It’s rare for me — a liberal feminist opinion writer — to be in complete agreement with a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank. But that’s exactly what happened this week when I read a letter to The Wall Street Journal from Charles Fain Lehman about the prediction market Kalshi.
Lehman’s take is that prediction markets are actually gambling no matter what claims their chief executives make, and the whole mess is an avoidable scourge; I made a nearly identical argument last month. This isn’t the first time I have shared values across demographics and party lines. I often receive supportive notes from conservatives when I write about tech in the classroom, and I have often wondered if there was a meaningful discontent brewing.
Then Tuesday happened, and a slew of Democrats, from Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa in Texas to Senator-elect Sherrod Brown in Ohio, won races in red and purple states. They won at least in part by vowing to fight Big Tech, that industry’s preferred financial instruments and the outsize, unfettered influence Silicon Valley leaders have had on our lives and the lives of our children.
Writing about the winning anti-tech blue tsunami in the technology publication 404 Media, Jason Koebler noted that Americans are sick of being told they should “shut up and suffer” while tech barons make scads of money and economically and spiritually impoverish the rest of us by automating our jobs and humanity away. His term for the corrupt status quo is “the depravity economy.” I haven’t read a better description.
There is growing moral revulsion against Big Tech as well as fury over the fact that the Trump family is profiting from the administration’s hands-off approach to the regulation of cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. Now that President Trump is a lame duck and MAGA is in retreat, Republicans may be less afraid that he might bully them out of office, and more afraid of being on the wrong side of this issue in 2028.
In October, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that a majority of Republicans said that the government is not doing enough to regulate A.I., 67 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the technology, and 58 percent would oppose a data center in their community. The polling is far uglier among independents and Democrats. Since voters rejected data centers nearly every place where they were directly on the ballot, I predict opposition will only increase over time.
With Democrats holding both houses and some Republicans potentially willing to break with the president, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to scramble the parties in Congress, and break the partisan gridlock that has made tech regulation difficult. Of course it’s not realistic to completely halt the forward motion of technology, but we need smart legislation that is not overly influenced by industry lobbying. We made that mistake with social media and our children continue to suffer the consequences of weak and outdated federal laws.
The arguments Hinojosa, Brown and others made on the trail were not rooted in wonky statistics, but in anti-corruption and pro-humanity values. Brown has been a thorn in the side of the cryptocurrency industry for years, calling digital assets “a shady, diffuse network of online funny money,” in 2021. Hinojosa attacked her opponent, Gov. Greg Abbott, for allowing artificial intelligence into Texas’ K-12 schools, saying: “I think that curriculum needs to be made by human beings. Not this A.I. slop.” On the campaign trail, she vowed to fire Mike Morath, the head of the Texas Education Agency, who is awfully cozy with tech companies, on her first day in office.
A tech-skeptical message is even more powerful when it is linked to a shared ethical language. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two Senate candidates who pulled off the biggest victories — James Talarico, a seminary student in Texas, and Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor in Kansas — are men of faith.
Part of Talarico’s campaign focused on increased regulation of data centers, social media and artificial intelligence. In an October interview with The Times’s Michael Barbaro, Talarico talked about how social media companies keep us divided and their algorithms create a “rage economy.” He said he finds it tragic that people go online to find connection, but instead are served anger and division. “We want a politics that is spiritually rooted, rooted in something deeper than partisanship, than red team versus blue team,” Talarico said.
When Hamilton, the senator-elect from Kansas, was asked about A.I. development by Politico’s Dasha Burns, he offered a comparison to the Tower of Babel, when humans built a very tall edifice and God felt they were trying to become like deities. “We might create something that would destroy ourselves,” Hamilton said, and “is that a god or is that a — is that a demon?” He then backtracked a little and said, “now I’m not saying A.I. is a demon,” but he kind of is saying its potential future may prove to have a dark side.
The morally coded backlash against tech overreach has been brewing for years in the states, and the reaction is usually framed as an effort to protect children from the predation of the tech industry. This year, Meta settled a lawsuit with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories and is now on the hook for up to $17 billion “over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms,” according to my newsroom colleagues. The civil litigation rolls on: Every month it seems that a social media company is having to settle yet another expensive suit about the harms it has perpetrated on minors.
For example, nearly every state is trying to do something about the federal government’s under-regulation of prediction markets. Utah, where gambling is illegal in all forms, has been particularly outspoken. In August, its governor, Spencer Cox, posted on X that prediction markets “are causing tremendous harm to countless American families.”
Big Tech leaders may be craven, but they are not stupid, and they are already trying to reposition themselves after going all in on courting Trump for the past two years. Just before the election, Axios reported that Meta had hired two former top aides to Democratic officials to work in “compute initiatives” and “strategic partnership management.” And the tech companies are all of a sudden talking about their willingness to work with environmental groups on a framework for data center development and offering policy concessions like paying for their own infrastructure and providing their own power. I’m sure this newly docile attitude has absolutely nothing to do with the Democrats coming back to power in Congress.
I will be sorely disappointed if the newly elected Democrats let corporate influence weaken their commitment to a human-first future for ourselves and our children. Technology companies have used their spoils to run roughshod over the American people for too long. And many of us stood up this week to say: We don’t want data centers next to our homes, we don’t want artificial intelligence thoughtlessly unleashed in our schools, and we don’t accept the future you’re force-feeding us.
End Notes
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My newsroom colleagues Dana Goldstein and Natasha Singer have the scoop about how Google is responding to negative feedback about the A.I. tools in its classroom software. Schools will now be able to turn off A.I. features, but “schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.” Goldstein and Singer quote Lina Khan, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who finds this move coercive. “Google is making clear it will punish those who don’t fall in line.” I have seen almost universal condemnation of this choice from Google, and I’m curious to see if the company will walk it back given the results of the election.
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Because the current moment reminds me of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, I have been reading “The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation,” a 1909 autobiography by the figure also known as “hatchet granny.” Nation opposed alcohol, gambling and apparently “skirts of improper lengths.” She carried around an actual hatchet and smashed up saloons that were violating local laws. Most people, Nation acknowledged, found her “partially insane,” but her anti-millionaire rhetoric reminds me of today’s anti-billionaire messaging. “The time is coming when the millionaires will be the despised of the people, for they are learning fast that people who amass fortunes, and hoard them, are in that condition because they have ground the face of the poor,” she wrote.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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