In just two weeks, my new book Hyperscale will be out in the world!

It’s the first book from a major publisher to chronicle the data center buildout and the backlash to it, while asking whether we really need to accept the future being foisted on us by Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires. (You can probably guess my answer!)

As the book’s release gets closer, the recommendations have been coming in fast and furious. The Guardian, Literary Hub, New Scientist, and Next Big Idea Club have all put it on their book lists in recent weeks, and it was longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. That’s all to say that the early buzz is good.

But I need to ask you for a favor.

Hyperscale is the culmination of work I’ve been doing over the past few years. If you enjoy my writing or my podcast, I’m certain you’re going to take a lot away from my book. It’s like the work I usually do, but in a lot more depth, meaning it will give you a much better picture of why data centers are built the way they are, why communities are pushing back, and what’s really driving our AI overlords.

The best way to help me out right now is to go preorder a copy of Hyperscale for yourself. You can head on over to Bookshop in the US or the UK to grab your copy, or find a bunch of other links on the book’s website.

I feel like a lot of readers don’t realize just how important preorders are for authors and their books. It’s not just about selling more copies, but sending a signal. Planet Money explained it well when their own book was coming out:

Preorders are incredibly helpful for authors. If you are buying books to support them, preorders give them an extra boost that can become a snowball. Booksellers look at preorder numbers when they are deciding on things like which titles get the sweet, sweet spot in the window, which are at the top of their website or even just how many copies to stock. They want to pick winners their customers will like, and strong preorders are a predictor of that.

The preorders also all count as first-day sales, so big preorders increase the chance of starting out on a bestseller list, which then leads to more sales and … you can see the snowball.

Basically, you buy a copy of my book, and you’re not only helping me in the direct way, but you’re letting booksellers know that readers are interested so they’ll bring in more stock and display it more prominently. If every person on this email list bought a copy of Hyperscale, its success would virtually be guaranteed.

Go preorder your copy of Hyperscale today. I’d really appreciate it!

Need more convincing? I got my copies of the book the other day, and recorded a video of the unboxing! Find it on Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon, or basically any of the other social media except X the everything app.

Also, just a head’s up that I’ll be doing a bunch of events over the next few months. I’ll be in Paris on October 17 with Mediapart, Montreal on October 23 for an event with Rachel Gilmore, and London on October 26 with Foxglove and Macrodose. You can already RSVP for the Paris and London events, and the details on the Montreal event will be available soon.

All that will be added to my website, and expect more US and Canada dates in November, followed by European dates in December. Plus, if you follow me on social media, I’ll be sharing events as they’re confirmed.

But the key message: You’d be doing me a big favor if you placed a preorder for my book, whether that’s from Bookshop, another store listed on the book’s website, or simply by going to your local bookstore.

With that all said, it’s time for the recap of good reads and important news you might have missed in September — made available to paid subscribers. In this month’s recap, find great pieces on how a shooter in Canada used ChatGPT to plan the attack, why Paulina Borsook disappeared from tech media, and a new one from Ed Ongweso Jr. Plus, plenty of labor updates and news from the past month you should know about.

Have a great month, and make sure to pick up your copy of Hyperscale!

— Paris

The top 3

• OpenAI said it banned the ChatGPT account of a shooter in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. But there was a second account the shooter used for eight months to plan the attack. Mark Follman details what was in the chat logs for Mother Jones.
• In 2000, Paulina Borsook published a book that skewered the tech industry. After that, she found she could no longer find work as a tech writer. For Wired, Tommy Craggs profiles Borsook and tries to find out why her voice was no longer welcome.
• The longreads put out by my pal Ed Ongweso Jr. are always worth checking out, including his recent one The Future Is Not Tech-Forward.

Labor updates

• More than 200 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation have voted to unionize in the United States.
• Blizzard workers finally have a contract after two years of negotiations.
• An Uber union in British Columbia has just expanded to cover 1,000 new drivers in additional communities.
• Uber announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce, or 3,300 jobs.
• Xbox cut 268 more jobs as part of its restructuring plan.

The other stuff

• Thailand paused all data center projects. South Africans in Cape Town are trying to stop an Equinix data center. Residents in surburban Sydney, Australia forced a company to cancel a major data center project.
• The data center boom is creating an e-waste nightmare we’re already starting to feel.
• The US government is trying to stop Australia’s plan to regulate social media algorithms.
• New legislation in California wants to force data center companies to share more information about their operations and demands.
• Alberta’s government is backing major data center projects, but a majority of the province’s residents are opposed to their construction.
• Officials aren’t using the European Commission’s alternative to Microsoft Teams, called Element Pro, because they say it sucks.
• A series of AI-generated websites seemed designed to influence the answers that chatbots give when users ask about Alberta’s referendum on separation from Canada to encourage them to support separation.
• Brazilian president Lula da Silva banned gambling apps ahead of the country’s elections in October.
• Walmart has committed not to use electronic price tags to change prices based on customers’ personal data.
• Tesla’s Cybercab is under investigation for lacking a steering wheel and pedals.
• Gulf countries are still pushing forward with major data centers projects, even as such infrastructures have become the target of Iranian attacks.
• British Columbia sued OpenAI for failing to warn authorities ahead of a mass shooting, after it detected a user planning violent scenarios with ChatGPT.
• Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda as part of a wider restructuring.
• 1Password found itself in hot water after funding a project by far-right tech bro David Heinemeier Hansson.

Note: This article makes reference to a mass shooting. I made a conscious choice not to use the name of the shooter.

For the past several weeks, we’ve been treated to breathless coverage of the supposed major threat presented by artificial intelligence. If we’re to believe the titans of the AI industry and the media reports mindlessly echoing their every utterance, humanity’s years may be numbered.

It’s not because of climate change and how we’re actively making our planet less fit for human habitation. Indeed, many of these prophets of AI doom don’t actually believe climate change is much of a threat at all. It’s also not because increasingly unstable geopolitics is shifting the world toward greater conflict and the risk of global war.

No, the real threat, according to these supposed geniuses, is that in ten years AI could break free from its human developers and decide it wants to kill humanity. If you’re big into science fiction, you might recognize that kind of a narrative: whether HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Terminator himself, this notion that our technology will come for us makes for compelling entertainment.

For more than a decade, people in the tech industry have been slowly deluding themselves into thinking those science fictional storylines were far closer to being realized than they are in practice. They think our future is one where we need to merge with computers, cover the face of the planet with data centers, and eventually start building them on other planets to fill with digital “people.”

These same delusional tech CEOs now want us to focus our attention on a fantastical future scenario where their chatbots gain sentience and go after their creators. Conveniently, that not only makes their products appear far more capable than they are in practice, but distracts growing regulatory conversations from the tangible harms of their products to futuristic scenarios that will never come into being in the first place.

Politicians and media have been far too happy to chase the industry’s sensationalist bullshit. But that doesn’t mean the real harms of AI have been dealt with. Yesterday we got even more evidence of the devastating effect generative AI products are having on our communities.

Enabling mass killing

If you’re not a Canadian, you might be forgiven for not realizing the country experienced one of the worst mass shootings in its history on February 10, 2026. That afternoon, the shooter killed their mother and brother before heading to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in the small mining town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia and opened fire, killing five students and a teacher. It was a terrible tragedy that should have never happened — and it turned out OpenAI could have stopped it.

In the days after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported there had been concern within OpenAI about the violent scenarios the future shooter was using ChatGPT to explore. They banned the individual’s account, but leadership decided not to report the future shooter to authorities. It was a fatal decision. But it turned out there was not just one ChatGPT account. While the first was banned, a second account was not. Yesterday, Mother Jones reported on the details of that account.

After creating it, the future shooter asked ChatGPT how to avoid getting banned a second time around. It instructed to frame scenarios as fictional and not to use real-world locations. “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it,” the chatbot responded to the query. Over the next eight months, it helped the shooter plan the school shooting and entertain other violent scenarios, right up until the morning of February 10 when the shooter asked what time of day school shootings tend to occur.

OpenAI may deny its culpability in the case, but it’s now facing dozens of lawsuits from the victims of the Tumbler Ridge shooting and their families, along with the province of British Columbia. It’s not even the first time this has happened. Other countries have seen similar cases, like in April 2025 when a shooter entered the student union at Florida State University and killed two people after planning the attack with ChatGPT. This is part of the real threat of generative AI, but don’t expect it to get the wall-to-wall coverage that’s been given to the sensationalist lies of industry deceivers.

Deception is a strategy

Tech industry deception about the supposed threat of their generative AI tools is nothing new. It’s in fact a well-worn playbook. OpenAI was using it all the way back in 2019 when it released GPT-2. Claiming its new AI model was so incredibly powerful it posed a threat to society was a fantastic marketing ploy, allowing it to capture global headlines and get a ton of free PR. Now they’ve moved on to using it to shape the conversation around their products, but the media seems determined not to learn anything from their consistent pattern of deception.

The media is compromised in many ways. It’s stuffed full of tech optimists who want to believe the narratives of industry figures, alongside people who crave access above all else and know their bread is buttered by staying in the industry’s pocket. But you also have people who really don’t understand digital technology much at all, and certainly not artificial intelligence, so when an influential tech figure is making catastrophic warnings, the tendency is to believe them. After all, they wouldn’t be so wealthy and powerful if they couldn’t be trusted, right? But media also relies on audiences, and the sensationalism of claims that AI could destroy humanity has proven impossible to resist, even for many outlets that should know better.

If the media cared about factuality over sensationalism, it wouldn’t be echoing the lies of the tech industry. Instead it would challenge the self-serving narrative they’re trying to sell to the public. It may seem as though presenting your product as dangerous would be bad for your company, but all it does in practice for AI companies is make them more powerful. Somehow, they’re treated as having the answers to the supposed problems they’re creating, thus shifting the regulatory conversation away from real issues to imagined threats.

When we talk about the threat of AI superintelligence, we’re not talking about how chatbots are aiding mass shooters. We’re not talking about how chatbot dependence is pushing people into mental health spirals and threatening people’s ability to learn and think critically. We’re not talking about the women and children who are victims of non-consensual deepfakes or how AI-generated false information is flooding social media platforms, sometimes just for profit, but other times for much more nefarious reasons.

That’s not to mention to threat to jobs in a whole range of sectors, or how employers are rolling out AI tools to further surveil and deskill workers. It’s also doesn’t get to the other major aspect of all those AI tools: the growing controversy around the hyperscale data centers needed to power them and the whole range of social and environmental consequences that accompany them.

All those harms are not nearly as simple of a story nor one as sensational as telling people that AI might kill us all in ten years or so. But it’s irresponsible not to be focusing on it more because those are all the ways AI is really harming people today, and how they’ll continue to well into the future if AI companies and the executives that lead them are not brought to heel as soon as possible.

Generative AI and the harms it causes are not inevitable. AI superintelligence is nothing more than a science fiction story that increasingly delusional and disconnected tech people are telling themselves. We can act to rein in the real harms of AI today, but that means not falling for the targeted deception of an industry trying to avoid regulation and finally holding them accountable for the widespread consequences we’ve all had to shoulder in their pursuit of power and profit.

Tim Cook isn’t the “main character” at Apple anymore. During the company’s keynote presentation on September 9, the long-serving CEO publicly passed the torch to his successor, former hardware engineering lead John Ternus, in time to be the face of a raft of new hardware announcements. There were new Apple Watches, AirPods, iPhones, and, most important of all, the long-expected folding iPhone Duo.

As the announcements progressed, many were watching not just to see what new electronics were coming from one of the mostly highly valued companies on the planet, but also how that company might change under the direction of a new leader. Would Ternus be a continuation of the Cook approach to management? Would new hardware make a comeback after years of tweaks and revenue maximization? Would Apple finally go harder on generative AI after taking a slower and more measured approach to rolling out such features?

It will probably take months, if not years, to fully answer those questions. But early signs are not promising. While the shiny new gadgets might be sufficient to distract some from the business machinations at play in the background, the keynote and reporting in the lead up to it provide a good indication that Apple might not be headed in the greatest direction under it’s new leadership.

Let’s not forget that the Cook era wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows either.

Cook was a numbers guy at the end of the day, and sought to extract maximum revenue from each of the company’s product categories. Product variations expanded to hit higher price points (and profit margins) with more Pro variants, paired with an aggressive push into the services business to extract more revenue from all those locked-in users. For years, the company has been consistently pushing up average retail price and revenue per user under Cook’s leadership. And that’s just the consumer-facing side. Cook was also aggressive on the supply chain, being the executive who initially set up the company’s outsourced production in China.

It’s hard to expect any of that will change under Cook’s hand-picked successor. The iPhone Duo is not just an evolution of the iPhone, but comes with an eye-watering price of between $1999 to $3199 in the United States. Canadians and Australians can expect to pay 10% more even after adjusting for the exchange rate, and in some markets like Turkey or Brazil it’s far higher. Sure, there are higher component costs now, but the company seems to be taking even greater advantage of international markets to eke out some further margin.

The $100 hike in the cost of the new iPhone Pro models can be explained by the memory price hikes affected the entire consumer electronics industry. The company hiked the prices of other products like Macs and iPads back in June. But the iPhone Duo’s price is a continuation of Cook’s strategy to ensure iPhone users pay more for their phones over time, not to mention how the base iPhone 18 won’t even get released until next year. A folding iPhone might be a new gimmick, but it’s also an opportunity to push the average price of an iPhone even higher.

The Ternus era is not only more expensive out of the gate on the hardware side; it looks like something could also be brewing on the software side too.

In the days before the first keynote headed by Ternus, Bloomberg’s Apple obsessive Mark Gurman reported that Phil Schiller didn’t just step down as head of the App Store because he wanted to spend more time with his family; he was also uneasy with Ternus’ plans for his division. “Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform,” wrote Gurman. “Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments.”

Will that mean more subscription services, like the Creator Studio launched earlier this year? Will it mean higher prices, as Apple TV and Apple One were hit with again last month? Or could Apple step up its efforts to keep taking upwards of 30% of all transactions that occur on its platform, even as courts and regulators try to weaken its grasp? In truth, it’s probably a mix of all those options — and will likely cause consternation among users and developers alike. I wouldn’t be surprised if more AI features are used as part of the justification, as we see with Creator Studio. But that brings us with the other thing that stood out from the new CEO’s first big public display.

Under Cook, privacy was a big part of Apple’s marketing — even if the narrative didn’t always reflect reality. Generative AI clearly places pressure on that stated commitment, and is part of the reason that every time Apple talks about implementations of AI features, it emphasizes the amount of processing that happens on-device and its Private Cloud Compute for the tasks that need to be processed in its data centers. Well, Apple’s privacy narrative might be about to come under much further strain.

It appears one of the big initial Ternus pushes will be more comprehensively integrating generative AI into Apple’s products, following the slow deployment under Cook. It’s most visible in a series of new features for the Apple Watch that record everything said around it to recognize sounds and music, provide a recap of your conversations, and allow a “Live Rewind” where you can see a transcript of what was said around you in the past 15 seconds.

At a moment of people freaking out about Meta’s “pervert glasses,” this is Apple moving to make the fear of your devices listening to everything you say a reality that’s openly championed as a new feature. The company is promising it will all be done in a way that respects privacy and security, but that’s what companies always say as we experience a progressive degradation in those very things.

Apple wants us to see the Ternus era as a wonderful new chapter that will birth wholly new wonders. It seems more likely to result in the company further doubling down on its worst instincts.

We’re less than two months out from the release of my new book Hyperscale, and the good news keeps coming! In August, the book made the longlist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award 2026 — a great sign that early readers are resonating with my critical exploration of the data center buildout.

Paired with that endorsement, Publishers Weekly said “this revelatory account is difficult to ignore,” and Kirkus wrote that Hyperscale is a “timely, vigorously researched and written work of tech and advocacy journalist.” Much more to come on the review front.

It’s honestly hard to believe the moment Hyperscale is arriving in. Data centers have become a huge issue that people across the United States and in many other parts of the world are deeply concerned about, pushing them to oppose and even stop the tech industry’s projects. They’re right to be worried, and Hyperscale lays out not only the reason why, but also argues it doesn’t have to be like this. The future doesn’t have to look like the one tech billionaires are building for the rest of us; but if we want a different future, we need to wrench power out of their hands.

Anyway, if you haven’t preordered your copy yet, you can do it now. Preorders are really helpful to authors because they signal interest to booksellers, and make it more likely they’ll order more copies and promote it more prominently to their customers. (If you don’t recognize that cover, it’s the UK version! The one I usually share is from the US/Canada version of the book.)

For the audiobook listeners out there, I have more good news: Not only will there be an audiobook for Hyperscale, but I will be narrating it! I was in studio for a few days at the end of August to read the book so you can all listen to it come October. If you’re used to listening to Tech Won’t Save Us, you’ll soon be able to listen to me reading Hyperscale to you!

One final thing: I’m also putting together events for the fall. Some are already listed on my website, but more will be added soon. If you’re interested in hosting me, feel free to get in touch!

Anyway, a shorter monthly update this month. As always, find a list of great reads and important stories you might have missed from the past month below the paywall. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, your support means a lot to helping me keep doing this work!

Have a great month, and stay tuned for more news about Hyperscale!

— Paris

I don’t know about you, but the one thing I’ve always though was missing from the driving experience was having a car I paid tens of thousands of dollars for start blasting me with ads now that it’s always connected to the internet. It wasn’t enough that there are billboards littered all around the roads we drive on for companies to try to capture our attention. I’ve always wanted them plastered on the increasingly large screen in my center console.

I am, of course, being sarcastic. But we recently saw one of the inevitable developments from the “connected car” that automakers (and tech companies) have been pushing us toward for more than a decade. Starting on July 27, when BMW owners turned on their vehicles they were met with a special surprise: an exclusive ad for the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie.

I found it kind of funny when I started seeing these stories. I saw the movie with a friend of mine, and there’s a scene where a BMW billboard is prominently featured for several seconds. When it appeared onscreen, I leaned over to my friend to comment on how the company had clearly paid to stick its ad in the movie. What I didn’t realize was that the movie also got its own ad beamed onto the center screen of every modern BMW vehicle.

BMW owners were rightfully furious about the company’s decision to put an ad in their cars — and not just because they drive luxury vehicles. “BMW should stop with this shit,” wrote one user on the r/BMW subreddit. “I can't wait for the day that when you start the car, you have to watch a minute long advertisement,” said another. I think the drivers of pretty much any vehicles would be annoyed to start seeing ads playing in their cars. Quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.

The first thing it brought to mind to me was when Apple put U2’s Songs of Innocence album in every iTunes user’s library back in 2014. People weren’t thankfully to get free music; many were pissed off that the company had abused its power to force a U2 album on them. Bono subsequently apologized, and Apple released a one-click tool for people to remove the album. It became a scandal, just as this decision has for BMW. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company promises never to do it again.

But once again, this seemed inevitable. As digital technology started rolling out and finding new data-driven, ad-based revenue models in places where they weren’t previously as common, it was only a matter of time before automakers tried to get in on the party. Modern vehicles collect reams of data on drivers, people in the car, and sometimes even those outside it. Often, that data isn’t just used by the automakers themselves, but sold to third parties so they can make some extra profit beyond selling cars, warranties, and maintenance packages.

Since the generative AI moment, I’ve often brought up the last AI hype cycle: in the 2010s, when companies and supposed experts told us up to half of all jobs could be wiped out by AI and robotics like self-driving cars, only for that narrative to distract us from how companies were really using that new tech to roll out algorithmic management and crack down on workers’ rights. It’s hard for me not to see something similar in the transportation space.

Executives like Elon Musk, Google’s Sergey Brin, and leaders at Uber spent the 2010s talking about how self-driving cars were going to transform everything and how new digital technologies were going to end road deaths, traffic, and transport inequality. I described it in great depth in my first book, Road to Nowhere. Over a decade later, none of those problems have been solved; some even kept getting worse for many years. But as they were distracting us with big promises, they were sticking screens and sensors throughout people’s vehicles, promising unparalleled convenience as they extracted data from their driving habits.

The modern vehicle is infused with digital technology at every point. The features present in vehicles available in the United States pale in comparison to what a driver can buy in China today, and those features are quickly going global. Increasingly, cars are getting compared to smartphones, prompting fears they’ll also be upgraded much more regularly than people currently replace their vehicles. If electric vehicles are supposed to be an environmental savior, such rapid refreshing would further erode any climate benefit.

This is what all the big promises have amounted to for most people: cars that are more and more expensive, devoid of physical controls which makes vehicles less safe, and constantly monitoring everything you do with the option for manufacturers to change whatever they want in your vehicle, including sticking a Spider-Man ad in front of you and presenting it as a fun “surprise.”

I’m sure Western automakers need to face some competitive pressure from their Chinese competitors, but I’m not sure their even more digitized vehicles are really the goal we should be pursuing. This whole story of BMW’s in-car ad makes me not just desire a day before all this digital tech was crammed into cars, but for better transit and cycling infrastructure so people can more easily ditch their cars altogether. This industry has so many people held captive, and it’s clear they plan to use it enrich themselves at our collective expense.

By this point, I’m sure ~ the algorithm ~ knows I’m not a big fan of, well… it. Not to mention everything it powers. And it seems to be trying to serve me content that recognizes that.

I’m not a big Instagram user, but recently it started serving me content that seemed to echo my feelings about digital technology.

In a video posted by livefromthetrees, an older man with a bushy white beard and an inviting smile let me know I’d scrolled far enough. I was done for the day, could put my phone down, and get on with my life — preferably by going out into nature. It’s a wholesome video, and brought a smile to my face.

My Instagram feed isn’t all that bad anyway. It’s a lot of golden retrievers, people with tattoos, Lord of the Rings content, and the occasional more lefty comedian (think people like Gianmarco Soresi). As I watched these videos of the old man in the woods, I started being served up similar videos. One featured a grandma asking for negative thoughts, dispeling them one by one, then batting them away with a baseball bat.

I wondered if I played these videos enough whether the algorithm would fill my feel with more of this uplifting content, but I also wondered how social media would feel if we saw more content like that than the polarized posts and AI slop increasingly filling people’s feeds. I don’t want to know everything about these people’s lives, but the brief moment they entered my world brightened my day.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think training an algorithm is the fix to our social media woes. But it also doesn’t have to be what people like Mark Zuckerberg have made it — prioritizing ad profits and engagement time over conviviality and actual connection.

Now, to this month’s recap. First, a very cool update on the book front: Hyperscale got a great review from Publisher’s Weekly. “Timely and persuasive, this revelatory account is difficult to ignore,” it says. Don’t forget to preorder your copy to get the full story on the data center boom, the communities it’s affecting, and why it doesn’t have to be this way.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I also did some great interviews this past month. Thomas Dekeyser was on the show to unearth the history of people refusing new technology, while Hannah Cyrus and Alison Macrina explained how librarians are on the front lines of informing the public about technology (and helping them ditch AI). Check them out if you missed them!

The top 3 stories in this month’s recap look at the Summer of Ludd, snail-mail subscription clubs, and writers changing their styles in response to AI. Plus, find more important reads, and updates on labor, AI, data center news, and even more!

The full recaps are a special perk for subscribers who support my work. Thank you to those who’ve signed up, and if you haven’t, consider joining today!

I hope your summer (or winter) is going well!

— Paris

Civil war is coming to Britain, at least according to the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk. But in a new interview with The Economist, he declared there’s good news for the struggling nation: it will take 20 years for it to descend into civil war, but the AI and robot singularity is 10 years away. In short, the robots will have taken over, meaning the abundance they bring will negate any need for pointless squabbles.

There was a time when media figures, investors, and virtually anyone with much influence — not to mention all the relatively powerless people watching the world turn around them — would hang on the every utterance or musing of someone like Elon Musk.

Self-driving cars were constantly just around the corner. Trains in vacuum tubes were going to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco far quicker and cheaper than high-speed rail. Tunnels for cars were going to negate the need for public transit. And a Mars landing was just ten years away — in 2011.

The 2000s and 2010s were a moment when a select group of men — and most of them were men — were treated as unparalleled geniuses as they lucked into riding an economic rocket created by the internet’s privatization into the stratosphere of wealth and power. But they couldn’t simply be treated as lucky; they had to be recast as uniquely talented and knowledgable to justify the gains our capitalist system was foisting upon them. None benefited from that more than Elon Musk.

I would never deny that Musk had some skills, particularly in those early days. He did have some technical knowledge and seemed genuinely curious about the engineering dimensions of electric vehicles and rockets. But that does not mean he was a genius engineer. His skills were more in the realm of knowing how to package what he was doing to sell it to investors, to a media desperate for readers or eyeballs, and to a wider public disillusioned in a neoliberal reality where their lives keep getting worse.

Musk sold the illusion of progress, by repackaging science fictional fantasies as realities that could be achieved if only people like himself were showered with resources and power to bring them into being. In the process, his repetition of very basic facts about his industries tied up with those fantastical futures earned him a reputation as a visionary — one media around the world were happy to echo, even as he spread bullshit, showed himself to be increasingly vindictive, and more frequently made claims that were demonstrably false.

One has to wonder whether a new Elon Musk could actually rise in 2026, in an era of great skepticism of the tech industry and the exaggerated promises it makes to justify the investment that floods into it. Even more, it’s increasingly baffling how the media still acts as though what Musk has to say is really worth listening to.

In his interview with The Economist, editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes vacillates between pushing him on issues like the DOGE cuts or how investors will actually make money on AI, to agreeing with him on a whole host of issues, including at times his mischaracterization of the political positions he pushes and the outcomes that countries are experiencing from them.

Musk demonstrates very clearly that he creates his own reality. It’s one where DOGE cuts to USAID did not result in any deaths, and that if they did it’s actually Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) who are to blame for not stepping in to fund the programs being cut. It’s one where the far-right political movements Musk supports are actually just normal people being slandered by hostile media, and Musk’s own politics are centrist, or where Europe is actually a much more dangerous place than the United States because of all the Muslims immigrating there — despite the stats very clearly showing otherwise. It’s one where humanity is about to become the pets of a superintelligent AI that will create “amazing abundance” and render money useless, negating the need for Musk to pay more tax.

Beyond showing the richest man in the world is completely out to lunch, the interview should lead any right-minded person to question why the media continues to engage him in this way. He clearly despises them, despite relying on them for some degree of credibility, while actively using his social media platform and broader influence to try to make people mistrust them so they place more trust in people like Musk himself. Part of the answer lies in the scale of Musk’s influence.

The media continues to turn to Musk for the same reason he remains so wealthy and his companies remain so highly valued despite their poor performance. Chinese auto companies are eating Tesla’s lunch, as its robotaxis are a joke and its turn to robots is little more than a marketing stunt (once again, in the face of Chinese leadership), while his rocket company remains unprofitable and his AI efforts are second rate, at best, leading SpaceX/xAI to become a neocloud provider for Anthropic — not the major player that aligns with the forward guidance that was supposed to justify the SpaceX IPO.

The companies don’t crash because investors have simply put too many eggs in the Elon Musk basket. If he collapsed, they would lose billions, so his myth — or at least his position — must be maintained regardless of the economic reality of his companies. That ensures he remains powerful and wealthy enough to wreak political havoc and muse about unattainable sci-fi futures, despite not delivering on his promises to investors.

For media, it’s much the same: they’ve spend so long helping elevate him to this position, they can’t give up on him. No matter how many racist statements or fascist calls he puts out on social media, they’ll still publish headlines about his latest bullshit prediction devoid of the broader context about how many times he’s lied or failed to follow through in the past, not to mention his embrace of far-right political movements.

Elon Musk, in a way, is too big to fail. It doesn’t matter how meaningless what he has to say becomes, how poorly his companies perform, or how much political havoc he incites, he still gets to be taken seriously. The media could turn to so many people to get better insight — or even similarly unhinged musings — but those people haven’t been put in the position that Musk has, so their equivalent or better insights don’t have the same importance.

The interview put The Economist in the conversation and allowed its editor-in-chief to do a media tour of her own to talk about it, calling him an “extraordinary individual” and treating his brain farts about the future as things people should be taking seriously. The whole thing was a shameful display, ending with her declaring she is “not a Musk hater.”

Meanwhile, over on X, Musk was calling her a “traitor to the West” and an “unthinking NPC” as he continued echoing a far-right meme claiming they must “deal with traitors before invaders” — an explicit call to violence against people like Minton Beddoes. It’s long past time for establishment media figures to wake up and stop treating Musk like the character they built him up to be for so many years. But their interests still seem too aligned to be honest that the richest man in the world is a repugnant fascist who got this far with their help.

For the past year and a half, the world has been forced to wake up to the great drawbacks that have come from dependence on the platforms, services, and infrastructures provided by US tech companies. What was once framed as a driver of economic growth and dynamism now gives an increasingly hostile US government an unimagined degree of leverage over other countries and their governments. It might seem to have come out of nowhere, but in truth it’s long been part of the plan.

I originally wrote this piece for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, but they’ve allowed me to share it with Disconnect subscribers. There’s some specific mention of Canada as a result, but the takeaway is the same for many parts of the world.

In November 2019, time was up for Evo Morales. After election results started coming in, the Organization of American States questioned the validity of the results, casting his lead into doubt. Those questions enabled the Bolivian military to force him from power, even though later analysis—including from major U.S. media—confirmed the OAS analysis had been “flawed.”

Bolivia’s left-wing president was overthrown based on a lie and the political right kicked off a massive wave of repression. After the coup, questions swirled about why Morales had been forced from office. One answer in particular caught a lot of people’s attention: that the United States wanted access to the country’s vast lithium reserves, which would be necessary to power the electric vehicles (EVs) and battery storage that were key to the energy transition.

Eventually, a Twitter user put that charge to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. If anyone was to benefit from such a move, it would be him. His response didn’t help quell the questions. “We will coup whoever we want!” Musk replied in July 2020. “Deal with it.”

It was nothing new for Musk to make brash statements, but his response today looks like an early indication of where the industry was going. This was before his acquisition of Twitter, his open championing of Donald Trump, and unapologetic embrace of extreme right-wing politics. But his response also signalled something else.

For years, Silicon Valley had framed itself as the home of a progressive libertarianism. It was not like the old guard companies, it claimed, and wouldn’t replicate the social harms that accompanied their business models in pursuit of maximizing profits at any cost. That narrative helped buy tech companies goodwill as they grew in size and expanded globally, but it also masked the expansionist—even imperial—project they were undertaking, one which Musk’s tweet cast a new light on just as the mask was starting to come off.

The imperial project of U.S. tech

As far as the public was concerned, the internet was framed around a series of libertarian notions. John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation, said as much in a 1996 manifesto that shaped internet politics for decades to follow. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” he wrote. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Barlow wanted the internet to be akin to a virtual hippie commune, and he felt that meant governments had to be kept far away. But by casting government as the enemy, he left the door open to another powerful societal force to shape the course of the internet’s development: corporations. Barlow’s framing, which came to define much digital rights activism, conflicted with the way many in government saw the potential the internet offered to maintain the power of the United States.

In 1989, several years before the effort to privatize the internet would kick into high gear, then Senator Al Gore was pushing a bill that would direct more money into funding high-performance computing technologies. He was interested in the field, but he saw another benefit to spurring innovation in the sector. “The nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century,” he told his fellow senators when introducing his bill.

As far as Gore was concerned, the advancement and adoption of those technologies would not just be a form of modernization or serve to boost the economy, it would also assure the continuation of U.S. power. He may have been a champion for the “internet superhighway,” but he also saw how a global expansion of the network that would facilitate the entry of U.S. companies into countries around the world would be in the interest of the U.S. government.

As countries became dependent on the products and services of U.S. tech companies, it wasn’t just the companies themselves that prospered. Their profits flowed back to the United States and the U.S. government gained leverage over those countries; leverage it began to openly flaunt once Donald Trump returned to office. The imperial nature of the project Washington and Silicon Valley had been collaborating on for decades was revealed for all to see, and the tech billionaires behind it shifted their rhetoric to reflect it.

Silicon Valley’s right-wing turn

There was a day when at least some Silicon Valley executives believed in the “don’t be evil” slogans they championed, but their commitment to any notion of social good eroded with every additional billion added to their net worths. Today, Elon Musk openly promotes white supremacy as tech companies fall over themselves to sign massive contracts with the Pentagon. If you listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, that’s all in service of defending Western civilization and, more specifically, the dominant role of the United States.

In a 22-point manifesto posted to the company’s X account on April 18, Karp argued that Silicon Valley “owes a moral debt” to the United States and needs to defend not just its power, but to build weapons to help its military. Western pluralism, in his view, was a fatal mistake, as some cultures had simply “proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” There was no point in trying to put them on the same level as the West.

Rather than trying to push the government away, Karp and his new alliance of openly right-wing billionaires were explicitly championing the essential nature of the alliance between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration. It’s a political bet as much as it is a statement of how the politics of the tech industry have shifted.

Under the Biden administration, Silicon Valley felt its first sustained threat of domestic regulation as branches of the government brought lawsuits against the tech companies for anti-competitive actions and broader social harms that have arisen from their products. That was one reason they openly embraced the political right, but it was far from the only one.

The reality is that right-wing politics has long had a foothold in Silicon Valley; its adherents were simply operating out of the public spotlight during the era the industry was trying to present itself as a more progressive force. But there’s also the question of power—now that tech companies are some of the most influential companies in the world, they want to defend their power and market share. They rightfully see aligning with right-wing political movements as the best way to achieve it.

As the global power of the United States is threatened, so, too, is their global market share. If the U.S. government can’t push other countries around, it’s easier for those countries to crack down on U.S. tech companies or even get rid of them. More still, as Chinese tech companies become more globally competitive, U.S. tech executives need the United States to contain China to protect their bottom line.

The new political orientation of Silicon Valley is a far cry from Barlow’s declaration three decades ago, but it’s a more honest description of the relationship that has long existed between the tech industry and the U.S. government. It may have taken different faces in different moments, but the global expansion of the tech industry has always been part of the U.S. imperial project.

The need for digital sovereignty

The U.S. empire has long depended not simply on military might, but also economic coercion to maintain its global dominance. Unlike the European colonial powers that preceded it, the United States has engaged in less direct colonization of overseas territories; instead, it mastered the use of economic dependence to keep countries in line.

For a long time, that power was used primarily against the Global South; its Western peers in places like Europe or Canada were able to prosper from the system it built and even become exploiters of their own. But Trump’s return to office in 2025 corresponded with a shift in how the United States deployed that power. Seeing its geopolitical advantage in jeopardy, it became much more willing to deploy economic coercion against its supposed friends as much as its foes, and technological dependence has emerged as a key aspect of its leverage.

Countries like Canada are waking up to that new reality. In recent months, Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun regularly speaking out against the changing U.S. role in the world. But his action is not living up to his rhetoric—certainly not on the digital front. Work on a sovereign cloud hasn’t moved beyond the talking stage, the government hasn’t joined European allies in considering how to wean public functions off Microsoft and other U.S. services, all while it pushes companies to become more dependent on U.S.-based generative AI tools that offer dubious promise.

Concern about the influence of the United States is nothing new in Canadian politics. Left-wing activists have long criticized the country as little more than a vassal of the United States, especially since the original North American Free Trade Agreement. But defending Canada’s sovereignty in the 21st century will require much more than increased military spending and trade diversification. It requires the government to get serious about digital sovereignty.

Until Canada gets off U.S. tech platforms and services, the government, major companies, and even much of the modern military hardware the government is procuring from the United States is in jeopardy. The U.S. government can request Canadian data stored in the servers of U.S. cloud companies, it has weaponized our use of those services to expand its surveillance apparatus, and it can even suspend access to any of those services at a moment’s notice.

The libertarian framing of the internet as a place of freedom and expression was a potent mask for a project U.S. lawmakers always understood was imperial in nature: to defend its government’s power and geopolitical position. Now it has countries around the world exactly where it wants them. They have to choose: will they act quickly to take back that power, or accept the subservient position the United States has designed for them?

Since finishing up the edits on my book Hyperscale (which you can preorder now!), I’ve had a lot more time to read for pleasure — and it’s been so wonderful. I’ve become particularly taken with the fiction of Emily St. John Mandel, a fellow Canadian. I really enjoyed Station Eleven when I read it some years ago, but more recently I’ve read Sea of Tranquility and have now moved on to The Glass Hotel.

There’s still some tech-related non-fiction in there, including most recently Thomas Dekeyser’s Techno-Negative, but I’m looking forward to a summer of reading even more fiction. I’m not even sure what fiction that will be yet, but I’ve found it to be such a palate-cleanser after an intense year of work on a non-fiction book. I hope you’re getting some time to read these days too!

Now, onto this quarter’s reading list. The coming months are packed with books I’m quite intrigued by, not just my own. You’ll find some of them on this list, and more on the one for next quarter. Happy reading!

— Paris

These lists of forthcoming books are a special perk for paid subscribers. You can find previous ones on our reading list page, along with a list of recommended reads that’s available to anyone.

This year on Disconnect I’m trying to interrogate how we use technology and what capacities we have to change it. But that work is only possible because of readers like you.

Become a paid subscriber today so I can keep examining the parts of the tech industry the billionaires prefer us to ignore. Thanks for your support!

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Before May of this year, I had never used a ride-hailing app. I had been in an Uber before — precisely two times, when friends had called them after a night out — but never had I actually downloaded the application to my phone to get the full experience.

That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative.

It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.

The user experience of the ride-hailing app makes you feel like you are in complete control. You are Big Brother for the exploited drivers trying to make a meager living from driving people around.

When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.

Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with.

Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.

The whole experience was an instructive one for me. My writing about the tech industry started with criticism of the gig economy, so I’ve long felt those services were not something I could reasonably use without a degree of hypocrisy. To this day, I still haven’t used a food-delivery app. But actually downloading a ride-hailing app showed me how so many people have gotten hooked on them and resist any pressure to return to using taxis, even as ride-hail prices have risen since the pandemic.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.

I feel like the ride-hailing apps stood out so much to me because they’ve become so normalized for so many. Most people are used to the experience of using them now, and it’s been optimized over time to lock people in and make them overlook the drawbacks of these businesses. Yet, I was coming in after all that work had been done and the rapid way it affected how I saw taxis was startling as someone who’s never felt the need or compulsion to download Uber.

Very quickly, I was finding it hard to imagine doing anything other than using a ride-hailing service. I couldn’t help but think about how many other apps and services have affected us in similar ways that we never stop to question.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that people all over the world are turning against data centers.

Residents of Great Torrington in England are trying to stop one of Europe’s largest data centers. Australians recently dealt a blow to one planned near the Blue Mountains, as more than 60,000 people have signed petitions to put a pause on data center projects across the country. Canadians took to the streets of Vancouver to stop two AI factories planned for their city while Hamilton, Ontario was forced to put a moratorium on data center plans because public opposition was so great. And let’s not forget the United States, where 75 major data center projects were blocked in the first three months of 2026.

Just a few years ago, most people wouldn’t have even known much about data centers, let alone decided to turn up at public meetings and demonstrations to stop them. But after the tech industry decided generative AI was its next big thing and accelerated the buildout of massive hyperscale data centers to power it, that all started to change.

People saw their power bills shoot up, their water sullied by nearby data center projects, and had to deal with new industrial neighbors bringing light pollution and an incessant hum to their communities. Not to mention that AI itself hasn’t delivered on its promises, while sticking the public with a growing list of harms that includes everything from flooding the zone with AI-generated lies to pushing friends and family members into spirals after they get addicted to chatbots.

I dig into all that and more in my new book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires.

A little over two years ago, I had a feeling we could be headed in this direction. I’d heard about the chaos data centers were wreaking in Ireland, Northern Virginia, Chile, and even The Dalles, Oregon. Everyone was talking about generative AI, but what about the infrastructure that made it all possible? Before the AI boom, communities in those places were already struggling to shoulder the costs of hyperscale development. But with the proliferation of chatbots and image generators, so many more would come under pressure as the tech industry sought to expand its computing power at any cost.

I felt that was a story more people needed to understand: how the hubris of tech billionaires is putting our communities and our planet at risk to serve their fantastical pursuits of power and profit.

The industry wants us to feel this is all inevitable; that we have no means to fight back agains this wave of supposed progress. But around the world, regular people were showing that wasn’t true. They were taking matters into their own hands, and pushing back some of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the tech industry abandons its climate targets and any pretense of having the public good in mind, these are stories we need to hear and learn from. In Hyperscale, I explain how we got to this place and why this scale of development is inherently unsustainable. I tell the stories of attempts to fight back in different parts of the world and, maybe most importantly, I show that we don’t have to go down this path. We can develop technology in a very different way that puts the public good at the forefront, not shareholder profits or billionaire dreams.

Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires is out on October 20 in Canada and the United States, and on November 5 in the United Kingdom.

You can preorder it wherever you buy your books, including by asking your local bookstore to bring it in! You can also grab a copy from Bookshop in the US or the UK, or get more information on the book’s webpage.

I feel like if there was a month that brought home how the data center buildout is pushing up the price of consumer electronics, it was June 2026.

Valve announced its Steam Machine would start at $1049, though many buyers will end up paying more than that, while Microsoft hiked prices of Xbox consoles by another $100-150. Those are staggering prices, but they only affect a certain segment of video gamers. The real blow came when Apple finally gave into increasing component costs, increasing the prices of Macs, iPads, HomePods, and Apple TV by up to 20%. iPhones were left out of this round, but that’s unlikely to remain the case when new models are announced in the fall.

Outgoing CEO Tim Cook had signaled price increases were coming, telling the Wall Street Journal on June 17 that price increases were “unavoidable.” But the amount of the hike and how soon they came seemed to take people by surprise. And this will not be the end. Industry analysis suggests memory and chip prices are going to keep going up for the next few years, and that will force up the prices of all manner of electronics with it. The sub-$500 laptop is already disappearing as cheaper computers becoming completely uneconomical.

When Valve finally disclosed the Steam Machine price, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais helped explained how much things have changed in a short period of time. “Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things, you’d just pay the normal price for it and it’s all good,” he said, “now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you.” He suggested the company doesn’t even have long-term contracts, but essentially has to see what it can buy month by month.

Why? It’s all so a bunch of unimaginably wealthy tech companies can try to force us to use their chatbots and image generators regardless of whether we want to, and build massive data centers that are needed to power the technology. All those data centers need a specific kind of memory, and with all the demand major manufacturers are shifting production to the products that the data centers need instead of those that go into consumer electronics.

There are already ample reasons to oppose their project: from the harmful effects of chatbots to the ways data centers are forcing up energy prices and throwing climate targets to the side. But now they’re even making our computers, game consoles, and our phones more expensive all in the name of their pursuit of power and profit.

Where does it all end? And how far will we let the industry go before we force governments to rein it in?

I actually talked about this with Chris Person over on Tech Won’t Save Us, if you want to listen to our conversation. It’s one of many fascinating conversations I had on the show last month. I also discuss the issue in my forthcoming book Hyperscale that’s out in October.

In this month’s recap, the top stories look at how Huawei has thrived despite US efforts to constrain it, how the US sanctioned Chilean officials assessing an undersea cable to China, and how the FSB took over the Russian internet. Plus, plenty of other great reads, labor updates, and news you might have missed from the past month.

Have a great summer! (Or an enjoyable winter, for those of you on the other side of the equator.)

— Paris

Around the world, governments are going hard to present themselves as AI leaders willing to do whatever the industry wants to attract investment.

Last month, I spoke to Will Dunn on Tech Won’t Save Us about how this is playing out in the UK, where the government has gone so far as to use chatbots to drafts laws. France has gone all in too, presenting itself as the third pole of AI leadership between the United States and China. Now, my own country is making its bid to join the fray.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney rolled out his government’s AI strategy earlier this month, annoyingly titled “AI for All.” But in it, I saw something novel: not just the aggressive pursuit of AI dollars by giving industry what it wants, but also reframing opposition to AI and hyperscale data centers as the product of a lack of AI “literacy.” If only the Canadian public was taught to use AI tools, the strategy suggests, they’ll come around to backing them.

As you won’t be surprised to hear, I think that’s a poor judgement that misunderstands why people have turned against AI so aggressively. I wrote up my thoughts recently for The Tyee, a fantastic progressive publication based in British Columbia. They’ve been kind enough to let me share them with Disconnect subscribers.

In late May protesters marched through Vancouver in an attempt to halt two AI data centres that Telus is planning for the city.

They called out the massive energy demands to power all the computers inside the centres and the vast quantities of water that would be used to keep them cool, especially as the region faces water restrictions. The demonstration came just weeks after the federal government threw its support behind the project.

Of course, they were focused on not just data centres, but the chatbots and generative AI tools they were being built to power.

By early June, the Vancouver School Board started rolling out chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and over, despite the research suggesting it could affect students’ critical thinking skills and cognition, not to mention ongoing media reports about the effects chatbots have had on teens’ mental health.

Those details should have been red flags for administrators; they certainly were for some parents.

A group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces is now seeking signatures to demand a two-year pause on the rollout of chatbots in Vancouver schools until there’s better data on the technology’s effects on students. Those ideas are spreading, not just in British Columbia but across Canada. But you might not get that impression if you listen to the federal government.

On June 4, Prime Minister Mark Carney rolled out his long-awaited AI strategy. Called “AI for All,” it laid out an ambition to invest in domestic AI infrastructure such as data centres, significantly increase the adoption of AI by Canadian businesses and begin to address some of the concerns with generative AI that are stymying what the government described as people’s trust in the technology.

The centrepiece of the strategy revolved around the concept of AI literacy. Carney acknowledged that trust needs to be established, which at this point is an understatement. Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute suggests 68 per cent of Canadians want to see strict regulation of artificial intelligence, even if it slows development. But the prime minister is not seriously trying to address the concerns of those in the streets who oppose data centres, or of parents concerned about what chatbots might mean for their children.

Instead, the government is positioning the disconnect over the exuberance of industry — not to mention Carney himself and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon — and the public’s skepticism as the product of a knowledge gap. The plan seeks to invest millions to educate Canadians on how to use AI, in effect increasing their “literacy” of the technology. They will give chatbots to every university student, train 90,000 young people to be advocates of the technology in small and medium-sized businesses, and equip more than 3,000 educators to provide AI training accessible by all Canadians.

The government acknowledges that the sector will need to be regulated, but the changes to privacy legislation, measures to protect children and their data, and restrictions on the production of deepfake images are only the tip of the iceberg of the concerns that civil society groups and many ordinary people have with generative AI.

Canadians are seeing their own social media feeds filled with AI slop and misinformation. They’re reading stories of people taking their lives after forming dependencies on chatbots. People who live in quiet small towns fear that proposed data centres will threaten their quality of life. Artists are seeing their work ripped off by AI companies. And who can forget how OpenAI refused to report the troubled 18-year-old shooter in Tumbler Ridge months before that devastating tragedy took place?

There’s so much more than a literacy gap leading Canadians to push back against having generative AI forced on them in so many areas of their lives. The government itself should know better. It has already tried to roll out a chatbot to give Canadians tax advice, only for the auditor general to find it provided incorrect information 66 per cent of the time. More recently, its use of generative AI in immigration was found to have denied a woman’s permanent residency application after the system made up parts of her submission.

Just weeks before Carney stood in front of medical workers from the University Health Network in Toronto to announce his strategy and talk about how beneficial AI will be in health care, the auditor general of Ontario had released a scathing report on AI scribes. Those chatbots, used to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients, are currently used by over 5,000 doctors in the province. But the technology sold as a means to save time had been regularly registering incorrect information and making up details about patients’ health. It was so bad that the AI scribes were recording the wrong drug prescribed to patients 60 per cent of the time.

This isn’t just a problem in the public sector. As Carney’s strategy seeks to boost business adoption of AI from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent in eight years, there are growing reports in the United States of companies pulling back on AI spending as the growing costs are not delivering the expected benefits or efficiencies. In May, the president of Uber even admitted that AI spending was becoming “harder to justify” as the company burned through its annual AI budget in just four months.

It’s clear that Carney and Solomon have bought the industry narrative hook, line and sinker. They seem to firmly believe that chatbots are the foundation of the next industrial revolution, but that claim is based more on faith — and the hype needed to boost the valuations of AI companies — than on hard data. In fact, it requires actively ignoring the stories of the very real harms of the technology that continue to pile up.

There’s a certain irony in the federal government’s belated focus on legislation to address the harms of social media, beginning with plans for a higher age limit to keep those 16 and under off the platforms — because even as that delayed online harms legislation moves forward, the age limit won’t be extended to cover AI chatbots.

We’re now playing catch-up on social media safety because we believed the companies’ narratives for far longer than we ought to have, and now our society is paying the price. Instead of being proactive on generative AI, the government is failing us all over again — all in the name of trying to attract some of the many billions flooding into AI investment to Canada.

If anyone needs better literacy on AI, it is not the public, but Carney himself.

Canadians may not know exactly how a large language model functions, but they can see how the chatbots and image generators they’ve made possible have changed society for the worse in just a few years. At this point, I’d put far more trust in the data centre protesters and the concerned parents to craft a real AI strategy than in the prime minister.

Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking actions in that direction.

There’s no denying the policy is a controversial one. On one side, you have parents and advocates of children’s safety pointing to the harms of social media addiction and the type of content that can be pushed at teens when they use the platforms. Pushing back against them are privacy advocates and digital rights campaigners who worry about how all that data to verify people’s ages is going to be used and whether it makes sense to limit young people’s access to online spaces altogether.

Maybe there was a day when social media was all it once claimed to be — an altruistic means of connecting people so they could keep in touch, engage with their community, be more informed, and maybe even push for positive change. But that is clearly not how these platforms operate today.

As the pressure to grow their user bases, accelerate engagement, and increase profits intensified, so too did unethical behaviors designed to keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time. It included serving users content to keep them coming back, sometimes to push them toward political extremes or even make them feel bad about themselves in relation to others.

There’s no doubt in my mind that modern social media is a toxic product that is long overdue for regulation. The question is whether higher age limits and stricter enforcement of them is the right way to achieve that.

I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I’m not inherently opposed to making it harder for young people to access social media platforms, given the negative personal and social effects they have. After years of handwringing, I felt we needed to start taking swings — even if they were imperfect ones. The question for me has always been more centered around whether the policy is effective and is delivering the outcomes we actually want. That’s where I’ve been worried that putting so much focus on age limits was leading us in the wrong direction.

The effectiveness of the Australian legislation so far is debatable. Young people are clearly getting around it in high numbers, but those who point to those figures often miss (or intentionally leave out) how the legislation isn’t yet fully implemented. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is currently investigating five platforms for potential non-compliance. But even worse is how focusing on an age limits frames the problem as one that narrowly affects youth and potentially shifts energy away from forcing companies to change how platforms are designed.

So many of the features of modern social media platforms were made to keep us engaged and feed us regular dopamine hits, from the infinite scroll of content to like buttons and incessant notifications. Algorithms have been designed over many years to surface content that will keep us hooked, often pulling in things that are sensational and extreme in place of posts from friends or family to ensure we spend more time with our screens, and as a result, looking at ads. There’s no question that has negative implications for young people — but it does for everyone else too.

As I watched the effort to ban youth from social media spread around the world, this was precisely my concern: that the more effective policy would be sidelined for the easier and more populist one. That instead of targeting how the platforms function, we would simply kick off young people and call it a day. I saw that repeated as the debate around age limits finally came to Canada in recent months.

Media coverage made it seem that an age limit would be central to provincial and federal efforts to address the harms of social media. I began speaking out against seeing that policy as a silver bullet and the need for measures focused on platform design and algorithmic amplification in addition to the age limit, if not in place of it. But when the federal government finally rolled out its Safe Social Media Act on June 10, I was pleasantly surprised at the nuanced positions it took on the issue.

The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit.

One of the problem is that the focus is on changing how platforms operate for younger users, when many of those “safer by design” standards should apply regardless of a user’s age to reduce the addictiveness, mental health impacts, and broader antisocial nature of what we call “social” media. The Canadian legislation also targets various types of harmful content that can spread on platforms, including those that sexualize children or incite violence, proposes the creation of a Digital Safety Commission that sounds not unlike Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and begins to extend some of those standards and responsibilities to AI chatbots.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. Australia, having been a pioneer on the social media age limits, is also rolling out a “digital duty of care” for social media platforms that will include an expectation that platforms be “safe by design.” Earlier this year, Brazil’s Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents came into force too, setting age limitations on social media paired with prohibitions on addictive design choices like infinite scroll and video autoplay.

These developments make me more hopeful than I expected to be upon seeing the Canadian legislation. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about how precisely the different aspects of the plan will work, but to me it shows that the perfect is the enemy of the good and ultimately leaves the major tech companies off the hook for the harms they’re causing.

There are clearly problems with social media age limits, but the experimentation with that policy got the ball rolling and also got the public engaged in talking about the issue. Just six months after Australia’s implementation of its age limit, we’re already seeing other countries learn from their experience and improve their own social media legislation in response, including by focusing more on those design and algorithmic interventions.

I found McGill University professor Taylor Owen’s breakdown of the Canadian legislation instructive on this front:

It brings together what has worked in peer democracies. From Britain, design rules that make products safe for kids by default and a duty of care. From the European Union, risk assessments, transparency requirements, and data access for independent researchers. From Australia, a narrow takedown obligation for child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images, removed within 24 hours. And a strong independent regulator with power to enforce it all. This approach learns the right lessons from a decade of other governments’ trial and error. But this bill adds two genuinely new elements: conditional age restrictions, and the inclusion of AI chatbots.

In short, it learns from other jurisdictions while moving the ball forward in other ways for its peers to learn from too. There is still work to be done and issues to work out, but policy experimentation rather than endlessly debating the perfect solution while getting nowhere is the way to actually make progress on reining in the power of major tech companies. I feel more than ever that the voices that act primarily to criticize and delay action are helping the tech companies avoid accountability, even though they often claim to be doing otherwise.

Taking on the power of the US tech giants will be a marathon, not a sprint, but getting to the finish line requires us to actually start the race. Now that we have, we can improve as we go. Doing so requires us to push our governments to do better, but we shouldn’t ignore the signs that they are receptive to expert voices — and of learning from one another. It should have happened years ago, but we should take what we can get, and make sure we don’t make the same mistake of waiting far too long to take on the harms of AI chatbots too.

When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, many artists and publishers quickly realized another technological threat was on the horizon. Boosters were enthusiastic about how generative AI tools could churn out writing and images that would, in the process, devalue the work of writers, journalists, illustrators, and many other professions. But it all depended on the ability of those companies to take the collective knowledge of billions of people from the open web to feed into their artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Immediately, many of those professions who felt threatened saw an opportunity they could seize to present a legal speed bump for the seeming inevitability of AI adoption. Over the past year and a half, a series of groups that include visual artists, authors, and news organizations have launched copyright lawsuits directed at that vulnerability. The US Copyright Office has also refused to grant copyright protection to works created with generative AI tools — a campaign that has been supported by groups like the Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, and the Authors Guild.

If governments or the courts affirm the demands of artists and media groups, AI companies would have to remove copyrighted works from their training data or develop complex new systems to identify and compensate the owners of those copyrights. That’s something they want to avoid at all costs. In recent months, OpenAI has been proactively making deals with news publishers to gain access to their archives, but the industry isn’t stopping there.

Last week, tech lobby group Chamber of Progress launched a campaign called “Generate and Create” to ensure it remains legal for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted works. The group represents Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and many others. Their argument is not only that generative AI “lowers barriers for producing art,” but that training on existing works should be considered fair use. They’ve found an unlikely ally in the argument: anti-copyright activists. After taking on film and music industry lobbyists in service of the little guy in the 2000s, they’ve flipped as their libertarian politics push them defend some of the biggest and most exploitative companies in the world.

After months of obsessing by tech media, Apple’s generative AI features are (almost) here. In a prerecorded keynote at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) on Monday, company executives ran through a series of features like proofreading and changing the tone of text, recording and transcribing phone calls, a more capable Siri voice assistant, and an emoji generator which all fell under the label of “Apple Intelligence” — its branding term for generative AI. But none of them were anything to get too excited about.

The biggest takeaway from Apple’s keynote is that the air continues to flow out of the generative AI bubble. Last month, Google and OpenAI had their own lackluster showcases to demonstrate a series of evolutionary and even mundane features that were hard for anyone not steeped in AI boosterism to get excited about. One of the standout subpar moments of the Google event was when the company showed off how its Gemini chatbot could find a user’s license plate number in the Photos app as if it was a huge deal. Apple virtually recreated it, but with a driver’s license number instead.

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Unlike what OpenAI and Google were doing last year, Apple clearly isn’t trying to make people think its generative AI features are going to change the world. If we weren’t in this moment of AI hype driven by investor exuberance rather than tangible technological progress, these features would just be like any other additions to Apple’s operating systems. But they have to be singled out and given some extra fanfare because that’s usually what helps boost a company’s share price these days — or at least protects it from sliding.

After all the build up, Apple’s stock dropped in after market trading but jumped on Tuesday. The company clearly has a strategy to use its Apple Intelligence features to try to address some of the deeper problems with its business. It just remains to see if it will work, and if some of those generative AI features it’s banking on to deliver a boost might come back to bite it.

Apple’s ambitions still face challenges

Last month, Apple was in the crosshairs of artists when it released an advertisement for the new iPad Pro that showed a whole range of creative tools being destroyed to give way to the thin black slab of glass and metal. The company meant to illustrate how much creative work it believed could be done on the device, but after over a year of concern about how tech companies are deploying generative AI to take work away from artists, it sparked an uproar. As Apple rolls out its text and image generation features, the company risks more creative ire.

The image generator built into Apple Intelligence contains the strange and glossy aesthetic we’ve come to expect from AI-generated visuals. Not to mention that the use cases the feature is supposed to make possible — like being able to send personalized generated images in text messages — seem wholly unnecessary. But the worst part is that Apple isn’t being open about where it’s getting the data that powers its models.

In a news release, the company said it used licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler,” with the option for publishers to opt out of having their content gathered as training data. It also assured users that their personal data and interactions are not being used. But the company didn’t say whether copyrighted works were absorbed into its training data without creators’ permission, suggesting it likely followed similar methods as other tech companies. Just days ago, Chamber of Progress launched a campaign to defend the legality of tech companies using copyrighted works in AI training data. Apple is a member of that lobby group.

On top of the potential anger from publishers and artists, Apple could face a public backlash once people actually get their hands on its generative AI features. After Google’s I/O event in May, it was pilloried for the terrible AI Overviews it enabled on Search that gave out an endless stream of incorrect and even dangerous answers. We’ve yet to see whether Siri will have its own controversial recommendations to make or if Apple’s built-in image generator will start spitting out offensive AI slop like so many others. That will be tested in the coming months.

Privacy is also still an open question, but the one it may be least likely to face criticism on. Apple has long presented itself as being uniquely committed to protecting user privacy, even as some groups have called those claims into question for not being as solid as the company suggests. The company’s AI features have previously done a lot of their processing directly on the device, but with generative AI it will be sending some tasks to servers it says will be highly secure, so much that it’s calling them “Private Cloud Compute.”

After looking over Apple’s breakdown of the system, cryptographer and Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew Green wrote on Twitter that “if you gave an excellent team a huge pile of money and told them to build the best ‘private’ cloud in the world, it would probably look like this.” Even with that praise, he warned there will still be a lot of vulnerabilities that could be difficult for researchers for detect. Apple also still hasn’t said whether users will be able to fully opt out of the feature if they choose to. But those protections only apply to Apple Intelligence. If a user wants to use the ChatGPT integration, almost all of that goes out the window and users must agree to share data with OpenAI on far less secure terms.

AI to drive iPhone sales

One thing you can say for Apple’s generative AI plans is that it does seem to have better curated the use cases it’s targeting instead of trying to throw everything at the wall, like some of its competitors. That doesn’t eliminate the broader problems that critics have been identifying with generative AI for more than a year, but the framing of the features does signal how Apple is hoping to use them.

The company isn’t positioning Apple Intelligence as a new subscription that users can sign up for to boost its digital services revenue. Instead, it’s just another set of features made available to people who buy its hardware — like its suite of office software. That not only further dispels the notion that generative AI is some groundbreaking development, but shows Apple is positioning the features to help it drive hardware sales — and specifically a new cycle of iPhone upgrades.

The company has been struggling with plateauing iPhone unit sales for years. It increased sales revenue by hiking prices through the introduction of its iPhone X and later iPhone Pro models, but even that stopped working last year when it had four consecutive quarters of declining revenue. Recently, iPhone sales in China saw a recovery, but that was driven by deep discounts.

Apple Intelligence will be limited to iPads and Macs with M1 chips, meaning certain models released in the last few years, but that’s even more constrained for iPhones. The only existing models that will be able to run the generative AI features when they’re released are the premium 15 Pro and Pro Max models that came out last fall, meaning the WWDC keynote was essentially a message to consumers that they’d better get ready to upgrade if they want the latest and greatest AI tools on their phone.

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Apple Intelligence will be the central part of a big push to drive an iPhone upgrade supercycle in the fall to deliver good financial results for the fiscal year. Rumors suggest Apple is even planning to launch a new model alongside the iPhone 16 series that’s tentatively named the iPhone Slim and will be even more expensive than the Pro Max.

Apple Intelligence is not the company’s “next big thing.” After the Vision Pro bombed and the car project was canceled, generative AI may help drive some additional sales in its existing hardware lineup, but Apple still seems as paralyzed by its success as it’s been for some time. It’s lucky chatbots and image generators aren’t the pivotal moment Sam Altman wanted us to believe, or the company might have really been in trouble.

UPDATE (June 11, 2023): Clarified Apple’s share price movements after markets opened.

If the AI bubble hasn’t crested yet, I think this week gave us the image that will define the ridiculous enthusiasm of this cycle. Attending Computex in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signed a woman’s boobs as the value of his company continued to soar to such a degree it even surpassed Apple’s market capitalization to become the second most valuable company in the world.

I’ve been saying for a while that Nvidia is clearly overvalued and will drop quite a bit once this cycle ends, but nothing could make me more convinced of that than seeing a tech CEO being treated like a rockstar. He’s not a “cool” CEO; he’s just another billionaire tech mogul.

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My reaction is the same as the man between Huang and the woman who seems to be disgusted by the whole sight. And we’re not the only ones to feel that way.

The Wall Street Journal was the latest publication to throw some cold water on all the AI enthusiasm this week, as columnist Christopher Mims warns that “significant disappointment may be on the horizon” with the rate of AI improvement slowing, reality beginning to set in around what those tools can actually accomplish, and the high cost of AI applications continuing to be a problem. [archive]

According to Mims, AI companies are running out of data to train their models on: they’ve already used up the internet and “there aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.” Sequoia also estimates companies have spent $50 billion buying chips from Nvidia to power their AI ambitions, but have pulled in a mere $3 billion in revenue. This isn’t the 2010s when companies could get away with losing billions of dollars a year and still keep chugging along.

Despite some figures that suggest a lot of employees are now using AI tools at work, Mims cites clarifying numbers that show “there is a massive gulf between the number of workers who are just playing with AI, and the subset who rely on it and pay for it.” That’s because some researchers have found that “AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as.”

The AI moment won’t be what Silicon Valley wants us to believe it is. Thank you to Jensen Huang for the image that will illustrate the peak of the bubble.

Sorry for the delay in this week’s roundup! I was at a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and didn’t get it done before I left. However, the one day delay meant I could pull a different tweet to highlight at the end of the newsletter that’s a further signal of Silicon Valley’s fascist alignment. Not a good thing, but at least an instructive one.

In the roundup, there are some important pieces of Israel’s information campaign against US lawmakers, Musk lying to investors, and a break down of who really runs his companies. Plus, plenty of other important labor details and other news you might have missed during the week.

I don’t have any other media to share this week other than the interview I did on my podcast Tech Won’t Save Us with Joseph Cox about his new book Dark Wire. It’s a fascinating tale of how the FBI made its own encrypted phone network to read the messages of criminals around the world, then carried out the largest ever sting operation with law enforcement agencies the world over.

Have a great week!

— Paris

Every now and then, Elon Musk needs to take a break from lying about his companies’ future roadmaps to get lauded for doing absolutely nothing to solve a larger global issue. This time, instead of promising to save Thai kids stuck in a cave or send ventilators to hospitals being swamped with Covid patients, he claims to have the fix for global water shortages.

No surprise, Musk’s solution is firmly technological. He’s not interested in talking about whether we should be planning our communities differently to address water scarcity or targeting companies who have massive water demands to fuel their profit margins. No, Musk’s approach is flippant in the face of political and social considerations.

According to Musk, water shortages are “very solvable” because existing studies are obsolete and price estimates are outdated. All we need is more energy and better transport infrastructure, then we can desalinate whatever water we need because it’s become “very inexpensive.” Phew, good to know it’s all so easy, Mr. Musk!

“We've got a great water future ahead of us, and a great sustainable energy future ahead of us,” he told the attendees of the World Water Forum in Bali, Indonesia, where he appeared to promote Starlink’s launch in the country. With a good hydroponics facility, “I think you can basically turn any part of the world green, including the entire world.”

But does Musk really have a solution? New Atlas acknowledged costs have come down, but pointed out Musk missed a huge roadblock to the supposedly easy solution he outlined: money for capital expenditure. New desalination plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the cost of solar energy and battery storage has to be added on top of that. “This isn't a tech problem, it’s a very familiar money problem — and while it might be an easy one for a techno-optimist like Musk to overlook, it's a towering issue blocking progress for developing nations.” 

The billionaire blinders strike again!

Another great roundup this week with pieces on what Jack Dorsey really wants from “decentralized” social media, a nuanced look at the smartphone debate, and the broader impacts of California’s Prop 22 law. Plus, the usual labor updates and other news you’ve come to expect.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Nora Kenworthy about the problems with normalizing the reliance on GoFundMe for access to healthcare and how it further saps the energy for structural solutions.

Finally, I’m back from doing events and media in Copenhagen and Berlin. You can see a recording of my talk at re:publica about data centers. I was on Denmark’s public broadcaster to talk about the AI debate and on the Transformator podcast to talk about AI and other tech issues. More to come!

Have a great week!

— Paris

When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, 2023, Kara Swisher started tweeting up a storm of “scoopage,” as she referred to her calls with high-ranking tech figures. Over the days Altman was on the outside, Swisher helped to craft a narrative that a board stacked with his internal rivals had pulled off a coup without a legitimate reason. The face of the AI boom had been betrayed and deserved to retake his position at the helm.

Swisher has been open about the fact she personally likes Altman. In her memoir Burn Book, she wrote, “I have come to know and like the young entrepreneur since I met him in 2005.” He also joined Swisher for an event in San Francisco to promote the book earlier this year. During his ouster, Swisher’s narrative was the story Altman wanted told. It cast him as the victim and helped to set the foundation for his triumphant return — one that would increase his power over the company and serve key investors like Microsoft.

In Swisher’s framing, which she repeats in her book, OpenAI was riven by divisions between AI optimists like Altman and doomers like cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever who believed artificial general intelligence (AGI) was on the horizon, presented a threat to humanity, and that the company wasn’t doing enough to mitigate that threat. The doomer camp took its opportunity to oust Altman, but misjudged its power and Altman was restored days later.

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In her commentary, Swisher often focused on a statement that Altman hadn’t been “candid” in his communications with the board, using it to suggest there was no real reason for Altman’s removal beyond factionalism, while claims he was “manipulative and headstrong” were dismissed as “sound[ing] like a typical [Silicon Valley] CEO to me.” She even went on CNN to call OpenAI’s board “incompetent” and to advocate for their resignation to open the way for Altman’s reinstatement.

Internal division was surely one factor in the board’s decision, but Swisher’s narrative and outright advocacy for Altman skillfully downplayed other factors whose details started to become clearer after his swift return as CEO. Those allegations focused more on Altman’s conduct and treatment of employees — things Swisher has a long history of ignoring as part of her “prick-to-productivity ratio.” Altman was another “prick” she cared more about being close to than seeing exposed.

Why Altman was really ousted

The day after Altman was restored as CEO, the Washington Post published a report into the side of his history that people like Swisher had little time for. Sources told the outlet the board was concerned that Altman was trying to remove checks on his power at OpenAI and had “a pattern of consistent and subtle manipulation that sows division between individuals.” A couple weeks later, journalist Nitasha Tiku built on that earlier reporting with more details suggesting Altman had been “psychologically abusive” and had allegedly been “pitting employees against each other in unhealthy ways.” Those actions had been central considerations for the board when they decided to remove him.

In 2019, Altman had also been removed as head of Y Combinator for putting “his own interests ahead of the organization,” according to the Post. At the time, he was making personal investments in companies he was selecting for inclusion in the accelerator’s fund. Even going back to his first startup Loopt, the management team had reportedly asked the board to remove him as CEO twice for “deceptive and chaotic behavior,” according to former OpenAI board member Helen Toner. Those details are often left out of the glowing profiles Altman receives today, not unlike how figures like Musk had their histories effectively rewritten once they became successful.

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During the ouster saga, OpenAI employees released a letter saying they’d resign en masse if Altman wasn’t restored as CEO. But the Washington Post found employees reported facing peer pressure to add their names and had a financial incentive to bring him back. If he wasn’t, an investment deal that would allow them to cash out would be put in jeopardy.

More recently, Vox revealed that employees were forced to sign strict non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements once they left he company, or else they could lose their vested equity. Altman claimed he didn’t know about those clauses, but his response doesn’t line up with documents Vox obtained suggesting he would have been very aware and that company lawyers were aggressive in getting ex-employees to sign away their ability to speak about or criticize the company.

A recent interview Toner gave to the TED AI Show casts further doubt on Swisher’s version of events. Toner elaborated on the reasons Altman was removed from the company, explaining that two executives had spoken to the board about negative experiences with Altman that included lying, manipulation, and creating a toxic atmosphere at the company. Altman also didn’t disclose his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund and lied about the company’s safety processes. The board felt it “just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us,” explained Toner. She was also personally targeted by Alman when she published a research paper he didn’t like.

Ultimately, Toner explained the quick and stealthy removal of Altman as being necessary because if he knew in advance he’d “pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board.” Those are clearly well-founded concerns, given that’s exactly what Altman did after he was ousted. He muddied the waters and ensured his narrative of events was the one that dominated the discussion about the company. Swisher served as a central conduit in that campaign.

Altman is cementing his power

After returning to OpenAI, Altman has cemented his power over the company. He brought in a new board that will be far less likely to challenge to his leadership. Earlier this month, Sutskever left the company, as did safety lead and company executive Jan Leike. OpenAI also dissolved the Superalignment team that Leike headed up. On Twitter, Leike explained that his disagreements with OpenAI leadership had been growing “for quite some time” and he was concerned “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Vox reported that five more of the company’s safety-conscious employees had left since Altman’s return as CEO as they lost trust in his leadership.

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To replace that team, OpenAI created a safety and security committee earlier this week stacked with company executives, including Altman himself. Meanwhile, the prospect of OpenAI throwing off the shackles of its non-profit status continues to be discussed and the company has reported branched out from its Microsoft dependency to sign a deal with Apple that will give it a greater sense of independence. Even in the face of the blowback from the non-disclosure scandal and the potential legal action from the drama over the use of a voice sounding very similar to Scarlett Johansson’s in GPT-4o, Altman’s power is only growing.

While Swisher might make the occasional jabs at the “man-boys” of Silicon Valley, as she refers to them in her book, she’s desperate to be in their circles and part of the power game. She’s chosen a few CEOs to more regularly criticize now that they don’t give her the access she craves, but there are many more whose narratives she will happily help turn into the official record whenever it will help them. Altman is in that group, and six months after his removal and return as CEO of OpenAI, it’s become very apparent that Swisher was echoing the Altman line and defending his interests. As she says in her book, she’s happy to give “flawed people … a little break,” as long as they have the power to justify it.