This morning I was reading this Puck article about the public relations woes of the AI industry. In short, having the CEOs and industry leaders tell everyone for years that their product will lose jobs for half the population and quite possibly lead to the extinction of humanity led to some serious reputational challenges for AI. (The article is paywalled. But that and what follows includes the gist.) Author Ian Krietzberg correctly notes that this isn’t just blather or bad messaging. It’s an investment strategy. Silicon Valley venture investing is essentially a well-oiled FOMO machine. Getting people to invest means pumping up the disruptive, game-changing nature of the product. Disruptive dislocation is the basis of all Silicon Valley venture investing since it’s the basis of the stratospheric growth of a small percentage of bets which makes the whole economy make sense.
But that’s not the entirety of it. Or rather the mentality of the key players in the space is so bound up and shaped by the dynamics of the investment logic. In so many words, it breeds a feral mentality and personality type. It’s no accident that you have architects of that world having famous mottos like “move fast and break things.” It’s a culture based on hyperbole and valorizing transgressive attitudes and actions.
In a way, we all know this. It’s the essence of the archetype we’ve all become familiar with in the early 21st century. The difference is between it being one social platform or perhaps the disruption of a specific industry like music or videos versus classes of employees across the entire economy or all the scenarios where AI could end humanity itself. We see another similar development in Silicon Valley’s heavy move into digital surveillance, from the hard, military- and policing-driven Palantir in one direction or the growth of ad tracking from the other. From various directions, in ways that began to become visible a decade ago, Silicon Valley’s antic, disruptive and network-creating culture went from things that happen on your laptop and your phone to things that happen to your body, your paycheck and possibly the future of your species. As this happened, the Valley had to get a lot more serious about political power, something which as recently as 10 to 15 years ago it viewed as mostly a relic of the fuddy-duddy past. Tossing a bone to marriage equality or climate transition was fine on an individual basis. But as a core part of regulatory strategy or just the environment tech had to operate in, government mostly didn’t matter.
We can actually pinpoint the key transitional moment. It happened back in 2012. And it emerged out of Hollywood’s effort to use its power on Capitol Hill to employ increasingly heavy-handed tactics to fight video piracy. I recounted the story here back in late 2017. It started with something called the Stop Online Piracy ACT (SOPA). It was mostly the creature of the Motion Picture Association of America, the movie industry’s trad association, which was incredibly powerful on Capitol Hill because of decades of effective insider lobbying by the legendary Jack Valenti. He’d recently retired. But it was still his lobbying colossus now under the management of retired Sen. Chris Dodd. SOPA did a bunch of things. But the biggest was the ability of rights holders to get court orders to force ISPs to block whole sites and domains associated with piracy.
Until quite recently, the big Silicon Valley colossuses had only barely deigned to set up lobbying operations in Washington, D.C. Again, those were the sclerotic old ways. Silicon Valley was building the future. They didn’t have time to worry about what the fuddy-duddies in D.C. did. There was a big Internet activist push against SOPA. It was a big attack against the open internet. It cut against the strong libertarianish mindset of a lot of internet activism. And it was just bad law on the merits. That activist push was building and starting to make some headway. The internet had the ability to spread cool-sounding memes and important issues deep into the population at large. That’s always a challenge for lobbying, which is always at its strongest with generally technical issues that most of the population doesn’t know or care about.
That was the state of play when more or less all at once Silicon Valley, especially but not only Google, decided to put its clout and money behind the anti-SOPA push. It was a watershed. The MPA’s view was who cares? We’ve got the votes all lined up. And they did. They generally had the Republicans on their side. But they had most of the Democrats too. Let those online folks spread their memes and hashtags. Whatever. We’ve got the votes …
Then, in a matter of days, all those votes evaporated. And SOPA died.
There were a couple of key factors at work here. One very big one was that in 2012 tech and Silicon Valley was the future. That was Big Tech’s brand in a way that astroturf and political spending simply cannot ever buy. It was an admittedly odd regional subculture but it produced a constant flow of transformative, cool things, many of which were free. The MPA and the movie industry were the folks who were going to send the FBI to bust your college-age kid for watching a pirated copy of “Star Wars.” Big Tech also had the ability to light up a big, big cross-section of the population and get them to call their lawmakers And then, of course, there was the money. It was limitless in comparison to industries like Hollywood, in a way that compared to the way late 19th century British dukes went hunting for American heiresses for their sons because of the almost incalculable wealth available in the United States. Big Tech had always been a sleeping giant, able to totally upend the money-power nexus of D.C. whenever it chose. And now it had chosen.
That’s now the world we live in, a world in which Big Tech operates in money multiples that dwarf most of the rest of the economy. It’s also dominated by CEO-founders who, in practice, own and control their behemoth companies outright. The control of boards is largely notional. Corporate decision-making is driven by individuals. But the unpopularity of Big Tech is also a different world from the one I describe 14 years ago. AI is only the leading edge of their unpopularity. It both informs it and drives it. It’s a different world in another way. Big Tech now increasingly needs to control the government — both to do the things it wants (buy defense and surveillance products, grease the skids for the AI roll out, etc.) and not do the things it doesn’t (pursue antitrust cases, regulate AI, aggressively tax founder wealth). It’s increasingly an all-or-nothing world when it comes to Big Tech and control of the American state. It’s not a world with any great familiarity with how to interact or persuade the American public. That makes it much more of a winner-take-all contest, one decided by money and force more than persuasion. Which explains the rapid move into the MAGA camp, now not just by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos but now by the Google “don’t be evil” crowd too. That’s where we are and why messaging and persuasion are unlikely to be major factors in the coming political battles over AI.