going to come probably, but some of which we could do. And even some of the people in Congress, compromised as they may be, you know, have a sense of that. Absolutely. And, you know, just to pick up on what you're saying there, like some of the arguments for this ban, some of the ones that are being made by members of Congress and people who support it

in the national security community, of course, would say that we need this or the United States needs this because, as we were saying, the Chinese Communist Party can manipulate the algorithm to shape what Americans can see. Or because TikTok is operating in the United States, that means that China or the Chinese government can get access to US user data. But a lot of these arguments seem to really fall down as soon as you start to probe them in any kind of way, right? The idea that China can get access to all this user data is one kind of, I think, misunderstanding the way that ByteDance and TikTok itself are constructed and owned. The fact that TikTok has its US user data on Oracle servers in Texas, as I understand, but also the fact that if China really wanted that

data, there are tons of data brokers that they can buy it off of without jeopardizing, you know, the credibility or position of TikTok within the United States and kind of the global markets where it operates. That's a great point. And something that I've been trying to think about more lately, Byron Tao from the Wall Street Journal has this new book, I forget the title, but it's about data brokers and national security. And it's based on this series of stories that he did over the last couple of years about how the US government and intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are buying tons of consumer data from app companies and data brokers, some of them receive more attention. Like there were stories about these Muslim prayer apps selling user data. And you can immediately see why that's alarming of the GPS coordinates of all these Muslim people and where they go throughout the day. But this is so big and so broad. I haven't read Byron Tao's book yet, but those articles that he wrote for Wall Street Journal are good and very interesting. And it's so much bigger than just, you know, than any one company.

And we do truly live in a surveillance saturated world that contains many actors, both private, corporate, acting legally, government actors, intelligence agencies, and also everyone in between acting, sometimes acting in gray areas or illegally. And as you said, China has an immense surveillance apparatus, and I'm sure that they buy data from data brokers, whether domestically or through cutouts overseas. There have been plenty of articles about Chinese hackers and others who sort of work for the state in some kind of informal, formal relationship. I mean, those sorts of things happen in Russia, they happen here. Here, we just call them military contractors, you know. So it does sort of hint at what a bigger

world this is and what a bigger problem it is. And I think also one issue is that people who might be supporting this bill might think that they're actually solving a problem when it's really like a really crude game of whack-a-mole or something like that. I mean, I don't even know if you're really solving even one small problem of the supposed problem of TikTok, which we can also question whether it really is a problem or how to actually define it. So as long as you have this both unfettered collection of data through legal and illegal means and through commercial and espionage style means, and then the practically unfettered sale of it, this is just going to go right around any ban that involves TikTok. Yeah, this is like the hypocrisy that you see with it. But also,

you know, the fact that it doesn't make any sense, right? Like if you were really concerned about China getting access to US user data, you wouldn't just simply target TikTok, right? Because there are a ton of other Chinese owned or, you know, apps that are owned by Chinese companies that are on people's phones that people use really regularly, even things that are like not big names like Shein or Timu or something like that, but just apps that happened to be made in China that are actually really popular camera apps and editing apps and things like that, right? That are very widely available that are not touched at all by this, or, you know, I guess they could fall under it, but there's no talk from any politician about targeting those sorts of

things. But then even broader than that, if you are really concerned about China getting access to user data, the idea that you're just going to ban TikTok and then allow every other social media company and data broker to continue operating exactly as they do, like it's very clearly not going to solve the stated problem. So it's hard to believe that that's really the issue that they're concerned about. Yeah, I think it falls under this ongoing issue of the US being very selective, I think, in how it addresses kind of cybersecurity and privacy and data issues. You know, it seems very opportunistic and limited to specific examples rather than maybe building up a more robust regime of legislation and privacy laws and kind of a more defensive mindset of protecting American infrastructure and American consumers and fixing

stuff. I'm not a telecoms expert, but there's this widely known vulnerability called SS7 in the telecom system, both here in the US and I think in a number of other countries. And, you know, all kinds of people have been saying this should be fixed for years now, but it basically hasn't because it very much facilitates surveillance and eavesdropping. And so the US obviously makes use of it, but so do foreign countries. And there have been similar discussions around vulnerabilities in software, zero-day vulnerabilities. You know, there's a whole disclosure process and meetings that take place at a very high level between intelligence agencies and stuff like that to decide, like, are we going to disclose this Windows zero-day vulnerability? Like, there's a real process and people do take it very seriously. But all this stuff seems rather skewed towards offense and towards maintaining U.S. omnipotence and surveillance supremacy and being able to see everything and access every system.

And as a result, I think this is a problem, is a technological problem, as we've said, a legislative and regulatory problem. It's even a problem to like on the level of competition or antitrust. I mean, we could bring in this medical billing company, I think you'd call it, Change, that was hacked here in the U.S. that's owned by United Health that has become perhaps the most catastrophic attack on the U.S. healthcare system ever. Even my wife, who's a therapist, has had some problems getting paid by insurance companies. I mean, it's all over the place in the healthcare system here, the sort of knock-on effects. But one thing you could say there was, one, there were probably bad defenses on the cybersecurity

side, but also this was a huge concentration of industry power in one company that was really the linchpin of a lot of the financial side of the U.S. healthcare, for-profit healthcare industry. So there's so many ways, I think, that you can go about addressing some of these issues that can really improve anything from the American economy to our sense of privacy. And we're simply not doing that. So that's, I think, also another reason why you hear some experts or people on the left or academics get a little frustrated when all this activity goes on around doing something about TikTok when you're like, well, what about everything else? Absolutely. That's so fascinating to hear that bigger picture, though, right, of how this works, especially, you know, the communications between intelligence agencies that are obviously naturally going on, but are not things that the public or people generally like hear about often, right, or would know about. But yeah, it makes perfect sense that all this stuff is going on. I want to come back to, you know, that broader conversation, you know, the international aspect of things. But I want to talk a bit about who stands to benefit if something like this were going to come through. And you had a story in The

Nation last week where you were talking about one of the many right-wing billionaires that we often talk about, but one that many people would not know about. He's not, I think, a well-known name when we think about billionaires who are involved in tech or even billionaires who are well-known in the right-wing media ecosystem and things like that, right? So who is this billionaire that you were talking about? What's his connection to TikTok? And what is his orientation on this bill that is moving through the U.S. government? So the man is Jeffrey Yass, Y-A-S-S. I believe it's pronounced like Yass Queen.

That seems to be the case. He is the richest man in Pennsylvania. He is, I meant, relatively new to me. This is what happens whenever we have elections in the U.S. or some political events, like time to meet a new oligarch. This is when we get to discover them. So he is the biggest donor of the 2024 political cycle so far, at least on the Republican side, according to Open Secrets. And so that's to

candidates and PACs and other organizations that require public disclosure. He has donated more than $44 million, I believe, last I checked. And he donates a lot of money to the Club for Growth, right-wing pro-business organization. The Club for Growth, right wing pro business organization. The Club for Growth has hired lobbyists on behalf of TikTok, including Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump advisor. So Yoss himself is a co-founder of something called Susquehanna International. It's a high frequency trading firm, financial firm. They have their hands in a few other pies, including they do some venture capital investments. So I think it was more than 10 years ago, they made an early investment

in ByteDance, which turned out really well. I don't know the exact amount of the investment, but it was in a round that was believed to be 5 million total raised. And so they were one of several investors. So say maybe a low seven figure investment. Now, more than 10 years later, that investment in ByteDance is worth billions. And this stuff is all kind of notional or on paper, but it's been pegged at maybe $40 billion. It really depends how much one considers TikTok to be worth and how much TikTok might eventually sell for. But we're talking tens of billions of dollars.

That's about 15% of TikTok is what they own. And about 7% of that owned by Yas personally, because he's one of the co-founders of Susquehanna. So this forms a big part of his fortune now. He's worth something like $28 billion. Susquehanna is dominant in options trading, is a big player in markets. He checks a lot of the right-wing billionaire boxes, like he loves Milton Friedman, who told him to get into charter schools and the school choice movement, as he calls it. So he funds a lot of that. He hates unions. He thinks Democratic politicians are evil. I mean, he called them evil at a recent event. He's really into poker. He was a big-time gambler. He still is is calls himself a gambler. Poker is very popular at Susquehanna. So I have to admit,

there are not a lot of surprises here. You know, he, you know, he's not going to suddenly show you a stamp collection or something like this is an archetypal right wing billionaire. Yeah, it was interesting in the story you quoted Ariel Klagsbrun, the deputy campaign director at the Action Center on Race and the Economy, who described him as a next generation Koch brother, just to give an idea of the influence that he's trying to have over US politics, but also the issues that he has this orientation toward, as you're saying, charter schools, which is obviously an issue that's very popular in Silicon Valley as well with Zuckerberg and Reed Hastings, I believe his name is, the Netflix guy, and Bill Gates, of course, all kind of supporting this movement. Yeah, but

this guy also has connections to Donald Trump. And of course, you say he has this large investment, this large financial stake in TikTok. So how does that shape his orientation toward a ban? Is he opposed to it? Is he hoping that this kind of legislation moves forward so he can get a larger stake of it? How would his approach to that be? The people in Pennsylvania say, you know, we've been dealing with him there for 20 years and now he's sort of taking his politics nationally. He doesn't want a ban.

I've argued or sort of speculated in my piece that I think he could benefit no matter how this shakes out because, you know, there's too much at stake here for 165 days to pass with no sale and TikTok is just straight up banned. I mean, maybe there'll be a brief service interruption or something like that. But this is such a valuable company and really the only major foreign competitor to US social media dominance that I think a deal would happen. But I don't think that's something that current TikTok leadership or investors like him want to force, because they may have to have a fire sale, it may not be on their terms. But still, you know, this was an investment worth up to maybe $40 billion that they probably put in a couple million dollars at most, like this is a lottery ticket. So I think

he's trying to protect that a winning lottery ticket at that. And so he's against a ban. And he was kind of a never-Trumper sort of guy. I mean, don't mistake him for a liberal, but he supported a lot of other candidates in the past, wasn't openly supporting Trump in 2020. Recently, he was supporting DeSantis. Obviously, that didn't work out. But all these right wing billionaires pretty much are lining up behind Trump and one expects them to before the election comes around. So he supposedly called Trump. There's been some, I think, debate about whether he actually called him personally, but reached out to Trump, invited him to a Club for Growth retreat earlier this year. And Trump, who, you know, as a lot of folks know, was anti-TikTok. He tried to force a sale when he was president and it kind of got stopped in the courts. There was a sort of partial deal made, the server deal made with Oracle, as you mentioned. But Trump came out of that meeting saying, actually, TikTok is not a Chinese menace. It's not so bad. And he doesn't want to ban it because

he sees Zuckerberg or Zuckerschmuck, as they called him, and Facebook benefiting, which could be a thing. I mean, Facebook may benefit from a ban. They may also be able to scoop up TikTok. You know, I think the one way, and this is sort of kind of paradoxical for the Biden administration, is that if you force a sale of this company, yeah, you're helping American interests by taking down or at least kind of moving a competitor of Silicon Valley to the side. But you're also maybe handing a gift wrap to one of the monopolistic tech companies that the Biden administration, to its credit, has tried to fight through the FTC and Lena Kahn and other measures. So, but, you know, usually NatSec rates above antitrust. So, Yass has become quite clearly

an influencer on the subject and able to kind of call up Republican politicians and persuade them. Last year, Vivek Ramaswamy, who was sort of one of the insurgent candidates, he was very much anti-TikTok, had this, you know, it's digital fentanyl kind of stuff, kind of a racist anti-Chinese attitude towards it, despite the fact that Ramaswamy himself has done business in China, for example. And then he started getting millions of dollars last year. I think he overall got around $5 million to his PACs from Jeffrey Yost. And by the end of the summer, he was not a critic of TikTok and basically saying we have to meet the young people where they are. And then he signed up for TikTok. The Biden administration is also on TikTok TikTok or the Biden campaign, rather. So it's been pretty clear where Yass's money goes and the kind of attitudes that follow. Rand Paul is a defender of TikTok in the Senate. I mean, this falls under some of his kind of free speech attitudes and also his demonstrated aversion to military conflict. But on the other hand,

he's also a huge recipient of money for years now from YAS. So I think he's going to be all in on trying to fight this. And I think the simultaneous lobbying push from TikTok shows that on the other hand, people in his kind of position rarely lose or end up as losers. So he may not get exactly what he wants, but say there's some

messy for sale of TikTok within the next few months, I think Jeffrey Yoss is likely to be in a better position than he is right now. And I also think this is just maybe for a billionaire with ambitions to be very politically influential, this is almost a proof of concept for him. He gets to try out being the money man of the moment, as I called him. He's, again, the biggest donor to the Republicans this cycle. There are other people who may pass him between now and November, but who share similar interests. But right now, he's worth paying a lot of attention to because he really has found both an issue and enough money in his bank account to put himself right at the forefront. It's really interesting to hear about that because obviously he is a figure that obviously I had not heard about before I read your story.

So someone completely new to us. But I think it also suggests we've seen a significant shift, I think, in a lot of U.S. social media over the past couple of years where they have become more open to the political rights, less interested in censoring or moderating extreme right-wing content and things like that, as they've been circulating on these platforms. Obviously, Twitter, most notably, was taken over by Elon Musk, who has become basically a far-right figure of his own and echoing all these conspiracy theories and things like that. When you look at someone like Jeffrey Yost owning a stake in TikTok and the potential of TikTok being sold to American ownership, and you also see that Steve Mnuchin, the former Treasury Secretary under Trump, was talking last week about putting together kind of a consortium that would be ready to bid for TikTok if it was forced to go up for sale.

And the decision they made was to sell it instead of withdrawing from the U.S. market. Is there like an effort growing on the political right to try to capture this social media platform as well and to make it work for their political interests, at least much more explicitly? I would think so. I mean, right now, just to be clear, the Republicans are a little bit divided because you have sort of the militaristic, hawkish, xenophobic contingent who are happy to ban this and act like they're doing something tough. And then you have the MAGA crew and some of the libertarian types, but also just the straight up recipients of Yass, cash and influence. So I think their first goal will probably be to stop the bill. But then I think undoubtedly, there is going to be a larger effort to steer this towards kind of pro-American interests, which by which I guess I mean, more right wing interests.

You know, I like to sort of joke that there are no liberal billionaires. I still think that's true. I think for kind of antitrust and practical reasons, it probably like Oracle, whose owner, Larry Ellison, is a big Trump supporter, held a strategy meeting to try to overturn the election, and is very wealthy. So you could speculate that it's coordinated, like, because you see Steve Mnuchin trying to take over the company. But I think it's very possible that given the kind of where the political winds are going in Silicon Valley, and that's something I'm increasingly arguing in my writing and in this book I'm working on is that you see kind of a right-wing radicalization

taking place, a more nationalistic bent, even with something like A16Z talking about American dynamism. You know, there's this much more kind of chess-beating fervor going on in tech, in finance, even in parts of finance and in venture capital. So I think you'd be more likely

to see some of these, a Steve Mnuchin takeover, maybe there's a former Activision executive, or why I don't, I'm surprised that people don't talk as much about Yass himself leading some kind of takeover, or Susquehanna. I mean, they're already in there. And I think there's already been talk also about maybe some kind of partnership with OpenAI or another company that would OpenAI would be attracted to TikTok to try to train its LLMs or expand them and train its models. some, you know, pretty craven reasons. And I expect that however, it really shakes out. It's, you know, it'll be to kind of strengthen those forces of capital and data hungry AI companies, and not to strengthen free speech or consumer choice or, or whatever else, even some of those right wing interests might claim that they're defending. Yeah, every potential option you outline there sounds utterly terrible.

We don't want Microsoft or Google doing it, even though they're nominally more responsible corporate actors. And I mean, I was going to say they're not ruled by crazy right-wing defense contractors, but they are defense contractors. And they have all their own problems, of course. There doesn't seem to be a very positive outcome here. Again, we are talking about a company with more than a billion users. This is like determining the fate of a monster tech company that activates many of the same concerns that the big US tech giants do, whether it's Chinese owned or not. Yeah. And what you outlined there, I think, gets to a really important point that I wanted to touch

on you with, which is, of course, that, you know, for a long time, Silicon Valley tried to present itself as like anti-government in a way or like having at least this distance from government and being critical of it because we are separate. You know, we are our own kind of center of power over here on the West Coast in San Francisco. You know, obviously ignoring the long history that they had of working with the military industrial complex, the Defense Department, the Pentagon, you know, how defense funding was essential to setting it up, right? But this narrative seemed to kind of work for a while. And I feel like we started to see the real transformation or Silicon Valley cozying back up to the government at the same time that, you know, there started to be more criticism of Silicon Valley itself, more concern about the power and monopolistic influence that they held. And all of a sudden, you know, the Chinese threat had to be brought up as something that was a

really big issue and Chinese tech in particular as a threat to US technological dominance, you know, just at the same moment, you know, by coincidence, that the US government was finally looking at the power and influence of its own US.S. tech companies. Of course, so then that they could argue, you know, as these Chinese tech companies are going international, are competing with U.S. tech firms, that actually the monopolistic power of U.S. technology was essential in order to try to combat the kind of growing international influence of the Chinese tech industry. So, you know, you can't regulate us. You can't do these antitrust enforcements on us. You need to kind of step back on that because if not, China's going to win. And of course, then you've seen, you know,

the Eric Schmitz of the world and all of these kind of folks in Silicon Valley being much closer to the United States government, the United States military, talking about how Silicon Valley can aid this effort to protect American power, as you're talking about, even with Marc Andreessen, talking about American dominance and how this has really been folded into the rhetoric. Like, I wonder what you make of this in light of this broader anti-China turn that the US has had, and how so much of it has focused on Chinese technology versus American technology. Yeah, a lot of good points there. I've said before, I may even said in the show, I mean, I think we kind of live in Eric Schmidt's world. And certainly there are a lot of influential

figures and companies and forces on this front. But this union of tech and government power, tech and military intelligence power, also people on the right sometimes worry about, I think sometimes in the wrong terms, perhaps, but it's a real thing. And I think it is one of the dominant trends of tech as an industry as part of the new defense industrial base over the last decade or two. This is almost why things like the Twitter files were frustrating, because they point towards this larger issue and state of play in which, yeah, there are a lot of people from intelligence going to work in Silicon Valley. There are potentially troubling interactions between government and Silicon Valley. Not every single one is a sign of villainy or whatever as it's sometimes portrayed, but there's a lot of stuff

going on there and a lot of complicated and troubling things, personnel, policy, contracts, everything else. And I think to some extent, Silicon Valley doesn't mind shedding its own, its sort of former counter-cultural, counter-government attitudes because there's so much money in government contracting. And it's a way sort of the industry becoming more comfortable with its own power, I think, and its own place in society. So there's hardly a big tech company that isn't doing government contracting or has some kind of military or intelligence adjacent project. Even like these cloud computing contracts are huge for Microsoft and Google and other companies, both in the US and Israel and elsewhere.

Microsoft is making those HoloLens goggles. I mean, for the Army, there's Google Project Maven. But then you also see it kind of in this more direct embrace of kind of companies and VC funds define themselves as contributing to military dominance. So this is the American dynamism thing from A16Z, which as a quick aside, I find very funny because they used to say it's time to build. And the only thing they built were really were crypto casinos and kind of financial engineering. So now they're supposed to finally be building stuff

to support industry and infrastructure. But really it's just sort of like waving the flag for the American war machine. But you see that also like with Palantir or Onderil. And to go back to what I was just saying a minute ago, I think these companies are actually just kind of spouting a cruder form of the Eric Schmidt ideology, which is that a kind of pursuit of American greatness and American power that is perhaps even founded in kind of acceptable liberal social mores, but that is still unapologetic about American exceptionalism and contributing to that and seeing kind of, you know, what's good for American foreign policy is good for America's companies. And to me, that is a big part of the

geopolitical context and backdrop of even what's going on with TikTok. Again, we shouldn't be fooled that Elon Musk or any of these other people actually care about free speech, whether they're talking about X or TikTok or anything else. If TikTok is going to be sold and brought into the American sphere of influence more directly, it will be because it has a strategic objective animating that right now, not really anything about free speech or a kind of almost antique utopian vision of how the internet should be. I don't think there are actually people in kind of the American establishment right now

who care about the balkanization of the internet or concerns about people's free speech rights on TikTok. And that, I think, is if we take a moment to look at that or kind of acknowledge that, I think that's actually a reminder of how much things have changed. You know, we're not even really paying lip service to the old utopian rhetoric of the internet, of connecting people and improving life. And then one other thing I would say is also, just to refer to something you brought up, there's this idea that we have to be in this kind of competition with China because they're going to win, whether it's TikTok or now we hear a lot about AI. And I

still want to know what are they going to win? Because, you know, as you and I and other critics have said, like the supposed benefits of AI seem very undefined or kind of diffuse or yet to arrive. I would say that maybe we treat a little too monolithically and, you know, generative AI is different from other forms of AI that might drive a car or something like that. But at the same time, the end goal here, the thing that we're really supposed to be in pursuit of and the kind of victory we're in pursuit of remains very nebulous to me. And the cost seems to be all this interference in the economy and in sort of geopolitics and national security and to fight what's really an open-ended economic and technological war against China. I mean, when does this end? When does someone declare victory in AI or in chip making or wherever else?

You know, I think that if we even manage to deal with TikTok successfully, I mean, as a country or as a political grouping, we're going to be fighting this chip battle and this AI battle for the foreseeable future. And to me, that in its own way seems strategically unwise. I mean, that's its own kind of forever war. And I don't really see how that benefits anyone. Yeah, just setting themselves up for failure, in a way. There's so much interesting that you said in that statement that I kind of want to pick up on, especially as someone who is not an American, right? And who is kind of watching this happening from on, especially as someone who is not an American, right? And who is kind of watching this happening from afar, you know, pretty close. You're stuck with us, but you

have less power. Exactly. You know, like, I'm watching, I'm still across the border, right? But at the same time, it's like, when you watch these discussions happening in the United States, it's like, we need to do this to protect American interests against China. And all of our allies just need to come along with us and accept this. And I feel like, you know, I don't know if this is happening, but I hope it is in a sense that there's a broader questioning of whether that makes sense, right? Because obviously, the internet and a lot of this utopian rhetoric around the internet emerges in the 90s, which is the same time that the Soviet Union is collapsing, the Cold War is like officially ending, US hegemony is kind of solid. And as the internet rolls out around the world, the US tech companies come along with it and dominate, you know, all of these sectors of the internet economy that then bleed into so many other kind of traditional sectors of, you know, what we're used to having in our economies. And the idea is that we just need to,

you know, allow this to freely happen that we can't restrict or regulate the internet, because that is restricting freedom and democracy and, you know, all these great things that America brings with it around the world. And at the same time, then you had these US companies dominate so many sectors of European economies, Canadian economy, Australian economy, so many other countries around the world. And what the US said was like, you can't stop this because that's against the international trading rules and against, you know, the free trade order and blah, blah, blah. And there were rules put in trade agreements that we couldn't do these things. And that benefited the United States immensely, right? There was talk of the open

internet, but often that was like a US-dominated internet where a lot of other people's interests could not be accommodated there because the US had to dominate, or at least that's how I feel about it. And now that the United States and in particular, the dominance of US tech companies is being threatened, all of a sudden, the United States is going back on those same principles that it claimed to believe in and claim to be pushing on the rest of the world, where it is now going to, you know, ban Chinese tech companies, and it is going to restrict apps that are competing with its companies. And I think it reaches the point where, on the one hand, like, okay, maybe that does work for U.S. national security interests

and whatnot. And I think, you know, to some degree, like that's a legitimate conversation to have if we're talking about what works best for the United States and their very narrow interests. But I think it also shows us that the rhetoric that they were using for so long to sell this kind of idea and sell the dominance of their tech companies to the rest of the world was always based on a fabrication

and was always kind of not true to a certain degree. And now we're seeing that, of course, naturally, it was always about US power. And now that US power is threatened in certain ways, they're going to change their actions to protect that power, because that was always what it was about and not spreading freedom and democracy. Yeah, we're a long way from even Hillary Clinton, State Department era of internet freedom kind of stuff, which was always a bit of a cover or thin cover for, you know, State Department and CIA activity overseas and democracy building, just like that term was a little euphemistic. Again, I would argue that it seems untenable. Like, you know, what is our end goal here or what are we trying to contain? I mean,

there are all kinds of economic protectionism and you might do it because you want to protect American industry or jobs, which is a little bit more understandable, I think. And that's why, you know, we have domestic subsidies or tariffs or other things or regulations, things like that. But it's a different matter when it's couched in this nebulous national security strategy that is open-ended. And so I would argue, you know, what are we moving towards? Yes, we're trying to preserve American dominance in some way. I mean, I say we very broadly, obviously, I'm not a member of the government. Jacob Silverman out on the front lines of American dominance. Yeah, you know, I'm revealing my say we very broadly. Obviously, I'm not a member of the government. Jacob Silverman, out on the front lines of American dominance. Yeah, you know, I'm revealing my affiliation or something. But no, it's an attempt at preserving

American dominance. But certainly from the political left, we'd like to live in a multipolar world that's just not dictated to on any level by the United States. And there comes, I think, a point where even from a view of American hegemony, it might be self-defeating because it causes countries in Europe, which are supposed to be close allies, to not be able to innovate or develop their own tech industries as much as one perhaps might like. And then I'd like to actually mention a specific example or two. Like this company ASML, which sometimes I've've said on twitter it's probably the most important company in the world that and tsmc the huge semiconductor manufacturer in taiwan which we might go to war over one day but asml

makes these machines that some people might know that that basically they make the machines that allow chip manufacturers to manufacture chips i mean they're these huge machines that allow chip manufacturers to manufacture chips. I mean, there are these huge machines that take up a warehouse, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take a month or two to assemble, I think, and they're magic. And engineers go crazy over them as they should. But the US has been trying to limit their sales, especially to China. And I mean, because it's a Dutch company, we can kind of push it around. But this seems a little ridiculous to me, especially when this company is really the only one in the world that can do something like this. I certainly understand from a realpolitik kind of perspective why the U.S. might try to do this. But you're harming an ally in the Netherlands who is actually an important intelligence ally also.

And you're really holding back this company that could perhaps in some more collective way drive technological or human flourishing. And it's kind of similar with TSMC in Taiwan. It's just this notion that we've allowed these companies to become so central and to become actually choke points in the global supply chain and in this Cold War or trade war with China, that they've become too important. ASML and TSMC are too important in a way. That is one reason why we need to build more chip fabs here in the U.S. and why TSMC wants to build in Germany and other places. And South Korea, I think, will have more chip fabs.

But we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner. And perhaps a more free trade embracing attitude towards the tech sector might really be better for everyone. And to help us also dial down some diplomatic tensions and, you know, create to use some of the kind of empty industry terms to create more innovation dynamism. You know, one other quick example that I find kind of amusing, I think it was last year and there's been some reporting on it recently, but there've been a few reports. I think it was either Huawei or Xiaomi created a phone,

and perhaps you know which one, but they released a phone that created a panic in the US national security establishment. Do you know which company this was? I think it was the Mate 60, Huawei. Yeah, that's right. And it used the three nanometer chip manufacturing thanks to companies like ASML. But anyway, it made right. And, you know, it used the three nanometer chip manufacturing, thanks to companies like ASML. But anyway, it made the tiny chips, or it was able to manufacture transistors at the nanometer level that really alarmed Western security experts,

because they thought China wasn't really capable of doing this, or that they had basically put a lid on all that through sanctions and limiting sales of companies like ASML. You know, in a way, it's kind of funny, like China released a sick phone and, you know, Western security establishment goes crazy. Of course, it's really about these larger issues of technological prowess and industrial capacity. But it also, to me, in a way, shows that we've gotten to a place that's almost silly. We are not going to limit the manufacture or spread of advanced smartphones, and especially if China has shown this capacity to produce its own. So where are we going to go from here? Are we going to keep fighting this kind of rear guard, quasi-militaristic action of trying to close the barn door after the horse is

already out? Or are we going to figure out a way that is more cooperative, that perhaps is more diplomatic, that has the potential to increase wealth and flourishing and even just basic research for everyone? We've become so set in this Cold War with China that the U.S. defense base and even I think a lot of US tech companies aren't necessarily prepared to think in those other ways. And, you know, and this does, this does cut both ways, you know, China in recent years, somewhat in response, perhaps to US actions, but they've been arresting a lot of people, they've been cracking down on the business intelligence industry, which has different terms for it sometimes, but basically is, you know, investigating and spying on companies to see whether they're worth doing business with.

It's a flourishing industry globally, but in China, it gets into some darker places that the Chinese government doesn't want Westerners looking at, especially, and also some of those, these business intelligence firms or these due diligence firms employ former spies. So there's a lot going on here. And China has a lot to account for also. But I would think it's possible to die down the temperature and eventually kind of create a more prosperous world. But we've really gone down this unhelpful path. Yeah, but you know, that wouldn't work well for Silicon Valley's market share. So we certainly couldn't do that, right? You would hope in another world, we would be able to think that way. But unfortunately,

a lot of our leaders seem to be determined not to. I think just as like, final points, I would say that I'm still skeptical that the TikTok ban will go through. I kind of hope it doesn't because I think that it signals a really kind of bad direction for policymaking to be headed in. Like if you really want to address these stated problems around data use, data capture, the potential ability for China to access this data and stuff, I think you would want to see a whole different doing that? And, you know, that just doesn't go for the US government, but what the Canadian government might look to do as well if the US moves forward on this. I think more broadly, like I would hope that seeing the United States move forward with these actions is a bit of a wake up call for other countries, particularly countries that consider it its allies that like, do we really just want to be continually dominated by u.s tech companies or is it time to kind of reject this binary of

u.s tech versus chinese tech and think beyond that as to like how there are better international and and even national tech industries developed in competition to that obviously we see europe moving forward with that to a certain degree but often often that's just like, how do we have our own tech monopolies as well, which is potentially not, I think, the best approach to that, or at least the approach that provides the social benefits that we would hope to see. What are you thinking about where this TikTok ban might go, or just more broadly on the focus of US tech policy in this frame of like U.S. versus China? I think you put it really well. I mean, there are systemic issues and business practices and, and yes, privacy and even national security concerns that should not be addressed with

bills that are designed to target one company and then to kind of be invoked whenever the president decides to in the future. You know, these are practices and business practices and issues of public concern that can be addressed much more broadly and sustainably with legislation that, you know, probably, again, is already written and on Ron Wyden's hard drive. I also just finally think that it's a waste of time. And, you know, political energy and sort of political capital is finite. And especially when, you know, our concerns are so pressing, whether you want Biden to win this fall or not, like, there's only so much the US government can do. Often it's very little. And to spend, you know, political capital, as people say, on this, and to do it by cooperating with some of

the worst Republican actors there are at a time when the Republican Party is supposedly a threat to democracy, I just think it's really ill-advised and, you know, really sloppy and careless from a political perspective. I don't really know why they're doing this or why they're doing this now. And so I think it's wrong on strategy and wrong in the timing too. And, you know, I hope we're talking about something else in a couple of weeks. I think this will go on for a while. And I think obviously TikTok deserves our attention, our study and our concern and people like Jeffrey Yost do too. But in terms of like what's needed right now in this political moment, you know, I don't think it is TikTok. I think it's some of the data privacy issues perhaps

surrounding it. But to do that would mean to take a look at the entire US tech industry, which people here do not want. Jacob, always fantastic to speak with you. Thanks so much for taking the time as always. Yeah, thanks. It was fun. Thank you.

Jacob Silverman is a tech journalist and the co-author of Easy Money. 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 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 tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.