Post-Apocalypse Edition

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory I’ve been counselling colleagues, friends and loved ones not to over-catastrophise the situation. But when it comes to tech that is precisely what we need to be doing.
As much as this is a victory for the nativist MAGA outsiders, it is also a triumph for Silicon Valley’s libertarian overlords who have bankrolled the Trump 2.0 project.
Up front of course is Elon Musk with his giant inducement checks and dreams of cutting government until it hurts, and libertarian Peter Thiel’s Vice-Presidential designate JD Vance. There are all sorts of dystopian routes this unholy alliance could take the US, and, by extension, the world as their interests for chaos and wealth accumulation converge. If you really want to crawl into a ball Sam Butler lays out the forces driving this alliance here.
But there are also immediate and pressing consequences right now.
- The wave of ani-trust prosecutions against Big Tech including Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google are certain to lapse with FTC chair Lina Khan likely to be one of the first public officials fired (to be fair, their was no guarantee she would have survived a Harris Administration either).
- The brief renaissance in tech workers organising is also likely to stall with the National Labour Relations Board defanged.
- The incremental moves to erect guardrails around AI developed by the Biden Administration will likely either be scrapped or ignored, especially as Big Tech acquires LLM and use their existing power to dominate this wave of technology.
- Protections for the 40 per cent of Americans who have an investment in bitcoins will also wiped away, with the fantasy currency trading at its highest level after the election result became apparent.
In light of the result, client states like Australia will scramble to maintain their interests, but when it comes to technology the only rational response, is to use this moment to seek digital independence.
The good news is that the reform framework for shifting power from technology to people is already taking form.
- Privacy Now – the foundation is updating our privacy laws for the first time in 40 years, expanding definitions to recognise the, eh, internet, placing positive obligations on those who collect data and enforceable rights for those whose data is misused.
- From Compliance to Accountability – recognising that technology is moving so place that compliance regimes are inadequate and shifting the focus to duties of care. This includes any business that deploys so-called ‘AI’ on their workers or customers.
- Embedding Worker Voice – recognising that, as Nobel Prize winners Acemoglu and Johnson argue, productivity is only unlocked when technology is designed by workers and citizens as a tool. We need industry AI workers councils and OHS-style employer liability as a matter of urgency.
- Setting the terms for Big Tech – rather than performative age bans we should be investigating a licensing regime akin to that imposed on banks with obligations around safety and social contribution imposed on local operations.
- Questioning the orthodoxy - that the only way to imagine machine learning is via the global, energy-sucking Large Language Models that drift-net our wisdom and purport to repurpose our thoughts as predictive text. The alternate world of deep understanding of sovereign sets of small, rich data sets needs to be urgently advanced as a counterpoint.
These are all pressing challenges that just can’t wait for another political cycle. The way Trump will embrace tech ‘acceleration-ism’ means what was already urgent now becomes critical.
If there’s a silver lining on Trump’s triumph it is that it is possible to upturn even the most powerful and embedded systems on earth. If a two-bit huckster can do it, surely we can too.
Burning Platforms
We touched on some of these issues in our most recent Burning Platforms, recorded a week before the election with special guest Mark Montfort from the Aus DeFi Association.
I met Mark when we were planning Audrey Tang’s visit earlier this year and it struck me the universes of digital rights and Web3 rarely interact. I think this takes on extra significance now.
It was great to chat with Mark and regular panellist Health Engine CEO Dan Stinton and our good friend and digital rights advocate Kate Bower.
Also on the menu was:
- the new front on chat-bot accountability
- is Emotional Intelligence the next killer app?
- and has AI doomer-ism turned the corner?
Listen to the podcast here or watch us here.
What we are clicking:
I’ve got a new word! – Evgenvy Morozov offers the world ‘Panglossian neoliberalism’ to describe what Silicon Valley is offering the world, before tearing the concept down.
Breaking the Silos – an insightful reflection on Australia’s seemingly doomed misinformation laws from Dr Miah Hammond-Berry
Horror show: Finally in the wake of the election check our Brian Merchant’s wonderful list of Luddite horror films