On the Supreme Court rulings, the great debate disaster, and how big tech stands to profit from it all
It Can Happen Here (Silicon Valley edition)
Greetings, and welcome to another edition of BLOOD IN THE MACHINE, a newsletter about big tech, AI, labor, and power. I’m writing from France, where I am absorbing the steady drip of horrifying news back home (and here!) from a 9-hr time difference, so go easy if there are typos or such.
This newsletter is free to read—please subscribe!—but is made possible by those of you who pay to subscribe—it means a great deal, and makes the continuation of this work possible. Thank you.
Well it goes without saying that the story of the last week has been the one-two punch of the presidential debate disaster and the Supreme Court handing down some rather, let’s say, “authoritarian-friendly” decisions that may well shape the future of our democratic society. Pretty grim stuff!
It’s hard to ignore the implications here. The highest court in the land decided a president has immunity from prosecution for all official acts a few days after the former president who stands accused of rallying his followers to stop the certification of a free election, the results of which he does not recognize, repeatedly refused to say that would accept the results of the next one. He did this in front of an audience of tens of millions of viewers, as he ran roughshod over the currently sitting president—the one who says it is up to him to defend our democracy and yet appeared so enfeebled he could barely muster a complete audible sentence in service of doing so.
Like I said—grim. As such, it’s probably fair to say that it is not just members of the Democratic Party but anyone who enjoys the notion of living in a democratic society who is panicking right now, and there have been reams of urgent and anxious commentary published about this already. But I wanted to take a second to consider another worrying element in play here—because besides Trump, one of the largest benefactors of the Court’s latest slate of rulings is Silicon Valley. Yes, I regret to inform you that there is a Tech Angle to the potential collapse of American democracy.
In two of the Court’s non-grant-the-US-president-the-powers-of-a-monarch rulings, they *also* managed to hand sweeping victories to tech giants, which will make it much harder to regulate them or to pass laws to rein in their policies. Last week, the Court struck down a 1984 ruling against Chevron that gave regulatory agencies the power to interpret and enforce laws—such as, say, laws pertaining to pollution output or to net neutrality. Here’s Jordan Pearson, writing in WIRED:
As if Big Tech weren’t powerful enough already, recent decisions by the Supreme Court will give some of the most valuable companies in the world more latitude to undermine the government’s ability to rein them in, according to legal experts WIRED spoke to.
“This has been a bad couple of weeks for regulatory agencies, it’s been a bad couple of weeks for the rule of law, and it’s been really terrible for consumers,” says David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law and former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau.
Speaking of the FTC, its newly instated rule banning noncompete clauses, a boon to tech workers everywhere, may be on the chopping block due to the ruling. And you can expect a challenge to net neutrality, which the FCC *just restored* earlier this year, all over again, too. Even worse is the impact on the EPA’s ability to regulate pollution and carbon emissions.
The second ruling is more explicitly tech-focused: The Court returned legal challenges to laws passed in Florida and Texas that would force social media companies to adhere to follow new moderation rules to the lower courts, essentially siding with the tech lobby that pushed to overturn them. Texas and Florida had passed laws forbidding tech companies from censoring content on their platforms under the pretense that conservative voices were unduly silenced on them, the tech lobby sued them, and a lower court blocked the laws—and while the intent of the law was extremely dubious, the ruling nonetheless indicates that the Court is prepared to side with the tech companies on matters of online governance. Which means more sensible legislative efforts to rein them in may not get off the ground in the first place.
These rulings send a message that the Supreme Court is content to take a hands-off approach to big tech, even as the sector has grown larger, more powerful, and wealthier than ever. Now, what might this friendliness to Silicon Valley mean at this critical juncture, paired as it is with a ruling that expands executive power to the point that, as justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the president “is now a king above the law”?
Wellll, the trajectory seems clear—power shall be allowed to concentrate even further, for the president, for corporations, for big tech. On the regulatory front, any of the cautious, tiny steps that have been taken in the last few years towards reining in big tech are at an extreme risk of being wiped away completely. Future steps might not be taken at all. And some of the strongest parts of Biden’s presidency—its FTC, emboldened by Lina Khan and her team to take antitrust action against big tech, and the strengthening of the National Labor Relations Board, to actually start standing up for working people—all that goes out the window under Trump.
But it probably gets worse, since on top of that we’ll have the continued AI boom to reckon with. Now, it is quite likely that Trump himself doesn’t give two shits about AI, unless he is excited at the prospect that it could make the crowds at his rallies appear larger, but you can bet his victory will embolden the executive and managerial class to use it more aggressively, and be less worried about regulatory blowback. Meanwhile, workers who must use or compete with AI in their jobs will be left more vulnerable than ever.
With the regulatory state being dismantled, executive powers being elevated above all, and a gameshow businessman president who would default to giving corporations free reign—as long as they have not publicly opposed him—it can actually get pretty alarming to think about the levels of surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, and precarity that will confront the workers of the near future. If you think it’s bad now—and for plenty, it is already bad—just imagine how it will look when the tech giants can simply assume regulators won’t be able to touch them, that the courts will defer to them, and that the only agencies willing to take them on in the last two decades have been thoroughly defanged.
Increasingly large pockets of Silicon Valley are already falling in line behind Trump, and it’s unclear where this alliance might lead if and when both are unbound. Hands-off AI policies when it comes to matters of labor, misinformation, and harassment, for sure. The tentative steps made to challenge Uber and the gig app companies at the federal level, gone. The idea that tech companies might have to account for the ballooning energy use of their AI systems? Lol, no.
But could it get worse? Add into the mix the fact that influential pro-Trump corners are pushing for an explicitly authoritarian new political project, and I’d say, sure! How bad? Who knows? Could, say, Peter Thiel’s Palantir win a contract with ICE to use facial recognition to help round up migrants for deportation? (Well, more than they already have?) Could we see a major tech firm get hired to build an AI that automates the seeking out of outspoken political opponents—making all sorts of errors in the process of course—for cataloging in some kind of federal database? I don’t know! This is one of those moments where you are forced to constantly guess and second guess at how bad things could get and chastise yourself for thinking too crazily one minute but scolding yourself for not anticipating the worst the next, because an awful lot seems like it’s on the table! What does it look like if it’s Happening Here and oh half of Silicon Valley is on board? Maybe even worse than I’m imagining! I am perennially an optimist, but some of the responses I’ve been getting online when I’ve posted about election stuff are pretty disturbing—lots of people seem pretty eager for actual fascism. It’s a dark moment.
We have to begin more seriously considering the role of Silicon Valley in an age of authoritarian drift; companies like Google have already taken no quarter with employees who protest the company’s involvement in selling tech to Israel. Others, including Microsoft, already contract with the Department of Defense. It will take so much more than winning a presidential election that is looking dangerously underwater to push back on the power that big tech has already accumulated. To move ahead we’re going to need more solidarity, more aggressive organizing, more unified action, both informal and formal.
compellingly argued that the time for counting on institutions like the Supreme Court to serve the will of the people is officially past. If we want to prevent a future that is dominated utterly by a handful of tech giants, a future rife with surveillance, algorithmic control, of digital overwork, the time to get boots on the ground and resist its rise is now.
Thank you, Brian, for drawing out the tech implications of the Chevron decision - much appreciated. I wonder what it would mean for us to “get boots on the ground and resist its rise is now”? What would that look like? Perhaps the subject of another piece…
It's not Biden's "performance" that worries... it's how quickly he's dumped... absolutely pathetic. Trump has no such worries.. he can be horrendous... and is...