I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.

The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.

I just got a new iPhone. I didn’t need a newer version. But my old one was broken in a way that wasn’t easily fixed. So I submitted myself to the hard wheel of planned obsolescence. I’m always happy for ever-improved image quality. Otherwise, for me, it was just a need for a new, undamaged phone. But this is one of the models which Apple tells you very frequently has their AI bundled into the device. Which I’m told is awesome. Or that’s what they’re telling me. A lot. And my sense generally is that Apple is the least over-the-top of the big techs in this regard.

As I’ve been using the new phone, I’ve noticed that the Apple texting app now takes suggested phrases and completing your words to the next level — as in kind of an absurd level.

Today, I want to share some additional thoughts with you on this ranging topic of tech lords and predators, the conquistadors and pirates in our midst. It’s a point that is perhaps the most visible part of the current moment, but because of that, paradoxically, hardest to see clearly. It’s been more than a century since the men at the highest pinnacles of the American economy so visibly and directly intervened in the country’s politics. An element of that is the highly personalist nature of the big tech monopolies. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a CEO or plurality owner. He is Facebook. He’s the founder, the driving mind since the beginning. I believe that voting rights are structured in such a way at Meta that in terms of control as opposed to equity stakes he is in total control. Meta cannot be taken away from him. Whether or not voting rights are precisely the same, a similar story prevails at Amazon, Google, certainly X and all of Musk’s companies. We haven’t seen anything like that since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons, when big names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller similarly owned, drove and personified the great corporate behemoths and monopolies of the day.

For many decades, certainly since the Second World War, even the more politically- and ideologically-minded corporations kept their political spending and their exertions in the background. Perhaps they gave most of their money to Republicans but they’d give to Democrats too just to keep them mostly on side.

What we began to see in the late Biden administration and then to an almost mind-boggling degree through 2025 is not just the big tech titans cozying up to Trump and doing so visibly, but making themselves what we might call main characters in the American Political Cinematic Universe. There’s really nothing like it in our history. I know many friends who are into MMA and the UFC. My sons are into it. Not my thing. But great if it’s yours. But if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you take ringside seats at a UFC match with Trump friend and UFC CEO Dana White, you’re sending a very clear and specific message and you’re sending it far outside the channels where most traditional political messaging takes place. Even more if you put White on your board. And the same applies to going on Joe Rogan’s show and talking about a rights movement for “high testosterone males.” Yes, Zuckerberg got into MMA before the so-called “vibe shift.” But not in this politics-inflected way. We’ve seen countless examples of this in so many different contexts, starting with that unforgettable inauguration image where the seats of greatest distinction were reserved for the centi-billionaire tech titans. Government of, by and for them.