https://www.publicnotice.co/p/big-tech-is-coming-for-the-midterms
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
It wasn’t that long ago that the prevailing view in Silicon Valley was that politics is both grubby and boring, not worth the time and money of the nerd emperors too busy shaping the future of humanity to care who wins the next election. But those days are gone, and now it seems that every few weeks we hear of a new tech-funded effort to leverage buckets of cash into the election of friendly members of Congress and state legislators. The latest, called Innovation Council Action, reportedly plans to spend $100 million between now and the midterm elections in November. It’s run by Taylor Budowich, a key MAGA operative and former deputy chief of staff in the Trump White House.
It’s just one of many tech industry-funded political efforts, the vast majority of which advocate minimal regulation of the industry, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. It appears modeled on what the crypto industry — which is closely aligned with tech — did so successfully in 2024: Deploy previously unheard-of quantities of campaign spending to punish skeptics and reward those who pledge to do whatever the industry wants, then reap the policy rewards after the election. As the stakes grow higher, Silicon Valley’s new political push is a preview of what we will face in years to come if and when AI creates the kind of economic and social upheaval that tech companies themselves tell us is all but inevitable. Money talksWhether they were impressed by what the crypto industry achieved or frightened at the rising tide of anti-AI sentiment, the tech industry has decided to invest heavily in the midterm elections, through both individual and corporate contributions to super PACs. Leading the Future, a group funded by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and other leading lights in the Valley, said it raised $125 million in the second half of 2025 in preparation for the midterms. Meta created a network of super PACs aimed at influencing federal and state elections; they say they plan to spend $65 million this year. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Elon Musk has already spent $71 million ahead of the midterms in donations to super PACs and Republican groups. What do they all want? The answer is simple: to be free of the pesky meddling of regulators and legislators. They want to stop federal and state government regulation of the tech industry in general and artificial intelligence in particular. While most of the money will go to Republicans, AI-friendly Democrats will benefit as well.
There is a countervailing force, but one not nearly as powerful. Anthropic, which has cultivated a reputation as the more humane AI company, donated $20 million to Public First Action, a pro-AI-guardrails super PAC started by two congressmen, one Democrat and one Republican. Their ads are not exactly rabble-rousing; the theme is less “fight Big Tech” and more “thank this member of Congress for protecting us while helping America lead on AI” (see this one or this one). Both the size and the message pale in comparison to what’s coming from the big companies looking for minimal regulation. There’s every reason to believe the 9-figure sums will grow as the election approaches. It’s not as though Mark Zuckerberg would have trouble dipping into his $180 billion fortune if he felt it was important; the same is true of Meta itself, which made $60 billion in profits in 2025. That’s even more true of Musk, who could become the world’s first trillionaire when the SpaceX IPO is complete. You won’t be protected from the jobs apocalypseThe political steps the tech industry and its leaders are taking now portend some very disturbing things about what could happen when the effects of AI are really felt. To see why, we have to understand how the jobs apocalypse could play out, and what political steps the industry would take in response. When tech industry leaders are asked about the potential for AI to bring about an unprecedented contraction in white collar employment, they don’t deny that’s exactly what the tools they are building could create. While they often argue that in the long term, AI will follow previous technological revolutions and create more jobs than it destroys, in the short term the dislocation could be catastrophic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that within five years, AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white collar jobs and produce economy-wide unemployment over 20 percent. Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft’s AI efforts, said in February that within 12-18 months, everyone who works on a computer could have their job automated. No one knows how accurate these predictions will turn out to be, but for the sake of argument let’s accept that at some point in the future, AI will drive millions of people out of work, and they will be unable to quickly find jobs at similar wages. What happens then? The answer some tech leaders give is that there’s no need to worry, because AI will create a utopia of limitless wealth. “There will be universal high income (not merely basic income),” says Elon Musk. “Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.” Andreessen predicts basically the same thing: Which sounds a lot like … the end of capitalism. There’s a leftist iteration of this vision (what Aaron Bastani calls “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”), but it’s safe to say that isn’t what Musk or Andreessen have in mind — after all, if they couldn’t be richer than everyone else, how would the rest of us know how brilliant they are? (emphasis mine, nb) In the meantime, there has to be some means by which all this new AI-generated wealth finds its way to people who today are retail clerks and fast-food workers, let alone the software developers and accountants who will be among the first to be automated out of their jobs. Or does there? The truth is that at least in the initial stages of this potential transformation of the economy, the new wealth will flow first and foremost to the people who own and run AI companies. Next it will go to corporations who can use AI to cut their labor costs down toward zero. In other words, the rich will get richer.
What happens to the millions of workers who are left out? The answer many in the tech industry gravitate toward is universal basic income (UBI), cash payments to everyone to forestall a Great Depression-style collapse, or worse. While there are some in the industry who have tried to seriously think through what UBI would entail, for many it’s an easy way to hand-wave away the consequences of the technology they’re creating. “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas,” said Mark Zuckerberg. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even donated some money to small-scale UBI experiments. So let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. Imagine we decided to send $1,000 a month to everyone in America, which isn’t a whole lot to live on. With 342 million Americans, that works out to $4.1 trillion per year. Bump it up to a more livable $1,500 a month, and we’re at $6.2 trillion. The entire federal budget last year was a little over $7 trillion. Where would all that money to fund UBI come from? It’s not going to come from all those newly unemployed people. There’s really only one answer: Higher taxes on the rich, especially the ultra-rich. And who are the ultra-richest? The leaders of the tech industry. Will they let us tax them?This is where the story comes back to politics. Are people like Musk, Altman, and Andreessen going to say “I have become even richer than I was before, so I’m happy to pay higher taxes to fund UBI”? Of course not. They’re going to deploy all the ample resources at their disposal to make sure they pay as little as possible. That’s what rich people have always done. If you doubt it, just look at how the tech overlords have reacted to a proposed ballot initiative in California that would impose a one-time wealth tax of five percent on fortunes over a billion dollars.
Since their wealth is held mostly in stock, tech billionaires are used to losing five percent of their assets in a bad week or month for the market. For instance, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has lost 20 percent of its value since February 1 in the recent downturn. Google co-founder Larry Page has about half his wealth in Alphabet stock, so that means he lost around one-tenth of his wealth. But he didn’t complain — when you have a couple hundred billion dollars, that’s just how it goes. Yet Page, like so many of his peers, feels very differently about being taxed than he does about losing money in the vagaries of the market — despite the fact that when he pays taxes, the money might be used for something worthwhile (funds from the initiative are earmarked for health care and education). He was so offended by the initiative that he and other tech moguls including Peter Thiel threatened to move out of California. This is a reminder that the super-rich hate, hate, hate paying taxes. They view taxes not as the price of living in a free society that nurtured them and allowed them to build so much wealth, but a personal attack. So if the jobs apocalypse comes and people start proposing that we pay for it by taxing them, what are they going to do? They’re going to do what they’re doing now, but with even more fury. They’ll use not hundreds of millions but billions of dollars to get friendly people elected to Congress, to buy presidents the way Musk bought Donald Trump, and to make sure that whatever happens to the American economy and American society, they get to keep their spoils and government doesn’t muck about too much in their business. They’ll talk a lot about protecting “innovation” and “entrepreneurship,” but what they really want to protect is themselves. |
No comments:
Post a Comment