Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” referring to ChatGPT users dying, people losing their jobs to AI, and the other negative externalities we have seen from AI.
Altman wasn’t running for office Tuesday. But this worldview—that the masses must shut up and suffer while oligarchs centralize power, self-deal, spend wildly to capture the political process, and automate away human endeavors so they can amass yet more wealth—was wholly repudiated in Tuesday’s election as people in Red States, Blue States, and Purple States rejected the cruelty, corruption, and depravity economy we’ve seen over the last few years. They are tired of kleptocracy.
The main difference between Donald Trump’s administration this term and his first term is that Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have lined up to kiss the ring; look no further than the photos from his inauguration and his gilded gala with China’s President Xi Jinping earlier this fall. Every major tech company CEO has spent the last two years flattering Trump, giving him gifts, and trying to capture the political process. They have been generously rewarded for their fealty and their money as the Trump administration has spent the last two years letting Big Tech do whatever it wants.
Elon Musk was given the keys to the federal government and used them to slash critical government programs, lay off tens of thousands of public servants, and replace collective human expertise with teenaged idiots and AI algorithms. His companies have continued to rake in billions in government contracts, his busted AI has been integrated into critical government systems, and the cuts led by his “Department of Government Efficiency” has, conservatively, killed many thousands of people around the world. Trump has pardoned crypto criminals, his family has made billions of dollars in cryptocurrency scams, and has overseen the rise of a gambling and prediction market-based “economy” rife with insider trading and misery (the idea of the administration doing anything to crack down on this is so implausible that to even suggest it could happen is laughable). He has installed manosphere podcasters, X trolls, and conspiracy theorists into top administration roles; they have performed even worse than their already low expectations. He has leveraged commercial surveillance companies to build a brutal, tech-powered mass deportation campaign. His government’s communications strategy can be described in no other way than inscrutable AI slop shitposting. This is to say nothing of the cost of living crisis Trump has caused as he’s started an illegal war in Iran that has driven up gas and diesel prices and levied tariffs on America’s allies for reasons that defy explanation. This has driven up the price of everything even as Trump’s administration slashes regulations on fossil fuel companies and big corporations.