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 visualartists, authors, and newsorganizations 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 proactivelymakingdeals 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Atlasacknowledged 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!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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The media can’t get enough of Malcolm and Simone Collins, the couple who’ve made themselves the face of the tech-aligned pronatalist movement that advocates having more kids using genetic screening technologies to (theoretically) choose the best possible embryos. The Collinses have been profiled countless times by various publications over the past few years, providing their movement with (I would argue) far more mainstream attention than it deserves, but also slowly unearthing the dark side of their beliefs.
This most recent profile by Jenny Kleeman in The Guardian revisits their attempt to put a tech makeover on eugenics. Malcolm disagrees with that framing, arguing eugenics is about state-backed program, ignoring how “liberal” eugenics is very much a thing with its own deep problems. That only becomes more clear when Kleeman notes how cozy their movement has become with elements of the far right which push the great replacement theory. She quotes Malcolm talking about the “really horrible optics” of “importing people from Africa.”
The real contribution of Kleeman’s piece is the insight she provides on how the Collinses treat their kids. Their three kids have toys and iPads, but Malcolm and Simone argue heating their freezing home in winter is a “pointless indulgence” and say that “pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting” where they claim to be sacrificing what they can give their kids in order to have more of them. Malcolm says he doesn’t like babies. Simone takes care of them for the first 18 months, then hands them off the Malcolm for regular care so she can pop out another.
The big moment of the story happens when Malcolm takes Kleeman out for Thai food with two of the boys. When one hits the table with his foot, “Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face,” Kleeman describes.
It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.
Later, Malcolm explains they hit their kids because Simone saw that tigers in the wild hit their cubs with a paw to shape their behavior. Think of that what you will. But the whole story just adds to the questions we should be asking about this pronatalist movement — not just the broader ideology behind it, but what it means for the kids being spawned as instruments in some supposed political project.
Not long after the profile was posted, none other than the Collinses themselves turned up in my mentions on Twitter to defend hitting their kids. “EVERYONE under anyone else's authority (kids, employees, citizens, etc.) is subject to misguided social experiments,” they replied. “We take this unavoidable reality seriously and are therefore very intentional about our approaches.”
Effective altruists will apparently even point to numbers and charts to defend physical abuse of children now. Not even laughing at their cringe Reddit posts can distract from the growing concern over what they’re doing and the question of how much having all these kids is driven by a desire to go viral by carving out a weird tech niche of their own.
This week in the roundup: your usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other stories you might have missed. There are a number of stories on Google’s AI Overviews disaster and the tech industry’s growing embrace of Donald Trump (after many previously said they wouldn’t support him again). I’d also really recommended the open letter from Kenyan AI workers to Joe Biden.
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Gil Duran about Balaji Srinivasan’s plan for tech-aligned “Grays” to take over San Francisco by allying with the police, then “ethnically cleansing” the city of “Blues,” meaning liberals and leftists. It’s a good discussion of how extreme the industry’s billionaires are becoming.
I did some Danish media this week, which I’ll share as it comes out over the next few weeks, and wrote a piece for The Independent about the problems with the legalization of Uber in Newfoundland and Labrador. I was also on WNYC’s On the Media to talk about AI hype and Sam Altman’s manipulation of the press, and did an interview with WDR in Germany on the Hyperloop. Also, just a final reminder that I’m speaking at re:publica in Berlin on Monday.
Less than a week after OpenAI showed off a demo of its GPT-4o with a voice that sounded so strikingly similar to Scarlett Johansson’s that Sam Altman even went to far as to tweet “her” — a reference to the 2013 Spike Jonze movie of the same name — we found out it wasn’t a coincidence at all. According to a statement released by Johansson, Altman had been trying to get the actress to be the voice of the product as far back as last September. He was seemingly desperate to make his favorite movie a reality — or at least a version of it that provided the aesthetic Altman needed to keep pushing the fantasy that his large language models will soon develop consciousness.
According to Johansson, Altman pitched her on the idea that putting her voice behind the chatbot would “bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al.” Probably more important to Altman, hearing Johansson would be “comforting to people” — or at least the tech bros trying to recreate Her. Ultimately, Johansson turned down the offer. But Altman wasn’t done.
Two days before OpenAI’s Spring Update focused on GPT-4o, he contacted Johansson’s agent once again, asking her to reconsider. But he didn’t even wait for a response. They company went ahead with the demo, prompting questions for OpenAI about how much it sounded like Johansson, jokes on Saturday Night Live referencing it, and even the actress’ close friends to message her asking if she was involved. OpenAI has now pulled the “Sky” voice that imitates Johansson, but the whole debacle brings up a number of important issues.
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The internet’s dark side
Putting OpenAI aside for a moment, it’s hard to ignore how often Johansson gets caught up in these cycles of tech exploitation and ends up having to become the face of campaigns against it. Back in 2021, she sued Disney when it decided to put Black Widow on Disney+ the same day it was poised to hit theaters without consulting her. Part of Johansson’s compensation was tied to box office performance, so she could credibly argue she’d be paid less as a result of the decision, but it also happened to play into bigger concerns in the industry.
WarnerMedia had sent its 2021 slate of movies to streaming too, without bothering to talk to the actors and directors involved with the projects first. Those decisions heightened the growing dissatisfaction in Hollywood with the streaming model and the decisions being made by major studios. Johansson ultimately settled, but her decision to sue was seen as an important move in a growing fight between talent and studios — regardless of her A-list status. That fight came to a head last year when actors and writers went on a months-long strike demanding a better deal. But Johansson may have been primed for that legal fight due to the longer battle she’s been forced to wage against digital exploitation.
When explicit AI-generated photos of Taylor Swift spread across Twitter/X earlier this year, a lot more people woke up to the growing problem of non-consensual deepfake or AI-generated sexual images that generative AI tools have made much easier to create. But the problem didn’t begin with generative AI. In 2018, Johansson spoke out about deepfakes after fake videos that put her face on graphic sex scenes started spreading online and racking up millions of views. Her statement was scathing, calling the internet “a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”
“The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause, for the most part,” she wrote at the time. “Obviously, if a person has more resources, they may employ various forces to build a bigger wall around their digital identity. But nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired.” For all the benefits that came of online connection, the internet continues to have a dark underbelly that often gets minimized by its biggest defenders.
By that point, Johansson was already well-acquainted with the ways the internet could be used to more easily victimize women, whether celebrities like her or just regular everyday people. Years earlier, she’d experienced having men make a life-sized robot using her face without her permission. Her email account was also been hacked and nude photos that were taken from it were later published online. (The hacker eventually got ten years in prison.) As the generative AI boom has taken off, she’s been dealing with it once again, having already sued Lisa AI for using her likeness to promote its product. Now she’s being forced to turn her attention to OpenAI.
Time for action
Since generative AI tools started taking off in November 2022, companies like OpenAI have been playing fast and loose with the rules that govern the use of copyrighted works and people’s personal data. We’ve seen countless examples of AI image generators churning out visuals that look remarkably similar to major franchise films or the graphic styles of specific artists, and voice actors have reported having their voiceshijacked by AI voice generators. A proposed class action was launched last week against an AI company called LOVO which is accused of doing just that. Johansson, once again, is among those whose voices were stolen.
In the same way that Taylor Swift’s victimization at the hands of people generating sexual images of her put a spotlight on the issue, Altman’s ham-fisted attempt to build an AI assistant with Johansson’s voice will now do the same for a whole range of other abuses by companies like his own. The scandal has promptedother artists to speak out in support of Johansson and has madelawmakers take note of the problem. The reality is that the issue of Johansson’s voice is just the tip of the iceberg, and as the hype dissipates, this could be an important moment in the deflation of the AI bubble.
In her statement, Johansson connects what OpenAI did to her to those broader issues. “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” she writes. Ultimately, she demands transparency from OpenAI and for lawmakers to move forward with regulation to protect individuals’ rights in the face of AI companies trampling all over them.
This scandal presents an opportunity for voices that have already been trying to raise the issue of theft and exploitation by AI companies to seize the spotlight Johansson has placed on generative AI and demand lawmakers take action. Protecting people’s voices and likenesses is important, but that effort can go much further to take on AI companies training on people’s work without their permission and the broader victimization their tools enable. It’s time to stop falling for Altman’s con and clean up the mess generative AI tools are making.
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Apple is a juggernaut, but it’s having a hard time charting a path forward. Earlier this year, it canceled the Apple Car and released the Vision Pro to poor results. In recent months, CEO Tim Cook has been jetting around Asia not just to shore up its supply chain, but also to try to find new markets for sales growth as Chinese consumers turn toward domestic brands.
In Business Insider, I wrote about the troubles Apple is facing [pl / es / archive]. After a series of category-defining hardware products under Steve Jobs, the company has struggled to replicate it under Cook and there’s nothing on the horizon to suggest that will change anytime soon. Instead, Cook’s strategy has been to push up prices and build a larger services business to try to make more money off existing customers, all while doing much more to keep investors happy.
When Apple released its quarterly earnings in early May, it had a sweetener to distract investors from its continuing stagnation and the increasingly worrying picture for the company’s sales in China: Cook announced a larger dividend and a $110-billion share buyback, the biggest in its history. It might keep investors happy for now, but it’s not a good sign for those looking for a long-term strategy.
Almost perfectly on cue, news leaked this week that Apple seems to be planning a “Slim” version of the iPhone 17 that will be even more expensive than the iPhone Pro Max, which built on the price hike that followed the release of the iPhone X in 2017. To me, it’s a further signal that Cook doesn’t have a real plan other than trying to keep squeezing existing customers for more money once again. But how long can that go on?
Apple aside, there are plenty of great recommended reads, labor updates, and other news items in this week’s roundup. I particularly liked the pieces calling Facebook the “zombie internet” and the longread on Silicon Valley going back to Saudi Arabia and the UAE with hat in hand for more money. Plus, if you’re a paid subscriber, don’t forget to check out the new reading list for the coming months.
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Paolo Gerbaudo about the Chinese automaker BYD, how its vertically integrated production model works, and why it’s presenting a big threat to US automakers. It was a fascinating conversation.
Just a reminder that I’m speaking on May 23 and 24 in Copenhagen, and on May 27 in Berlin. I may also be doing another event in Berlin on May 25 — if you might want to attend that, keep an eye on my social media.
At the end of Google’s snorefest of an I/O presentation on Tuesday, CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to inform the crowd his team had used the term “AI” 120 times over the preceding two hours. He then said it one more time for good measure, so the counter would tick over to 121 and the audience could clap like a bunch of trained seals. The tired display wasn’t just an illustration of how fully Silicon Valley has embraced the latest hype cycle, but also how exhausting the whole thing has become a year and a half after the release of ChatGPT.
Throughout the keynote, Google executives showed off a ton of pretty standard features that were supposed to seem far more impressive because they had some link to Gemini, the name for its current suite of large language models (LLMs). The lemmings in the audience celebrated such groundbreaking features as getting Google Photos to find your license plate number, having a chatbot process the return for some shoes you ordered online, and getting Gemini to throw together some spreadsheets for you. The revolutionary nature of the AI future just continues to astound.
The company also brought DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis — excuse me, Sir Demis Hassabis — up to do some AI boosting of his own. That including repeating a debunked claim that Google’s AI tools had discovered a ton of “new materials” last year. Researchers who reviewed a subset of Google’s data concluded “we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds,” with one telling 404 Media, “the Google paper falls way short in terms of it being a useful, practical contribution to the experimental materials scientists.” A little later, they got Donald Glover to lend some credibility to Google’s AI video generation efforts, making the dubious claim that it will let anyone become a director — just like we were told with home video cameras, smartphones, and other technologies that did little to break down Hollywood’s gates.
Gone are the days when tech executives could reasonably make us believe artificial general intelligence (AGI) was on the horizon because they’d thrown so much capital and compute behind getting their models to do slightly more advanced work than they’d done before. They certainly can’t scare us any longer with the idea that sentient AIs are on the cusp of enslaving us, if not just killing us all. Beyond the massively oversold new features that might not even need an LLM in the first place, the leaders of this AI push are getting lost in their own fantasies.
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Take OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. He’s recently been making the podcast rounds sounding as though the past year of AI proselytizing has made him lose his remaining grasp on reality. Earlier this week, he appeared on the Logan Bartlett Show where he claimed AI will create a huge market for “human, in-person, fantastic experiences” — something that definitely doesn’t exist in the metaverses Altman must think we currently live in. A few days earlier, he joined the increasingly radicalized bros at All-In to explain that universal basic income is dead; instead we should strive for a universal basic compute where everyone would get a share in an LLM to use or sell as they see fit. It had big “let them eat compute” energy.
OpenAI had a showcase of its own this week that was similarly underwhelming, despite how much the company’s executives and parts of the media tried to pretend otherwise. As a few members of the OpenAI team showed off a ChatGPT voice bot doing math equations, responding to basic requests, and doing a very short voice translation demo with a flirty, female tone that got commentators obsessively comparing it to the movie Her, the tool itself kept making mistakes and unrelated comments that the presenters had to awkwardly laugh off. Over at Intelligencer, John Herrman astutely observed that AGI is no closer to being achieved, so OpenAI is getting its tools to “perform the part of an intelligent machine.”
Going back to the 1960s, we know humans are suckers for computers that pretend to be thinking machines, even when they’re doing nothing of the sort. Leading the update, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said its updated chatbot just “feels so magical.” But as we know, magic is an illusion that always has an explanation. OpenAI just doesn’t want us to know what’s happening below the hood of its tools and keep buying the fantasy as long as possible. Murati is the same woman who became a meme back in March for the expression she pulled when asked in a Wall Street Journal interview if YouTube videos had been used to train OpenAI’s Sora video generator.
The reality is that no matter how much OpenAI, Google, and the rest of the heavy hitters in Silicon Valley might want to continue the illusion that generative AI represents a transformative moment in the history of digital technology, the truth is that their fantasy is getting increasingly difficult to maintain. The valuations of AI companies are coming down from their highs and major cloud providers are tamping down the expectations of their clients for what AI tools will actually deliver. That’s in part because the chatbots are still making a ton of mistakes in the answers they give to users, including during Google’s I/O keynote. Companies also still haven’t figured out how they’re going to make money off all this expensive tech, even as the resource demands are escalating so much their climate commitments are getting thrown out the window.
This whole AI cycle was fueled by fantasies, and when people stop falling for them the bubble starts to deflate. In The Guardian, John Naughton recently laid out the five stages of financial bubbles, noting AI is between stages three and four: euphoria and profit-taking. Tech companies like Microsoft and Google are still spending big to maintain the illusion, but it’s hard to deny that savvy investors see the writing on the wall and are planning their exits, if they haven’t already begun them to avoid being wiped out. The fifth stage — panic — is where we’re headed next.
That doesn’t mean generative AI will disappear. Think back to the last AI cycle in the mid-2010s when robots and AI were supposed to take all our jobs and make us destitute. The fantasy of self-driving cars is still limping along and some of those tools became entrenched, particularly the algorithmic management techniques used to carve workers out of labor protections and make it harder for them to put up a fight against bosses like Amazon and Uber.
Even though the excitement around generative AI is giving way to exhaustion, that doesn’t mean the companies behind these tools aren’t still trying to expand their power over how we used digital technology. It’s quite clear that Google is trying to further sideline the open web by ingesting it into its model then expecting people to spend even more time on its platforms than anywhere else. Things aren’t so different with OpenAI, where they’re hoping to revive the failed voice assistant push that followed the last moment of AI hype and get people used to depending on ChatGPT for virtually everything they do.
Between those visions, the Google one feels far more threatening because of the structural transformation it hopes to carry out that will further platformize our online experience, at a moment when people are feeling increasingly frustrated with the state of the internet as the services we’ve come to depend on further erode under pressure to maximize profits. But that doesn’t mean OpenAI’s efforts should be ignored. With the backing of Microsoft, it wants to sell people an illusion of intelligence to get them to take their guards down for a power play of its own.
Each of these companies present a threat in their own way, but there might be some solace in the recognition that the return to AI winter is inevitable — and the crash that’s coming could be unlike one we’ve seen in quite some time. The question is how long companies will keep spending increasingly vast sums to pump a little more hot air into the bubble to delay its total deflation. Seeing a CEO count the number of times his underlings said “AI” during a keynote suggests they’re already running on fumes.
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Despite some hype by Apple fans in the media (especially Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman), Apple’s iPad event was more of the same — you might even say it was a dud. The iPad Air has a bigger screen, the iPad Pro has a chip that isn’t even in a Mac yet (telling any prospective Mac buyer to hold off even longer), and the vision of the iPad as a laptop replacement continues as a delusion among only the company’s top management.
The biggest thing to come out of the event wasn’t even one of the products, but an ad that was supposed to introduce the new iPad Pro to the world. In the video, a hydraulic press crushes the tools and products of human creativity, including everything from a trombone and piano to a sculpture and set of paints. The camera lingers on the objects to indulge in the moment of destruction. Everything must be obliterated for the press to rise again and show a gleaming black rectangle.
The idea of the ad is clear: all those creative tools can now be found in a ridiculously expensive device that just got a little thinner. But the execution shows how detached Apple leadership and PR has become that they couldn’t see the scandal in front of their eyes. At a time when generative AI is threatening to replace artists with poor imitations of their own work, people are particularly sensitive to the topic.
Apple has long positioned itself as a friend to artists, but as it signals it will be going hard on generative AI next month, the ad suggested the company has turned its back on that key constituency — and its decision makers couldn’t even see it. As the scandal broke, I could only think of a clip of Hayao Miyazaki that’s been making the rounds again the past couple years, where after seeing a terrible AI demo, he declares it “an insult to life itself.” Apple’s now succeeded in doing the same.
There’s plenty more about Apple in the roundup this week, particularly some stories about its union busting and poor treatment of workers. Beyond that, there are more recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed in this edition!
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke with Ed Niedermeyer to dig into all the news coming out of Tesla lately: the cancellation of the Model 2, the doubling down on robotaxis, and the mass layoffs. It’s an important conversation where Ed explains the structural factors that made Tesla look like it was doing much better than it actually was these past couple years.
I was in Linz, Austria this week to speak at the Art Meets Radical Openness festival. I believe there will be a video of it at some point, so I’ll share it when I have it. If you’re in Copenhagen, I’ll be speaking there on May 22 and 23, then in Berlin on May 27.
On Tuesday, Xbox announced it was shuttering three of its internal game studios and turning a fourth into a support studio. It was a bad look. The games industry has been experiencing massive layoffs over the past year, including the 1,900 people Microsoft already fired after it completed its $68.7-billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Even worse, the company only picked up those four studios in 2021 after buying their parent company ZeniMax Media.
At the time, Xbox head Phil Spencer assured gamers that Microsoft only wanted to support the studios under the ZeniMax umbrella and help them make great games. “Our plan is to leave it alone,” said Spencer in September 2020, when the $7.5 billion deal was announced. “ZeniMax has an amazing track record of building great games. Our goal is to make ZeniMax the best ZeniMax they can be.”
As the man in charge of the Xbox division, Spencer didn’t just style himself as another corporate executive, but as a fellow gamer serving that community. He sold a vision to players where Microsoft was going to open its war chest to force industry consolidation, but it would work out for gamers because Xbox would support its studios to make great games that would become more accessible though an affordable subscription service. The history of consolidation and even of video subscription services should’ve set off alarm bells, but Microsoft had Spencer to sell the message.
This time last year, some of the games media and players themselves were praising Spencer for his candid comments on the problems with Redfall, an Xbox exclusive made by Arkane Austin that didn’t live up to expectations. In an interview with the Kinda Funny Xcast, he commented on how he saw Xbox’s relationship to its growing number of studios in light of that underwhelming release.
One thing I won’t do is push against [the] creative aspirations of our teams. When a team like Rare wants to do Sea of Thieves, when a team like Obsidian wants to do Grounded, when Tango [Gameworks] wants to do Hi-Fi [Rush] when everyone thought they were probably doing The Evil Within 3 ... I want to give the teams the creative platform to go and push their ability, to push their aspirations.
The friendly face of Xbox was not just admitting the company had let players down, but committing once again to supporting its studios. “I’m a huge supporter of Arkane Austin, their track record is awesome, I love a lot of their games that they’ve built,” he said in the interview. But now Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks are among the studios being shut down entirely, as Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty says the closures are “grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles” — meaning the big games based on known properties. In light of these cuts, gamers are demanding Spencer resign. But people should’ve seen it coming.
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Why Microsoft needed Phil Spencer
In March 2014, Spencer was named Head of Xbox — and he had a big job on his hands. After a successful console cycle where the Xbox 360 had the momentum against the Playstation 3, gamers were turning against the brand. Just as Sony’s overconfidence with the Playstation 2 had imperiled its successor, Xbox had succumb to the same hubris and was squandering the goodwill it had built up with players over the previous eight years.
When Microsoft announced the Xbox One in 2013, the company wanted to sell people a home entertainment device — but that wasn’t what consumers wanted. It also forced players to buy its Kinect peripheral by bundling it with the console, pushing up the sale price. But worse of all, the company wanted to put a strict digital rights management (DRM) system on games that would limit sharing and ultimately force players to connect to the internet every 24 hours or else their entire game libraries would be disabled.
Players were furious at Microsoft, handing Sony an opportunity to win back the customers it had lost in the previous cycle. On June 10, 2013, both companies made their pitches for their next-generation consoles at E3. Microsoft showed off a ton of games in the morning, but couldn’t shake the anger over its DRM policies. The $499 price tag it unveiled didn’t help. That evening, Playstation responded with a strong slate of games of its own, but made two key announcements to win over players: that the console would not place restrictions on physical media or force people to do online authentication, and that the Playstation 4 would cost a full $100 less than the Xbox One.
After the shows, IGN wrote that “if you care about games like [Sony] do, you'll buy a PlayStation 4,” while GameSpot declared the Playstation 4 was “the gamer's choice for next-generation.” Weeks after E3, Don Mattrick, the Microsoft executive who was in charge of Xbox, left the company, making his successor clean up his mess. When Spencer was officially promoted the following year, he had already been a senior executive at Microsoft Studios, but once he took over it was clear that more than good business decisions would be needed to turn things around. The company also needed a friendly face.
The friendly corporate face
When Spencer took the reins, he didn’t waste time ditching the Kinect so he could cut the price of the Xbox One and making it clear he was committed to Xbox as a games company — not a home entertainment service. That obviously bought him goodwill, but as the Xbox One fell further and further behind the Playstation 4, Xbox needed a bigger response.
In that Xcast interview last year, Spencer explained that losing in the PS4/XB1 era meant a ton of gamers were locked into the Playstation ecosystem because they’d already built up digital game and trophy libraries on the other console. It certainly helped that Playstation had a more consistent record of releasing good games. That meant it would be a lot harder for the Xbox console to ever truly recover unless Playstation seriously misstepped. The company didn’t just need a better console; it needed to change the very paradigm of the competition. That was where Game Pass came in.
After taking over music and video, Xbox figured it should drive the games industry toward a subscription model. Getting people to adopt Game Pass would take a lot of upfront investment to offer the service below cost and build out a library of games, but if Xbox did it first, it would get a head start on Playstation in what it hoped would be the next phase of video gaming. It also helped that Microsoft had much deeper pockets than Sony to fund that effort.
All the while, Spencer assured gamers the strategy was all in their interest: “Play the games you want, with the people you want, anywhere you want,” he echoed as a slogan. “When everybody plays, we all win.” While I’m sure Spencer loves games, ultimately it was a plan to increase Microsoft’s power in the games industry and eventually the profits it would derive from the Xbox division. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that: layoffs, studio closures, a more limited slate of games, and the possibility that Microsoft starts to look more like a publisher than a platform holder.
The strategy is failing
Xbox and Game Pass won’t disappear, but the strategy isn’t working. Xbox Series X/S has sold about half the number of units as Playstation 5, and the gap seems to be widening as the PS5 outsold it by a 3-to-1 margin in 2023. Game Pass subscriber growth is also well below where the company projected it would be several years ago.
According to Circana executive director Mat Piscatella, Game Pass saw significant growth from late 2019 to early 2021, but has since leveled off. “Purchasing games and add-on content as well as free-to-play models are still the vastly preferred method of getting to video games by US consumers,” he told Bloomberg. Even worse, Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad recently observed that Xbox gaming revenue is actually down 5% year over year if Activision Blizzard revenue is excluded.
Back in February, there was more controversy around Xbox when news leaked that it was going to release some of its previously exclusive titles on other platforms, including Playstation. Some Xbox fans felt betrayed, prompting leadership to record a video podcast explaining that the plan would only apply to four games, none of them major titles — at least to start. Spencer even began talking about exclusive games becoming a smaller part of the industry.
After trying to “spend Sony out of business,” as Booty put it in a 2019 email, the company is reportedly debating whether to even put Call of Duty in Game Pass and planning yet another price increase to the service. The job cuts also aren’t over: voluntary severance agreements are already being offered to other staff at ZeniMax and rumors suggest other parts of Xbox will be further hit too. When asked about the studio closures at an internal town hall, Booty said, “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” as if Tango Gamesworks’ Hi-Fi Rush hadn’t been successful or lauded. A game project manager at the studio posted photos of its accolades after those comments, asking, “Not enough?”
As the controversy over the closures has escalated, Spencer has been missing in action. After using his persona as a fellow gamer to sell a bad corporate strategy to fans of Xbox, it will be interesting to see what happens to him next. Will he be sidelined — or even sacrificed — as the company pivots to a strategy focused on milking the major franchises Microsoft bought with its ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard acquisitions beyond Xbox, or will he simply pivot to selling another corporate vision? Either way, the past decade of Spencer’s tenure as head of Xbox shows exactly why corporate executives that try to present themselves as your friend shouldn’t be trusted.
At the end of the day, their allegiance is to the company that pays them — and that company now wants to pursue a different strategy. As a former longtime Xbox employee told IGN, “it’s no longer Xbox, but Microsoft Gaming.” The games business has to deliver for the broader corporate empire, and if console sales are slowing and Game Pass is stagnating, that means the games have to generate as much as possible. Just selling them to Xbox gamers won’t be enough.
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Looking for a critical tech read as we head into summer? Or a book to cozy up with as the temperatures drop for those of you in the Southern hemisphere? You’ve come to the right place.
After a pretty stacked early part of the year, the releases on my radar are slowing down a little over the next few months, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of books I think will still be worth your time.
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.
One of the reasons tech coverage can be so positive toward tech companies comes from bias; from people liking those companies or believing in a broader ideology that tech ultimately does good in the world (if they think it does much bad at all). Those biases often go unacknowledged, even though they can be crucial to how a journalist or an entire outlet approach a company.
I still think Apple gets more of a pass than it deserves because of how well it cultivated fandom for so long. Its keynotes weren’t just product updates; they were events that journalists got a front row seat to and where they could clap along with executives and fans alike. For a while, I was guilty of that too. As I wrote about in March, I was an Apple fanboy, and while some of my first articles about tech were about Apple changing its product line to charge higher prices to take advantage of inequality, for a while I still believed it was the lesser evil in Silicon Valley.
I’m reflecting on this topic this week because I’ve found myself confronting one of my own biases. I’ve been closely following the story about Paramount Global and whether it will agree to an acquisition deal. A couple weeks back, it was announced that Sony might join Apollo in its bid for the company and it was confirmed this week with a $26 billion offer. Immediately I found myself hoping it would happen.
Despite that fact I believe consolidation has been a negative force in entertainment — I’ve even written as much about film and video games — I’ve long held a soft spot for Sony. Playstation was my first video game console, and I still have a fondness for its electronics. When I moved last year and needed to buy a new television, I didn’t look at reviews of televisions generally — I looked at reviews of Sony televisions. My setup contains a Sony TV, Sony soundbar, Sony Blu-ray player, Sony Playstation 5, and an Apple TV.
I don’t actively cover the entertainment industry, so I’m not so concerned about that bias around Sony creeping into what I write — and even if I did, I can acknowledge how that knee-jerk reaction to favor a Sony takeover of Paramount goes against my broader views that it would be a bad move. But I can think of plenty of examples where those views do shape people’s coverage, and thus readers’ understanding of issues in the tech industry. In my view, it’s a dangerous thing.
Anyway, those thoughts aside, there are some great pieces in the roundup this week on the far-right politics of tech billionaires, along with other recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. I’ll also be releasing a book list for paid subscribers looking at interesting tech books coming in the next few months in the coming days.
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Nicole Lipman about Chinese fast fashion giant SHEIN and how it’s basically taking over the industry, but in the process only exacerbating the problems with how our clothes are made.
If you’re in Austria, I’ll be speaking at Art Meets Radical Openness in Linz on Wednesday. Later this month, I’ll also be in Copenhagen to speak about AI at ENIGMA.
In August 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched his plan for the “Clean Network.” The State Department envisioned creating an alliance of “clean” countries and companies that would follow the United States in its aim to constrain the growth and competitiveness of the Chinese tech sector. They would exclude Chinese components from their telecom networks, ban the sale of devices from Chinese brands, and even start blocking their citizens’ access to Chinese apps and services.
Once Joe Biden took power the following year, his administration ditched the racist name of the initiative, but kept the main thrust of what it was trying to achieve. Gone were the days when the internet was supposed to be open and whatever form it took had to be embraced by countries, companies, and users alike, lest they be accused of suppressing digital rights or opposing free speech. As the United States saw its tech industry facing real competition, it was reacting; not by embracing the free market principles it had pushed on everyone else, but by trying to corral its allies into a new bloc that would agree to remain under the boot of Silicon Valley to forward the United States’ geopolitical aim of thwarting the rise of the Chinese tech companies.
In essence, the US approach told the world it needed to choose: either you’re part of the “clean” world of democratic US technology or the “dirty” and dangerous alternative marked by the authoritarian tech of China. Forget that whatever side you’re on, companies are looking for the optimal way of extracting the most profit from you by harvesting your data, locking you into their walled gardens, and limiting your actual power over the technology you use. An initiative to protect the market power of Silicon Valley was repositioned as being about defending Western democracy and liberal values — part of the usual US playbook.
But that’s a pretty terrible choice to have to make. Why should we have to choose between Amazon and Alibaba or Google and Baidu — especially the vast majority of the world that is neither American nor Chinese? Accepting that binary is not the road to a better future of technology or for our societies more broadly, as that trajectory is defined by an exploitative vision for what digital technology must be to maximize power and profit. As US technological hegemony declines, the better path is to reject the choice it’s trying to force on the world and forge a new one centered around entirely different values.
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Rejecting the US-China binary
For years, internet advocates have warned against restrictive policies by governments like those in China and Russia aimed at limiting access to specific content online. They said initiatives like the Great Firewall risked ushering in an internet that was increasingly balkanized into different spheres where users will have very different experiences of the web based on where they are. The “splinternet,” as some call it, was to be avoided at all costs, but maybe it’s time to reconsider that stance; maybe it’s time to embrace it.
The open internet as we once knew it was always a product of US hegemony. As the network went global, cloaked in narratives of free speech and democracy, US tech companies rode the wave to establish themselves in international markets before domestic competitors could effectively compete, then got US diplomatic support to ensure they wouldn’t be strictly regulated. As Senator Al Gore declared to the US Senate in 1989, “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.” A few years later, he would become vice president and advance the commercialization and eventually privatization of the internet.
The consequences of that policy are now being felt, and even US allies are becoming openly frustrated with how Silicon Valley firms now dominate significant parts of their economies and they’re limited in how they can respond without drawing the ire of the United States. Part of the reason China has been able to buck the trend and develop a tech industry that can rival Silicon Valley is precisely because it didn’t accept the US rulebook. While the Great Firewall does have a strong censorship component, at its core it’s a tried-and-true economic policy: by keeping out foreign competition, it gave its domestic tech companies the space to grow and improve their capacities to the point where they can go global like their US counterparts. It’s similar to what South Korea and Japan did decades ago to build up their electronics and automotive industries — though they did it with US permission.
As the United States turns to protectionism and an embrace of the kind of policies it would’ve spurned less than a decade ago, the true nature of its internet policy is being put on full display. It was never about the liberal ideals it wrapped the internet in, but was always about maximizing the power of its tech firms and the benefits the US state could accrue from them. Despite Silicon Valley’s libertarian rhetoric, there was a mutual benefit among tech leaders and the US government to see Silicon Valley go global, including everything from economic gains to the intelligence benefits enabled by its vast surveillance apparatus. In recent years, that’s become openly formalized as Silicon Valley has used (and arguably campaigned to advance) the hysteria against Chinese tech to forge closer alliances with the US defense industry and security state.
Seen through this light, the binary choice the United States is trying to force onto the world isn’t a particularly appealing one — not for US citizens, and especially not for those of other nationalities where governments have even less power to hold US tech companies accountable. An alternative to what the United States is offering doesn’t mean simply embracing Chinese tech or building national champions that still follow the same extractive model guiding the development of both, but wholly challenging the dynamics that have shaped the growth of the global tech industry for the past several decades.
A proposal for a collective splinternet
If we’re make a serious case for a splinternet, the central plank should be the elimination of massive global platforms like we’ve gotten used to over the past couple decades. Governments will have to use regulatory and legal tools to erode the power and influence of those firms, squeezing their business models by restricting the ways they can use and collect data and enforcing much stronger rules on their operations. Higher taxes wouldn’t hurt either — something the US has been holding up globally for years. Regulation of global firms can be hard when undertaken by a single state on the national level, which is why it’s so important to start building an alliance of states that refuse the binary choice being offered by the United States — and rein in both US and Chinese tech giants with sectoral rules.
At the same time as regulatory pressures escalate, governments will need to think about what alternatives look like. This is where forced interoperability and open protocols come in, as long as they’re paired with regulatory measures and efforts to build public technology. Users will still want to communicate and share things with people they know from around the globe, and they should still be able to do that. But access to those federated services should instead happen through platforms conceived of and developed on the regional, national, or even local level. That will allow governments and communities to exert much more power over how they work and what they deem acceptable on them — instead of leaving it to a global monopoly or a tech-savvy group that has technical skill few other people hold — and given the different rules and cultural contexts of different countries, the choices they make may differ.
For example, we’re already seeing a growing effort to regulate social media as governments acknowledge the consequences of the previous hands-off approach. Some might see that as curbing fundamental rights, particularly US internet advocates and foreign activists who’ve picked up their conception of free speech. But many countries do not have the same approach to free expression and tolerate greater enforcement. In Brazil, lawmakers want Twitter to respect its ruling to suspend far-right users involved in an attempted coup, while Australia wants it to take down videos of a recent stabbing at a church. Elon Musk has been resisting both, using “free speech” as a justification to protect right-wing accounts. The Australian case, in particular, will be an important test of the power of national governments outside the United States to regulate tech platforms. It wants the stabbing videos removed entirely, not just hidden from Australian users.
Developing those alternative platforms shouldn’t just be left to private companies. In the same way many countries have always recognized an important role for public broadcasters, it’s time to reject the neoliberal consensus that’s dominated the internet and create public bodies whose job it is to develop technology in the public interest — not to serve founders or shareholders. The most exciting proposal I’ve seen in this vein is the British Digital Cooperative that Dan Hind conceived of in 2019. In his vision, a public cooperative would be established to build not just a public social media platform, but non-profit alternatives for payment processing, office software, and other digital services people depend on to cut out the rentiers. It wouldn’t just have a central office in the capital city, but would set up centers — something like libraries, maybe even connected to them — throughout the country to provide access to technology and public education, while building software and services to meet the needs of their communities.
Building on Hind’s vision, the social media platform could be connected to that federated network, so it aligns with the values of the country or community that builds it, but other jurisdictions can have their cooperatives shape their platform to align with their needs — while still being able to communicate with everyone else connected to the service. There’s also the possibility of setting up alliances between cooperatives on bigger projects like office software and any number of wider technological initiatives to pool resources for the collective good, whether domestically or internationally.
Internationalism would have to be a key part of this movement as well — not simply developing a new model that a small number of countries uses to extract economic returns from others, as is currently the case. In 2020, Juan Ortiz Freuler called for a digital non-aligned movement of countries in the Global South who could chart a different technological path, taking inspiration from the countries that rejected the pressure to embrace US capitalism and Soviet Communism during the Cold War. Given that some countries will have more resources, their work should be shared with — not sold to — countries with fewer resources as their public cooperatives deploy services that meet the needs of their citizens. Countries in this alliance could also share learnings from the successes and failures of their regulatory efforts to develop more effective means of reining in the existing tech monopolists.
Not all of that work will be able to happen on the local or national level though; there will need to be some degree of international governance given communications infrastructure does cross borders and exists within international waters. Inspiration could be taken from the Universal Postal Union, a UN agency that’s been around since 1874 to manage the global postal system and regulate international postage rates. A Universal Internet Union could manage the network of undersea cables that connect the world, instead of leaving it to private companies (and increasingly tech monopolists), and the transfer of public technologies and software for the common good. This would be a very different conception for how we govern the internet and the development of digital technology — but that’s exactly what we need right now.
Take back control of technology
Embracing the splinternet won’t be without its challenges. Surely, tech libertarians whose narratives have shaped how people understand the internet since its commercialization will find a slew of problems with any plan to increase the role of government — even as many of them continue not to acknowledge the role their ideas played in enabling the corporate takeover of the internet and the many problems that followed. The bigger issue comes down to incentives and economics though.
The tech policy of many of our governments is currently guided by maximizing economic returns. Even when they talk about reining in the tech monopolies, they’re usually still hesitant to challenge the deeper model that drives the industry because of all the money tech firms can pull in. Europe has been lauded for its tech regulation in recent years, but much of it has been focused on putting restrictions on US tech firms so it can raise its own exploitative national champions that may go on to command massive valuations of their own — not to challenge the underlying model. But rejecting the binary choice offered by the United States and embracing an alternative will require just that: to sacrifice economic returns in favor of democratic control and social gains.
One of the great things about such a model is how it could wrest the centralization of technological development from Silicon Valley and a small number of other hubs around the world to make it something much more democratic and aligned with public and community needs rather than the interests of venture capitalists and the stock market. In the same way that many countries have domestic media industries — often supported by public funding — a collective splinternet allows us to imagine a world where US tech monopolies are pushed out so local innovation can become a tangible goal in a way it hasn’t since Silicon Valley’s global conquest.
Is the splinternet a perfect proposal? I’m sure it has its flaws. But Silicon Valley has had too much power over how we think about and relate to technology for too long, and simply giving Shenzhen a greater hand in it isn’t the path forward. The US-China tech rivalry offers a rare opportunity for us to look clearly at the technological reality we’ve been sold and to refuse the bargain being put on the table. Instead, an alliance can be formed that imagines a very different social and technological future that tells US tech billionaires to get lost, gives countries greater sovereignty over the technological choices they make, and promotes a much more distributed approach to innovation.
Three decades into the commercialized internet, it’s time to take back control.
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For the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece by Joanna Nelius in The Verge. For the past year, she’s been using the Light Phone 2, one of those barebones smartphones that has no app store and very limited functionality. Sure, it took some getting used to, but she described a motivation I think a lot of people can relate to.
If I felt anxious or bored, reaching for my smartphone was an automatic reaction, to the point where I sometimes didn’t realize my phone was in my hand until I was 10 cat videos deep on Instagram. I’m the kind of person who likes to retain control over my faculties, so that terrified me. By making the Light Phone my primary phone, I hoped to separate myself from easy access to social media and change my relationship with how and when I accessed the internet.
I don’t know about you, but I have a similar tendency that I don’t particularly like. I’ve been intrigued by the Light Phone and similar concepts for a while, but always avoided taking the plunge because of a feeling I simply need a smartphone because of my job, the travel I do for it, and how smartphone ownership increasingly feels like a necessity in our societies.
Nelius’ piece makes me reflect on whether it’s time to try it. She writes that she still keeps a smartphone in her bag, and can connect it to data through a hotspot from the Light Phone if she ever needs it in a pinch. That’s a potential workaround. I’m already in the process of making my way through my watch lists and cancelling most of my streaming services. So maybe that’s the next step.
Anyway, this week in the roundup there are all your usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. There are some pieces in there about notable tech company quarterly earnings this past week (like Tesla and Meta), as well as some interesting stuff on how Europe is taking a slightly different approach to China than the US.
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I interviewed Meghan O’Gieblyn about the roots of transhumanism and how it secularized a lot of ideas that were initially taken from Christian theology. Instead of achieving the resurrection through spiritual means, transhumanists see it as a project of science and technology.
Also, just a head’s up that I’ll be speaking at AMRO in Linz, Austria on May 8 and at re:publica in Berlin on May 27. I should have some more events to announce in the coming weeks.
Can you remember an Apple product unveiling that went as bad as the Vision Pro? The company known for the iPhone and the Mac had a big task: to convince people to stick a computer on their faces for hours on end, experience the world through cameras and screens, isolate themselves from anyone around them, and pay $3,500 for the privilege. The awkward photos of Tim Cook with the thing on his face in Vanity Fair certainly didn’t help convince people it was a future to embrace.
In the lead up to June 2023 unveiling, the New York Times reported on the internal dissent over the company’s decision to release the product and even Bloomberg’s Apple hype man Mark Gurman had to admit that Cook had mismanaged the project. There were plenty of reasons to believe it was going to be a dud, but there were still a sizeable number of people not willing to write off Apple’s next big thing. After all, this was Apple; one of the most valuable companies in the world that shaped personal computing with the Mac then led the mobile revolution with the iPhone. How could it get a major product release that it had poured $10 billion into so wrong? Its executives must’ve seen something us lowly consumers were missing.
In the days after the Vision Pro’s release in February, there was an initial wave of hype as the early adopters got their hands on it. Videos proliferated of people using it in cars, on streets, and in planes — mainly for views, but it still got the discourse flowing. Even some critics came up with bad justifications to get their hands on one. But that didn’t change the fact it was a bad product that imagined an anti-social future that other companies have tried and failed to foist on the public many times before. And in an all too rare moment, many tech reviewers agreed.
While complimenting the theoretical possibilities the product offered, it was impossible to ignore the many drawbacks on everything from weight to eye strain and headaches to the fact the product just didn’t offer many compelling use cases. Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journalopined that the Vision Pro was “the best mixed-reality headset I’ve ever tried,” but that companies like Apple know “these aren’t really the devices we want.” At The Verge, Nilay Patel was even more damning, writing that the headset couldn’t “overcome the inherent nature of cameras and display” and “may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends.” In other words, the Vision Pro wasn’t a first step toward an augmented reality future but a moment to accept that vision would never be properly realized.
The concept of the Vision Pro might have excited some developers in an Apple lab in Cupertino, but most people are never going to use computers in the way those engineers and their managers imagined. Before the 14-day return window closed, there were plenty of reports of people heading back to the Apple store or popping their headsets back in the post to get their money back. They bought into the hype, they tried the new thing, and they ultimately realized it wasn’t worth it. That’s now being reflected in the sales numbers.
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Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year, but slowly revised that number down to 900,000. When the product was released, estimates pegged initial sales at around 200,000 units, though it’s not clear how many of those were returned. Even people who kept their devices have recently been sharing on social media that they rarely use them anymore. It was no surprise on Tuesday when Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Apple had slashed Vision Pro production even before its international launch, expecting to sell as little as 400,000 units this year. Kuo also suggested a cheaper version had been pushed beyond 2025, if the company makes one at all.
For some companies, selling 400,000 units would be a major achievement. But for a company like Apple that sells well over 200 million iPhones every year, along with tens of millions of Macs and iPads, it’s nowhere near the success they need it to be to justify the resources that went into it. And it’s looking ever more likely it will never get there.
The power of tech criticism
The Vision Pro is just one in a long line of tech failures that includes everything from Juicero to the metaverse to the crypto financial system to the self-driving cars that were supposed to be ubiquitous by now. There’s no doubt the tech industry has upended many parts of our lives by getting us to adopt their digital technologies en masse — sometimes by choice; sometimes by force. But the times the industry was wrong are often overlooked in the narrative of tech’s supposed inevitability.
When a major tech company throws a new product into the world, it’s all too common that people immediately assume it’s something we must accept or even try to justify why it should exist (and succeed) regardless of how good it is. We’ve seen a lot of that over the past year with generative AI. We’re told it’s here so we just need to adjust to it, instead of admitting we do have the collective power to choose how it’s used — if it should be at all.
Some of the tech industry’s failures were because the products sucked. Juicero was an expensive plastic box that squeezed a bag of juice and Theranos’ finger-prick blood tests were a big fraud that eventually sent its founder to prison for 11 years. But crypto’s failure was a mixture of bad product and public opposition, while the metaverse was even more a rejection of a future where we would all be wearing headsets on our faces and socializing in virtual environments instead of with real people in meatspace. Like with Google Glass back in 2014, it was the public revulsion and open criticism that helped defeat those visions tech had for our collective future.
This was put on display recently with the Humane Ai Pin, a dumb aluminium square that you stick on the front of your shirt, use to projects menus on your palm, and is, of course, powered by AI. The product was roundlyslammed by reviewers when they finally put it through some real tests earlier this month, but that was after months of reporting that gave the product the benefit of the doubt and echoed its marketing line that it might ultimately be a replacement for the smartphone. Oddly enough, the tech bro backlash to the criticism centered on YouTuber Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD.
Brownlee called the Pin the “worst product I’ve ever reviewed… for now.” He did a deep dive on how poorly the product worked and explained that viewers shouldn’t buy into a product simply because of the vision of what it hopes to be in the future. He’s absolutely right about that. Former AWS engineer Daniel Vassallo was not happy about it though, writing on Twitter that he found it “almost unethical” because reviewers have a duty to “do no harm” — which absolutely is not the case. Reviewers have a duty to be honest with their viewers or readers, though that’s often tempered by a desire to maintain a good relationship with major tech firms.
It’s funny that Brownlee was singled out in this case because he’s the kind of reviewer who will only slam a product if everyone else is going to do it too. He doesn’t often go hard on tech products and tends to give companies the benefit of the doubt, even when they don’t deserve it.
On the Vision Pro, for instance, he weighed the pros and cons while spinning a narrative that the product was indeed the future and was going to take off just like other Apple products before it. Meanwhile, the guy literally drives a Cybertruck and spends part of his review of the monstrosity explaining away the problems with Tesla’s build quality and criticizing those who point to videos of Cybertrucks stuck on a beach, struggling with going off road, and crashing into hotel signs in Beverly Hills for conflating driver error with vehicle deficiencies. The warning against buying into future visions expressed in the Humane Ai Pin review was nowhere to be found; he was all in on whatever future Apple or Tesla was ready to sell him.
No tech is inevitable
When Brownlee dismisses concerns with the Cybertruck or praises the future of what the Vision Pro could be, he’s not doing it because he’s being paid off by Apple or Tesla (though I think he certainly wants to keep his access to those companies). He does honestly believe what he’s saying, but his views are those of a tech booster. He wants to believe the narrative of tech inevitability, and he’s made a good career of echoing it to his followers — which is valuable to the tech companies he often features on his channel.
That narrative of inevitability is used to convince us we don’t have the power to challenge Silicon Valley and just need to accept whatever it throws at us. It might flow out of tech companies’ PR departments, but it’s echoed by well-connected journalists, influential tech publications, and even powerful political figures who effectively tell the public that resistance is futile and we must bow before our silicon overlords. But that’s clearly not true.
The Vision Pro and the Ai Pin are just the latest in a long line of tech failures, and they won’t be the last. We need to recognize that we have the collective power to challenge the industry, and no tech company or access journalist should be able to convince us otherwise. The only way we can hope to build a better future is by seizing that power and using it to rein in an industry that has already caused immense harm and is poised to do far more as it erodes the benefits of its products to squeeze out a bit more profit for greedy shareholders.
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UPDATE (April 28): “One [Apple Store] employee says they haven’t seen one Vision Pro purchase in weeks and that the number of returns equaled the device’s sales in the first month that it was available,” writes Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Meanwhile, The Verge reports Vision Pro units are selling at a significant discount on eBay.
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When Napster was released in 1999, it marked a new era of sharing of digital files — copyrighted or not. The application may have been targeted at music sharing, but it wasn’t long until that spread to other forms of digital media too, causing the entertainment industry to recognize it as a major threat to their business. Napster itself lasted little more than two years, but its success spurred countless imitators, and even though the threat of legal consequences seemed to hover over the heads of anyone using them, that didn’t constrain their popularity.
Industry lobby groups were quick to get lawmakers on side to regulate the sharing of copyrighted works and legal action followed to shut down file-sharing sites, force companies like YouTube to restrict the free sharing of copyrighted material, and even occasionally target a consumer to set an example for everyone else. That didn’t stop file sharing because nothing ever will, but eventually the industry found there were things they could do to entice consumers to spend their money instead of trying to punish them into doing so.
The iTunes Store, launched in 2003, was a response to the threat of piracy. It made it easy and affordable for people to buy MP3 files — and millions of people did. Apple later added movies and TV shows. Within a few years, streaming services also began to emerge with another offer: instead of buying everything individually, consumers could pay what was then a reasonable monthly fee for access to large libraries of content. Spotify and Prime Video first emerged in 2006, with Hulu and Netflix following in 2007. Many more have launched as streaming picked up steam in the 2010s, and it’s pretty clear the model helped convince millions of customers to let their file-sharing services lie dormant — at least until recently.
The streaming model has been undergone a series of rapid changes over the past couple years that has made it far less appealing to consumers, who are cutting back on their subscriptions, if not ditching them altogether. As a result, many people are pirating more than they have in years, if not learning how to do it all over again. Determined to improve their balance sheets, the industry is having its lobbyists gear up for another piracy battle to target the sites that enable the sharing of copyrighted works.
If anyone still believes Silicon Valley is some sort of haven for progressive values or a better form of capitalism, this week hopefully disabused them of that notion. Tech companies are profiting immensely from relationships with the Israeli government and military, to such a degree that Google fired 28 people earlier in the week after they protested a major cloud contract the company has with the Israeli government. There was a moment when South African apartheid became untenable and companies were forced to cut ties with it. We can only hope that day comes soon for the Israeli apartheid regime.
In this week’s roundup, you’ll find the usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. There are some really great pieces on the growth of SHEIN, transformations in Hollywood, and why AI-generated ebooks are flooding Amazon.
Instead of commentary this week, I’m going to direct you to a piece by journalist Jacob Silverman where he gives more detail on the 91 people who were on the transition team as Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022. The full list of names was revealed in a case where six ex-Twitter employees are suing for not receiving the severance stipulated in their contracts. It tells us a lot more about the people Musk pulled from the rest of his empire to begin remaking Twitter to serve his personal and political goals — and could fuel more shareholder scrutiny of how Musk shares resources among his companies.
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I interviewed Alex Shephard about the popularization of sports betting and how it’s leading to a spike in gambling addiction. The piece I wrote a few weeks ago about Musk’s alliance with the global far right was also translated into Italian by Internazionale.
On April 7, Elon Musk struck out at a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, branding him “Brazil’s Darth Vader.” For the past several years, Brazilian authorities have been cracking down on the digital platforms where far-right activists organize — an effort that gained steam after an attempted coup in the capital of Brasilia by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro on January 8, 2023. Justice Alexandre de Moraes has been leading the charge, and he recently turned his attention to Twitter/X.
The court issued an order to Twitter/X demanding it remove certain accounts related to its investigation, and the platform initially complied without making a big deal of it. That shouldn’t come as a surprise: the company regularly acts on government requests; the percentage it complies with has actually significantly increased since Musk took over, despite his frequent grandstanding about censorship and free speech. But Musk already had ties with the Brazilian far right, and they likely used that connection to get him to declare war on the court and de Moraes specifically. He’d already been meddling in Brazilian politics with the recent release of a Brazilian version of the Twitter Files.
On April 6, Twitter/X’s Global Affairs account posted a longtweet to go public about having to suspend particular accounts and making it very clear that the company’s representatives did not agree with the actions they had to take. “We believe that such orders are not in accordance with the Marco Civil da Internet or the Brazilian Federal Constitution,” the longtweet read. “The people of Brazil, regardless of their political beliefs, are entitled to freedom of speech, due process, and transparency from their own authorities.”
Not long after, Musk posted that all content restrictions in the country would be lifted. The following day he continued, urging Brazilians to download a VPN, saying the demands of the court would be published in full, and calling for de Moraes to be impeached — echoing a longstanding campaign by the Brazilian far right and Bolsonaro himself. Needless to say, Brazilian authorities were not happy to see a foreign billionaire so vigorously refusing to comply with domestic court orders.
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Fighting for digital sovereignty
Musk’s posts prompted a swift response within Brazil. “It is urgent to regulate social networks,” posted Attorney General Jorge Messias to Musk’s platform. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.” De Moraes acted quickly to launch an inquiry into the legality of Musk’s “disinformation campaign” and added him to a criminal investigation looking into anti-democratic acts by “digital militias.”
The president of the Federal Supreme Court, Luís Roberto Barroso, was even more forceful about the threat Musk’s actions represented by seeking to shield the far right from accountability. “They are trying to use Brazil as a laboratory on how to interfere in local politics and local businesses,” he wrote in a statement. “They are making the case that their decision is more important than the national decision from a state democratic institution.” Political and judicial leaders made it clear they would not stand for any refusal to comply with what many see as reasonable measures. President Lula da Silva even made an account on rival platform Bluesky, building on his existing active presence on Threads.
In declaring war on Brazil’s democratic institutions at the urging of the extreme right, Musk is not only further demonstrating his commitment to using Twitter/X to promote the rise of global fascism; he also calls into question the more widespread and longstanding use of the cudgel of an American conception of free speech by US digital advocates to delegitimize attempts to regulate the internet. Brazil’s fight is not just about taking on Musk’s influence and the power of Bolsonarismo, but also setting a new standard for the regulation of social media platforms that other democratic governments outside the United States can look to for inspiration.
Opening the doors to fascists
Twitter/X has not released the demands of the court, as Musk said it would, and the same day he made that claim the administrator of the company’s Brazilian office, Diego de Lima Gualda, submitted his resignation. Presumably, he didn’t want to face fines or jail time for following Musk’s orders. The company risks being fined $20,000 a day if it doesn’t comply with the court’s orders, and it could even be hit with a complete ban in the country.
Soon after Musk took over Twitter, he fired nearly all the company’s Brazilian staff, including those who moderated the platform for misinformation and incitement to violence, and opened the floodgates to local fascists, just as he did in so many other countries with his amnesty on previously banned far-right accounts. Bolsonaro was a fan of Musk’s plan to buy the platform, calling it a “fresh breath of hope” when Musk visited Brazil in May 2022. According to the Washington Post, Musk’s decisions ensured Twitter was “heavily used by a circle of right-wing influencers” to spread false narratives about election fraud leading up to the attempted coup.
After Musk announced he would stop respecting the court’s orders, Brazilian media listed some of the Bolsonaro supporters and far-right agitators he could restore to the platform. Among them are far-right blogger Allan dos Santos, who fled to the United States in 2020 to avoid arrest, and YouTuber Bruno Aiub (or Monark), who argued for the recognition of a Nazi Party in Brazil. The Brazilian far right is eager to gain an even greater foothold on Musk’s platform, but just because he hears from them doesn’t mean he has a good grasp of wider Brazilian opinion on what he’s been trying to do.
Brazil has more rapidly and successfully gone after its coup plotters than the United States has, and even though the far right demonizes de Moraes, he is “widely considered to have played a role in protecting Brazilian democracy during the 2022 presidential election,” according to the Financial Times. While de Moraes’ actions may occasionally seem extreme, they are also in response to the storming of the highest governing bodies of a country with a much more recent memory of dictatorship. They’re even more justified when you consider that Brazil — like many countries around the world — does not hold the same absolutist conception of free speech as the United States.
The meaning of free speech
Musk loves to claim that his increasingly unhinged and belligerent actions are simply the result of his defense of free speech, yet it’s become very clear that his conception of “free speech” is a political tool to forward the cause of the extreme right, not to defend everyone’s right to say what they want. There are plentyofexamples of this since his takeover of Twitter, but it’s easiest to demonstrate with some of his moderation decisions.
In Brazil, Musk acted quickly to allow the Brazilian far right back on the platform after he took over, as he did in many other places. He has frequently said that he would fight attempts at “censorship,” whether from governments or former advertisers. Yet in India, Twitter/X has become an important tool of censorship and information control for the far-right, Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi. Musk has allowed the removal of posts critical of Modi, along with the suspension of journalists and political opponents. That’s quite different from how Musk has been acting in Brazil. In India, the far-right government is free to shape the platform, but when Brazilian authorities try to respond to the threat Musk’s decisions pose to their democratic institutions, he lashes out and calls that the real censorship — because it targets the Bolsonaro supporters and the political program he supports.
As João Brant, digital policy secretary for Brazil’s Secretariat of Social Communication, recently toldWired, “We have a background that is different from the US. It’s more similar to the European concept of freedom of expression.” Since the internet emerged from the United States, there has been an effort to have the US conception of free speech pushed onto the rest of the world because it benefited the US tech companies that rode the internet’s coattails into international markets. But different societies have their own standards of acceptable discourse — and for Brazil, planning to overthrow a democratically elected government is a step too far, regardless of what an American billionaire might think. As Bloomberg columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto explained, “Are calls to overthrow a democratically elected government protected by free speech? It may be the case in the US under the first amendment, but in other developed countries such speech can well be considered sedition.”
For several decades, US social media platforms were largely free to do as they wanted abroad because of the narrative of all the benefits that were supposed to accompany digital tech, but also because US hegemony protected them from burdensome regulation. As US dominance wanes, so too does the privileged status of its tech companies and the notion that countries just need to accept US dominance of their internet sectors. China aside, Brazil’s campaign against Twitter/X and social media more broadly could mark an important moment in the shift toward a different conception of the internet in a multipolar world.
Challenging the power of social media
In his response to Musk’s tweets refusing to comply with court orders, Justice de Moraes argued that Twitter/X’s actions were “not only abuse of economic power, by trying to ILLEGALLY impact public opinion, but also flagrant induction and instigation to maintain various criminal conducts practiced by the digital militias under investigation.” In short, Brazil would not stand for it, and it seems one of Musk’s yes men dared to talk some sense into him.
On April 15, Reuters reported that Musk’s lawyers contradicted the previous statements of their boss. “As already communicated to the federal police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp,” they wrote in a letter to de Moraes. This could lead to Musk’s brief Brazil saga fading out of people’s memories as he undoubtedly gets himself embroiled in other scandals in the coming weeks, but it doesn’t change the fundamental point.
The internet is entering a new era. It may not yet be fully clear what it will look like, but we can be certain that social media platforms are in for more regulation than they’ve seen in the previous two decades as people are no longer falling for the hype and deception they relied on to get away with degrading and capitalizing on our communications for so long. That isn’t inherently a violation of free expression, as understood by many countries, but a necessary correction to align their operations with the laws and values of the countries in which they operate.
Brazil is right to challenge Musk’s policy changes designed to turn Twitter/X into a haven and organizing ground for the global far right — and it shouldn’t stop there. Communications platforms aren’t just profit machines for major corporations or political playthings for US billionaires. If they don’t serve the publics that use them, they should be forced to change. And if they won’t comply, that’s all well and good; they can be replaced with something else that will.
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