The direct impact of Citizens United is that, if you are a super-wealthy individual facing multiple government investigations, the cheapest thing you can do is try to buy the government outright.
Elon Musk’s paperwork error was the simplest and smallest of the government investigations into his business empire. He spent $290 million on the 2024 election. That’s an outrageous, unprecedented sum. And it’s also, for him, a bargain. Had Kamala Harris won, he would have remained on the hook for billions in fines. It was cheaper for him to buy the government outright than to pay what he owed.
This feels like a simple parable of life in the United States in the 2020s. A handful of billionaires own everything. They are sloppy. They don’t bother to obey the rule of law. They profit as a result. And there is nothing — not even the government — that they cannot buy.
It’s a story of simple corruption. It cannot last. But it is not self-correcting. This sort of everyday corruption keeps spreading until everything collapses. Systems like this break down, and then have to be rebuilt through tremendous collective effort.
It’s all just so… pathetic. This was Elon’s smallest infraction, and even in this case, he refused behave as though the social contract applies to him by just paying the damn penalty. And he got away with it, because of course he did, because that is how the Supreme Court and the Trump Administration have chosen to arrange the incentives.
In which Elon Musk buying the government turns out to have been his cheapest option.
I don’t see how else to make sense of it. 2022 was the year the 20-year tech bubble finally burst. 2023 was still bad for startups, and was full of bad headlines for the big platforms. And yet, in the markets, tech investors just took a deep collective breath and started inflating the next bubble, as though the previous year had never happened.
Mark Zuckerberg has made Facebook a metaverse company, but is it really the future? Dave Karpf explains how the pivot is destroying the company and the consequences of tech billionaires living in a whole other reality.
Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.
Guest
Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.
AI is now a significant chunk of the economy. The industry has succeeded in stuffing AI into every product and every consumer experience. And that means AI policy is no longer the remit of a small, expert policy community. That was an early times phenomenon. The early times are over. This is what success for the industry looks like.
All the more reason to avoid the instinct to lump all forms of AI resistance into the same category. The Yudkowksy fans throwing molotov cocktails are a distinct discursive community, operating far outside the boundaries of what we might call “normal politics.” The data center challenges are mostly coming from what I would label Sierra Club-types. These are people showing up to community board meetings, writing letters to their legislators, making demands about industrial transparency and reporting, pollution and energy prices.
These two variants have practically nothing in common. The Yudkowsky crowd literally staged a protest this February in favor of billionaires. The Sierra Club types are deeply distrustful of corporate power, and deeply committed to participatory democracy. Bundling them together under the heading of “AI populism” makes it even harder to reach analytic clarity. The sole thread that ties them together is that they both are a problem for the AI industry.
Can we just not?
The options for the AI industry are (a) legitimate backlash or (b) illegitimate backlash. The mass public turns to violence when the avenues for legitimate, orderly contention are unavailable or non-functional. The Luddites smashed machines because it was illegal to forming unions.
I suspect the next few years will see an awful lot of anti-data center activism. People are going to raise their voices and say “we don’t want these data centers raising energy prices here. No more giveaways to Musk/Altman/Zuckerberg.” OpenAI’s lobbyists and comms consultants will surely brand it the “new NIMBYism,” and “AI populism.” They’ll treat participatory democracy as a form of damage and try to rout around it. I expect they’ll be quite cutthroat in their maneuvers.
That’s a mistake though. The friction of participatory democracy creates a pathway for legitimate resistance. If you do away with that friction, the illegitimate alternative you’re left with is firebombs. As I’ve written elsewhere, Democracy is an incredibly good deal for elites, one that they ought to stop taking for granted.
This moment will not last forever. The generative AI financial bubble will burst. The ongoing fraud and corruption will take a toll on everyone. Authoritarian governments are not known for their prosperity or their long-term stability.
But neither will it be brief. Stable, legitimate institutions are not hastily constructed or easily repaired. Those who advocate for change have fewer allies than last time, when we had some limited success in appealing to the better angels of big tech’s nature. Those angels are no more.
If we are going to repair democratic institutions, we are going to have to do it ourselves, writes Dave Karpf.
The second Trump administration has been worse than the first, and there is no longer any use in trying to appeal to the better angels of tech oligarchs’ nature.
It isn’t that my 2018 warning was incorrect, so much as it now strikes me as dismally incomplete. What I had not counted on was that the tech platforms would be much more responsive to the demands of a rising authoritarian than they would be from pressure from their workers, or their users, or their civil society peers. A nervous monopolist is a well-behaved monopolist, but we are not the ones making the monopolists nervous any longer.
This, I suspect, is the central explanation of Silicon Valley’s authoritarian turn: It’s a simple expected value equation. Imagine you are the head of a major tech company in the summer of 2024. The race is effectively a coin flip; there is a 50/50 chance that former President Donald Trump wins. In that scenario, he will vindictively pursue everyone who opposed him. That may be your company, or it may be your competitor’s companies. In that scenario, it is to your benefit to have been a staunch, public Trump supporter. On the other hand, if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, then your company will face fines and antitrust suits. But you will also enjoy the benefits of living under the rule of law, which means she won’t single your company out just for having endorsed her opponent!
These are all multinational companies. They know how to do business in authoritarian countries. Faced with the prospect of the US tumbling into authoritarianism, they have each concluded it is their own best corporate interest to stay on the authoritarian leader’s good side.
The U.S. political system is just about irreparably broken. The Democrats were “winning” the comms fight over the shutdown, but that’s a borderline-pyrrhic victory. Trump doesn’t care about his popularity, and he doesn’t care about Republican electoral losses a year from now, and he doesn’t care about mass suffering and loss. The guy went to the Supreme Court with a demand that he let him starve 40 million Americans. That’s both terrible substance and terrible optics!
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But the politics of the 2026 election (and beyond) will be on basically the same trajectory with the government reopened as it would’ve been if the shutdown continued indefinitely.
We’re looking at a recession combined with runaway inflation. Either the AI companies are going to deliver unto us their digital god within the next 24 months or else the AI bubble is going to burst, and AI capital expenditures + stock market hype is basically the only thing keeping the economy upright.
I just... I mean... Whatever.
Trump is going to keep sending masked goons to abduct anyone who looks like the wrong type of American to them. FEMA and the FDA and NHS and the CDC are so understaffed that avoiding catastrophes will be like dancing between raindrops. Health insurance premiums are going to skyrocket, and the Republican policy response is going to be some version of “shut up. No they aren’t.”
And meanwhile they’ll keep trying to gerrymander their way to a House majority, keep relying on their Supreme Court majority to reinterpret the constitution to mean whatever Republicans need it to mean this morning, and keep sending occupation forces into Democratic-run cities.
The shutdown wasn’t hampering Trump’s illegal actions, because he just decided that the parts of the government that he cared about (the new ballroom, mostly, it seems) were still operational. And his court majority was letting him do it.
All of that is bad. All of it will keep getting worse. And the public will continue to hate it. That’s equally true regardless of the shutdown.
So it would be nice if the Senate Democrats would stop scoring own-goals. It would be cool if the party-in-opposition wasn’t such a goddamn embarrassment all the time.
Read between the lines, and you can spot the real concern: Bill Gates made a lot of bets on clean energy technology companies when the United States still operated under the rule of law. Under the Trump regime, the fate of Gates’s investments is tied to how Donald Trump and his close advisors feel about Gates himself. It’s a pattern we’ve seen from all the other tech billionaires: Make nice with Trump, give him gold trinkets, and publicly distance yourself from all inconvenient previously-held beliefs. Better to publicly break from the climate movement, and urge the delegates at COP30 to abandon their climate commitments, than to stand with the climate movement when the going gets tough.
It’s all ludicrous, of course. If Bill Gates succeeds in convincing the COP30 delegates to prioritize “human flourishing” over carbon emissions, that isn’t going to result in more dollars flowing to global poverty or public health. There isn’t a finite and fixed pool of resources to be distributed. More or fewer resources are spent on a variety of causes based on collective political will! Does he really think Trump et al are going to say “ah yes very good, now we will stop wreaking the global economy and public diplomacy and international aid efforts. What very wise points you all have made.”?
It’s pathetic, but it isn’t the least bit surprising. The fight against climate change was always going to require technologies and markets and a social movement with the political will to make inconvenient demands upon the powerful. This was never going to be easy, nor was it ever going to be quick.
Bill Gates and his pals were never going to be anything but fair-weather-friends to the climate movement, because they lack the political vision to imagine that the problems of global climate change are also problems of the global social hierarchy that they sit comfortably atop.
Bill Gates went full Lomborg. Never go full Lomborg.
So for the next couple months, we are essentially Schrödinger’s Electorate. There is no uncertainty about Trump’s ambitions....But there is real uncertainty about his capacity to execute.
We won’t know until at least January just how dark things are about to get.
There is a version of Trump’s second term where he talks a lot about mass deportation, but actually deports comparatively few people. He gestures at massive tariffs, but mostly as a negotiating tactic. The most dangerous parts of Project 2025 languish because they require more attention to detail than he cares to give. (Plus they would be unpopular. And Trump likes to feel popular.) This would be a Trump II that kind of resembles Trump I, when he talked a whole lot about “building the wall,” but lacked the will and skill to actually put the plan into practice.
This is not a good future, mind you. But it’s the best possible of all the bad futures. Its one where we suffer through several years of mid-level corruption and a ceaseless barrage of Trump intrigue and incompetence. It’s a future that still yields a couple hundred more Trump judges with lifetime appointments to the federal bench, ensuring that no future administration can accomplish its goals. It’s also a future that sets us back at least four years on climate commitments, all while handing the plutocrats more money and power that they will ruthlessly work to defend.
It’s, y’know, still really bad.
But the other version of Trump II is the one where he deputizes and mobilizes a deportation force that removes tens of millions of people from their homes. Some will be sent back to their home countries. But most will be rounded up and sent to makeshift camps. And that’s a future where he also uses Schedule F to replace all federal workers with Trump ideologues, reducing the federal government to a cutout front for the Trump organization. It’s one where he shuts down all progressive organizations under the cover of fighting “extremism,” rendering the Democratic Party network incapable of competing in future in elections. One where his political opponents go into hiding, and the military is deployed against protestors, and press critics quickly learn that their constitutional protections are not self-enforcing.
This would be much, much worse.
Some early notes on political resistance in Trump's second term.
I’ve heard a cold-comfort, rally-the-troops message in some progressive circles: “we’ve been here before. We know how to mobilize against him!”
I hate to be a downer, but… no. If your strategic plan for Trump II relies on a repeat of the conditions of Trump I, that is a very bad strategic plan.
When Donald Trump assumed the Presidency in 2017, we had (1) a mainstream media that was eager to play a watchdog role, (2) a Republican Party that had not been entirely cleansed of Trump critics, (3) a judicial branch with zero Trump appointees, and (4) Trump and his team lacking even the vaguest sense of how to run the executive branch.
We had, in other words, a huge attack surface.
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It’s also going to be harder to tie him up in the courts than it was in the first term. Trump appointed 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court Justices. These Trump judges have shown no deference to precedent. Many are naked partisans, with no incentive to hide it. (Hell, a Trump judge just struck down Biden’s overtime pay Executive Order yesterday.) The Supreme Court has also gotten very comfortable using its shadow docket to speed up and slow down cases to Trump’s benefit.
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Here’s a rough outline of what I think might work.
The basic assignment is simple: run out the clock.
There are 102 weeks until the 2026 midterm election. There are 206 weeks until the 2028 Presidential. That’s a lot of time to be playing prevent defense against an opponent who controls all the structural power levers at the federal level. This will hardly be easy.
But Donald Trump is not some strategic genius, enacting a meticulously-crafted long-term plan. He has grown older, but no wiser. He is as likely to focus on deporting 20 million people as he is to get into a weeklong Twitter spat with Mark Cuban. He is a ridiculous person, and tremendously vulnerable to ridicule.
His administration will be staffed by devoted ideologues, not skilled operators. Rudy Giuliani was a devoted Trump supporter. So was John Eastman. Both were comically inept, and are now disbarred as a result. The benchwarmers suiting up now that they are off the playing field have no great excess of skill.
