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      Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back

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      Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals.But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property.During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism.Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.But recently filed federal court documents allege that in the months before the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, he and other company insiders funnelled almost $5m to Lightcone, including $1m for a deposit to lock in the Rose Garden deal.FTX bankruptcy administrators say that money was commingled with funds looted from FTX customers. Now, they are asking a judge to give it back.The revelations cast new light on so-called “Tescreal” intellectual movements – an umbrella term for a cluster of movements including EA and rationalism that exercise broad influence in Silicon Valley, and have the ear of the likes of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk.It also raises questions about the extent to which people within that movement continue to benefit from Bankman-Fried’s fraud, the largest in US history.The Guardian contacted Habryka for comment on this reporting but received no response.Controversial conferencesLast weekend, Lighthaven was the venue for the Manifest 2024 conference, which, according to the website, is “hosted by Manifold and Manifund”.Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic.Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.Another advertised guest, Michael Lai, is emblematic of tech’s new willingness to intervene in Bay Area politics. Lai, an entrepreneur, was one of a slate of “Democrats for Change” candidates who seized control of the powerful Democratic County Central Committee from progressives, who had previously dominated the body that confers endorsements on candidates for local office.In a phone interview, Lai said he did not attend the Manifest conference in early June. “I wasn’t there, and I did not know about what these guys believed in,” Lai said. He also claimed to not know why he was advertised on the manifest.is website as a conference-goer, adding that he had been invited by Austin Chen of Manifold Markets. In an email, Chen, who organized the conference and is a co-founder of Manifund, wrote: “We’d scheduled Michael for a talk, but he had to back out last minute given his campaigning schedule.“This kind of thing happens often with speakers, who are busy people; we haven’t gotten around to removing Michael yet but will do so soon,” Chen added.On the other speakers, Chen wrote in an earlier email: “We were aware that some of these folks have expressed views considered controversial.”He went on: “Some of these folks we’re bringing in because of their past experience with prediction markets (eg [Richard] Hanania has used them extensively and partnered with many prediction market platforms). Others we’re bringing in for their particular expertise (eg Brian Chau is participating in a debate on AI safety, related to his work at Alliance for the Future).”Chen added: “We did not invite them to give talks about race and IQ” and concluded: “Manifest has no specific views on eugenics or race & IQ.”Democrats for Change received significant support from Bay Area tech industry heavyweights, and Lai is now running for the San Francisco board of supervisors, the city’s governing body. He is endorsed by a “grey money” influence network funded by rightwing tech figures like David Sacks and Garry Tan. The same network poured tens of thousands of dollars into his successful March campaign for the DCCC and ran online ads in support of him, according to campaign contribution data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission.Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”HoSang added: “From there, they anoint themselves the elite managers of these forces, investing in the ‘winners’ as they see fit.”“The presence of Stephen Hsu here is particularly alarming,” HoSang concluded. “He’s often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people like Ron Unz, Steven Sailer and Stefan Molyneux and more mainstream figures in tech, investment and scientific research, especially around human genetics.”FTX proceedingsAs Lighthaven develops as a hub for EA and rationalism, the new court filing alleges that the purchase of the property was partly secured with money funnelled by Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX insiders in the months leading up to the crypto empire’s collapse.Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for masterminding the $8bn fraud that led to FTX’s downfall in November 2022, in which customer money was illegally transferred from FTX to sister exchange Alameda Research to address a liquidity crisis.Since the collapse, FTX and Alameda have been in the hands of trustees, who in their efforts to pay back creditors are also pursuing money owed to FTX, including money they say was illegitimately transferred to others by Bankman-Fried and company insiders.On 13 May, those trustees filed a complaint with a bankruptcy court in Delaware – where FTX and Lightcone both were incorporated – alleging that Lightcone received more than $4.9m in fraudulent transfers from Alameda, via the non-profit FTX Foundation, over the course of 2022.State and federal filings indicate that Lightcone was incorporated on 13 October 2022 with Habryka acting in all executive roles. In an application to the IRS for 501(c)3 charitable status, Habryka aligned the organization with an influential intellectual current in Silicon Valley: “Combining the concepts of the Longtermism movement … and rationality … Lightcone Infrastructure Inc works to steer humanity towards a safer and better future.”California filings also state that from 2017 until the application, Lightcone and its predecessor project had been operating under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a rationalism non-profit established in 2012.The main building on the property now occupied by the Lighthaven campus was originally constructed in 1903 as a mansion, and between 1979 and Lightcone’s 2022 purchase of the property, the building was run as a hotel, the Rose Garden Inn.Alameda county property records indicate that the four properties encompassed by the campus remain under the ownership of an LLC, Lightcone Rose Garden (Lightcone RG), of which Lightcone is the sole member, according to the filings. California business filings identify Habryka as the registered agent of Lightcone Infrastructure and Lightcone RG.Lightcone and CFAR both give the campus as their principal place of business in their most recent tax filings.On 2 March 2022, according to the complaint, CFAR applied to the FTX Foundation asking that “$2,000,000 be given to the Center for Applied Rationality as an exclusive grant for its project, the Lightcone Infrastructure Team”. FTX Foundation wired the money the same day.Between then and October 2022, according to trustees, the FTX Foundation wired at least 14 more transfers worth $2,904,999.61. In total, FTX’s administrators say, almost $5m was transferred to CFAR from the FTX Foundation.On 13 July and 18 August 2022, according to the complaint, the FTX Foundation also wired two payments of $500,000 each to a title company as a deposit for Lightcone RG’s purchase of the Rose Garden Inn. The complaint says these were intended as a loan but there is no evidence that the $1m was repaid.Then, on 3 October, the FTX Foundation approved a $1.5m grant to Lightcone Infrastructure, according to FTX trusteesThe complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.The complaint also says that FTX trustees emailed CFAR four times between June and August 2023, and that on 31 August they hand-delivered a letter to CFAR’s Rose Garden Inn offices. All of these attempts at contact were ignored. Only after the debtors filed a discovery motion on 31 October 2023 did CFAR engage with them.The most recent filing on 17 May is a summons for CFAR and Lightcone to appear in court to answer the complaint.The suit is ongoing.The Guardian emailed CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon for comment on the allegations but received no response. More

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      When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

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      I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More

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      Republicans attack FTC chair and big tech critic Lina Khan at House hearing

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      Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, faced a grueling four hours of questioning during a House judiciary committee oversight hearing on Thursday.Republicans criticized Khan – an outspoken critic of big tech – for “mismanagement” and for “politicizing” legal action against large companies such as Twitter and Google as head of the powerful antitrust agency.In his opening statement, committee chair Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said Khan has given herself and the FTC “unchecked power” by taking aggressive steps to regulate practices at big tech companies such as Twitter, Meta and Google.He said Khan carried out “targeted harassment against Twitter” by asking for all communications related to Elon Musk, including conversations with journalists, following Musk’s acquisition because she does not share his political views.Khan, a former journalist, said the company has “a history of lax security and privacy policies” that did not begin with Musk.Other Democrats agreed. “Protecting user privacy is not political,” said congressman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat of New York, in response to Jordan’s remarks.Republicans also condemned Khan for allegedly wasting government money by pursuing more legal action to prevent mergers than her predecessors – but losing. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against the FTC’s bid to delay Microsoft from acquiring video game company Activision Blizzard, saying the agency failed to prove it would decrease competition and harm consumers. The FTC is appealing against that ruling.“She has pushed investigations to burden parties with vague and costly demands without any substantive follow-through, or, frankly, logic, for the requests themselves,” said Jordan.Another Republican member, Darrell Issa, of California, called Khan a “bully” for trying to prevent mergers.“I believe you’ve taken the idea that companies should have to be less competitive in order to merge, [and] that every merger has to be somehow bad for the company and good for the consumer – a standard that cannot be met,” Issa said.Khan earlier came under scrutiny from Republicans participating in an FTC case reviewing Meta’s bid to acquire a virtual reality company despite a recommendation from an ethics official to recuse herself. She defended her decision to remain on the case Thursday, saying she consulted with the ethics official. Khan testified she had “not a penny” in the company’s financial stock and thus did not violate ethics laws.But enforcing antitrust laws for big tech companies such as Twitter has traditionally been a bipartisan issue.“It’s a little strange that you have this real antipathy among the Republicans of Lina Khan, who in many ways is doing exactly what the Republicans say needs to be done, which is bringing a lot more antitrust scrutiny of big tech,” said Daniel Crane, a professor on antitrust law and enforcement at the University of Michigan Law School.“There’s a broad consensus that we need to do more, but that’s kind of where the agreement ends,” he said.Republicans distrust big tech companies over issues of censorship, political bias and cultural influence, whereas Democrats come from a traditional scrutiny of corporations and concentration of economic power, said Crane.“I don’t fundamentally think she’s doing something other than what she was put in office to do,” he said.Congress has not yet passed a major antitrust statute that would be favorable to the FTC in these court battles and does not seem to be pursuing one any time soon, said Crane. “They’re just going to lose a lot of cases, and that’s foreseen.”The FTC’s list of battles with big tech companies is growing.Hours earlier on Thursday, Twitter – which now legally goes by X Corp – asked a federal court to terminate a 2011 settlement with the FTC that placed restrictions on its user data and privacy practices. Khan noted Twitter voluntarily entered into that agreement.Also on Thursday, the Washington Post reported the FTC opened an investigation in OpenAI on whether its chatbot, ChatGPT, is harmful to consumers. A spokesperson for the FTC would not comment on the OpenAI investigation but Khan said during the hearing that “it has been publicly reported”.In 2017, Khan, now 34, gained fame for an academic article she wrote as a law student at Yale that used Amazon’s business practices to explain gaps in US antitrust policy. Biden announced he intended to nominate the antitrust researcher to head the FTC in March 2021. She was sworn in that June.“Chair Khan has delivered results for families, consumers, workers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs,” White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa said in a statement. More

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      Be serious, conservatives. ‘Wokeness’ didn’t cause Silicon Valley Bank’s demise | Tayo Bero

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      You’d think that witnessing the second-biggest bank failure in US history would be a sobering moment. Since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday amid a bank run, however, Republicans have instead been twisting themselves into inelegant pretzels to blame “wokeness” for the financial disaster.For context, SVB – which before it collapsed was the 16th largest bank in the US and worth more than $200bn in assets – proudly reported that aside from 45% of its board being women, it also had “1 Black”, “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans”. According to Republicans, the bank’s focus on “woke” ideals is what led to its ultimate demise.“This bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff, I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” the Florida governor Ron DeSantis told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo.And according to Donald Trump, Jr: “SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices. This won’t be the last failure of this nature so long as people are rewarded for pushing this bs.”This is a ridiculous and senseless leap, even for the right. “Wokeness” has gone from being a hamfisted shorthand for progressive overreach to a convenient – if lazy and illogical – explanation for every catastrophe.Of course, the actual circumstances that led to the collapse of SVB are of no importance here. Republicans have said little about the higher interest rates brought on by inflation anxiety and bad government bonds that helped SVB speed toward collapse.They’ve also refused to acknowledge that, as James Downie writes in MSNBC, “SVB might still be around today but for deregulation signed by former President Donald Trump that was supported almost unanimously by Republicans (and even some Democrats).”Look, it’s not easy to decide who deserves sympathy, or the opposite, in this moment. Nobody wants to “side” with a sinking Silicon Valley institution – we’re supposed to be eating the rich, remember? Still, it’s important to remember that while politicians spin this disaster, workers suffer. Americans will probably go without paychecks; some won’t have have jobs when this shakes out.According to The Verge, “Some people already know their paychecks will be [disrupted]; a payroll service company called Rippling had to tell its customers that some paychecks weren’t coming on time because of the SVB collapse.”Most of those people aren’t high-flying Silicon Valley tech founders. For some of these workers, money for rent, groceries, mortgage payments, childcare and other essentials simply isn’t coming.The right has always been contemptuous of corporate solidarity with marginalized people, so their disdain for SVB’s messaging is unsurprising. In a line that truly sounds like something out of an SNL sketch, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus recently claimed on Fox News that SVB collapsed because the bank was overly concerned with global warming.“I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank,” he said. “It’s depressing to me. Who knows whether the justice department would go after them? They’re a woke company, so I guess not. And they’ll probably get away with it.”The New York Post is also toeing the party line, accusing the bank’s head of risk management of wasting time in “spearheading multiple ‘woke’ LGBTQ+ programs, including a ‘safe space’ for coming-out stories”, even as “the firm raced toward collapse”.God forbid a financial institution be concerned with anything that even remotely falls outside their mandate of self-enrichment.SVB was a part of a Silicon Valley economic machine that has helped drive the tech industry’s success for decades. Initial reporting suggests that shoddy practices at the bank brought about its collapse; either way, that doesn’t change the essentially sad story here.As institutions continue to crumble under the weight of shaky policy and a volatile economy, it’s the people at the very bottom of that food chain who will suffer the most. That’s not because of “wokeness”. It’s just called capitalism.
      Tayo Bero is a Guardian US contributing writer More

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      America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich

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      America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forcesRobert ReichBillionaire donors are pushing an unsettling agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy itself Decades ago, America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy.Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15m to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions.Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:
      The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
      Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who repeat Trump’s big lie.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?Last Tuesday night, Doug Mastriano, a January 6 insurrectionist and Trump-backed big lie conspiracy theorist, won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (the fourth largest state in the country, and the biggest state that flipped from 2016 to 2020). Mastriano was directly involved in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election by sending an “alternate” slate of pro-Trump electors to the electoral college – despite the fact that Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes.If Mastriano wins in November, he will appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will oversee the 2024 election results in one of the most important battleground states in the country.Meanwhile, the major annual event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) – the premier convening organization of the American political right – was held this past week in Budapest.That’s no accident. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orbán’s agenda as that of a “Trump before Trump”.Orbán has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy – rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary and muzzling the press.He remains on good terms with Vladimir Putin and has refused to agree to Europe’s proposed embargo of Russian oil.Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s progenitor of white replacement theory – broadcast his show from Budapest. Trump spoke remotely. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke (although he refuses to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on American democracy).If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights against arbitrary authority and a voice in what is decided.If we want to guard what is left of our freedom, we will need to meet today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his wannabes, and from big money like Peter Thiel’s.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansSilicon ValleyPeter ThielcommentReuse this content More

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      Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to task

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      Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRo Khanna represents Silicon Valley and the best of Capitol Hill and wants to help. His aims are ambitious, his book necessary Just on the evidence of his new book, Ro Khanna is one of the broadest, brightest and best-educated legislators on Capitol Hill. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School who represents Silicon Valley, he is by far the most tech-savvy member of Congress.Silicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartlandRead moreAt this very dark moment for American democracy, this remarkable son of Indian immigrants writes with the optimism and idealism of a first-generation American who still marvels at the opportunities he has had.Even more remarkable for a congressman whose district includes Apple, Google, Intel and Yahoo, Khanna is one of the few who refuses to take campaign money from political action committees.Once or twice in a “heated basketball game” in high school, he writes, someone may have shouted “go back to India!” But what Khanna mostly remembers about his childhood are neighbors in Pennsylvania’s Bucks county who taught him “to believe that dreams are worth pursuing in America, regardless of one’s name or heritage”.His book is bulging with ideas about how to transform big tech from a huge threat to liberty into a genuine engine of democracy. What he is asking for is almost impossibly ambitious, but he never sounds daunted.“Instead of passively allowing tech royalty and their legions to lead the digital revolution and serve narrow financial ends before all others,” he writes, “we need to put it in service of our broader democratic aspirations. We need to steer the ship [and] call the shots.”The story of tech is emblematic of our time of singular inequality, a handful of big winners on top and a vast population untouched by the riches of the silicon revolution. Khanna begins his book with a barrage of statistics. Ninety percent of “innovation job growth” in recent decades has been in five cities while 50% of digital service jobs are in just 10 major metro centers.Most Americans “are disconnected from the wealth generation of the digital economy”, he writes, “despite having their industries and … lives transformed by it”.A central thesis is that no person should be forced to leave their hometown to find a decent job. There is one big reason for optimism about this huge aspiration: the impact of Covid. Practically overnight, the pandemic “shattered” conventional wisdom “about tech concentration”. Suddenly it was obvious that high-speed broadband allowed “millions of jobs to be done anywhere in the nation”.The willingness of millions of Americans to leave big city life is confirmed by red-hot real estate markets in far flung towns and villages – and a Harris poll that showed nearly 40% of city dwellers were willing to live elsewhere.“The promise is of new jobs without sudden cultural displacement,” Khanna writes.He suggests a range of incentives to spread tech jobs into rural areas, including big federal investment to bring high-speed connections to the millions still without them. This is turn would make it possible to require federal contractors to have at least 10% of their workforces in rural communities.The congressman imagines nothing less than a “recentering” of “human values in a culture that prizes the pursuit of technological progress and market valuations”. A vital step in that direction would be a $5bn investment for laptops for 11 million students who don’t have them.The problems of inequality begin at the tech giants themselves. Almost 20% of computer science graduates are black or Latino but only 10% of employees of big tech companies are. Less than 3% of venture capital lands in the hands of Black or Latino entrepreneurs.If redistributing some of big tech’s gigantic wealth is one way to regain some dignity in the digital age, the other is to rein in some of the industry’s gigantic abuses. Data mining and the promotion of hate for profit are the two biggest problems. Khanna has drafted an Internet Bill of Rights to improve the situation.Throughout his book, he drops bits of evidence to suggest just how urgent it is to find a way to make the biggest companies behave better.“Algorithmic amplification” turns out to be one of the greatest evils of the modern age. After extracting huge amounts of data about users, Facebook and the other big platforms “push sensational and divisive content to susceptible users based on their profiles”.An internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”. The explosion of the bizarre QAnon is one of Facebook’s most dubious accomplishments. In the three years before it finally banned it in 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles. Twitter also recommended Qanon tweets”. The conspiracy theory was “actively recommended” on YouTube until 2019.And then there is the single greatest big tech crime against humanity. According to Muslim Advocates, a Washington-based civil rights group, the Buddhist junta in Myanmar used Facebook and WhatsApp to plan the mass murder of Rohingya Muslims. The United Nations found that Facebook played a “determining role” in events that led to the murder of at least 25,000 and the displacement of 700,000.The world would indeed be a much better place if it adopted Khanna’s recommendations. But the question Khanna is too optimistic to ask may also be the most important one.Have these companies already purchased too much control of the American government for any fundamental change to be possible?
      Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Silicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartland

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      InterviewSilicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartlandLauren Gambino in Washington As part of his drive to use tech to close social divides, the California Democrat has written a book, Dignity in the Digital AgeShortly after Silicon Valley sent him to Washington, Ro Khanna visited “Silicon Holler”, a name coined by a colleague, Hal Rogers, for the fledgling tech sector in eastern Kentucky.Gentrification destroyed the San Francisco I knew. Austin is next | Patrick BresnanRead moreThe two congressmen’s districts had little in common. Khanna’s was among the wealthiest, most diverse and most Democratic. Rogers’ was among the poorest, whitest and most Republican.But when he visited Rogers’ district, in once-prosperous coal country, the California Democrat did not meet with resentment. Desire to participate in the digital revolution was there. Only opportunity was lacking.“In my district, young people wake up optimistic about the future – there’s $11tn in market value in the district and surrounding areas,” Khanna said.“But for many working-class Americans, across the country, globalization has not worked. It’s meant jobs going offshore. It’s meant the shuttering of communities and it’s meant that their kids have to leave their hometowns.“We need to figure out how to bring economic opportunity for the modern economy to these communities that have been left out.”In his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, Khanna lays out his vision for democratizing the digital economy. He wants the tech industry to expand to places like Paintsville, Kentucky, and Jefferson, Iowa, where the Guardian watched him make his case.Khanna is an intellectual property lawyer who taught economics at Stanford before serving as the congressman for California’s 17th district, home to companies like Apple and Intel. The top contributors to his most recent campaign were employees of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.And yet Khanna is a member of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and was a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. He says tech companies must be held accountable for harm, and has backed regulatory and privacy reforms.Two senators, Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, have introduced legislation to stop tech platforms disadvantaging smaller rivals. Khanna calls it a “promising” start. Despite fierce opposition from large tech companies, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act was voted out of committee this month on a bipartisan vote, 16–6.A House committee passed a version of the bill last year. Khanna, however, was critical of that effort, warning that the language was imprecise and could have unintended consequences. His nuanced views on tech and its impact on the economy and democracy have helped make him a rare figure in Washington and Silicon Valley, taken seriously by politicos and entrepreneurs alike.“You can’t just have the tools of antitrust and think, ‘OK, now we’re going to have jobs in Youngstown or jobs in New Albany,’” Khanna said. “You want to have antitrust so new competitors can emerge but then you also need a strategy for getting jobs into these communities.”Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to comeRead moreKhanna says Silicon Valley has a responsibility to address inequality it helped create. Tech companies would benefit, he argues, from a diversity of talent and lower costs of living. Such a shift, he says, would help revitalize communities devastated by the decline of manufacturing and construction, and by automation and outsourcing, thereby allowing young people to find good jobs without leaving their home towns.For years, Khanna said, the notion met resistance. But millions have transitioned to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic, pushing tech companies to embrace changing practices. He says he has gone from “swimming against the tide” to “skiing down the mountain”, so much so that an industry friend said he had put into practice many of the ideas Khanna outlines in his book.“It’s amazing how people go from, ‘It’s impossible’ to ‘It’s already been done’ as if there are no steps in between,” Khanna said. “The truth is, it’s not impossible, but it hasn’t already been done. My book is sort of an accelerant for what is now taking place.”Early in the pandemic, tech workers fled San Francisco for smaller cities in neighboring states. While the transplants brought new business and wealth, in some places they widened wage gaps and drove up real-estate prices. Growth has to be planned, Khanna says.“It’s important to learn some of the lessons and the mistakes of the Valley. There has to be more housing supply, there has to be proper conditions for workers and fair wages so you don’t have the stark inequality that you see in Silicon Valley, where you have, in certain communities, 50% of people’s income going to rent because rents are so high.”Khanna thinks bridging the digital divide might also begin to alleviate polarization that Donald Trump exploited.“Just having good economic empowerment and prosperity for rural Americans, for Black Americans, for Latino Americans is not a silver bullet for becoming a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy,” he said. “But it could be a starting point.”He has called for billions in federal investments in research, manufacturing and workforce development; building tech hubs that emphasize regional expertise, such as a hub in eastern Washington state to focus on lumber technology; providing tax incentives for federal contractors who employ workers in rural areas; underwriting training programs at historically black colleges; and expanding Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in public schools.Such ideas have captured the attention of Joe Biden’s White House, as it looks to expand opportunity at home and counter China abroad.This week, House Democrats turned to a bill that aims to make the US more competitive with China by strengthening technology, manufacturing and research, including incentives for producing computer chips, which are in short supply.The plan incorporates key planks of Khanna’s Endless Frontier Act, including the establishment of a Directorate for Science and Engineering Solutions. A similar measure passed the Senate with unusual bipartisan support last year but House Republicans seem less amenable.“We need to produce things in this country, including technology, and have the supply chains here,” Khanna said. “Everyone now recognizes that it’s a huge challenge for America to have semiconductors produced in Taiwan and South Korea. With the shipping costs and the disruption with Covid, it has created huge challenges in America from manufacturing cars to making electronics.”‘Can we get more Republicans?’With much of the Democrats’ agenda stalled, Khanna believes the new bill can provide a second major bipartisan accomplishment for the party to tout in a difficult midterms campaign.Billionaire Republican backer donates to Manchin after he killed key Biden billRead more“Can we get more Republicans than voted for the infrastructure bill?” Khanna said, recalling 13 who crossed the aisle. “That’s the barometer.”Khanna, who is also a deputy whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Democrats must be ready to accept a less ambitious version of Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending plan. That is in limbo after Joe Manchin – a senator from West Virginia, the kind of state to which Khanna wants to bring tech jobs – announced his opposition.“A big pillar of [the spending plan] should be climate,” Khanna said, “and then let’s get a couple more things that can get support from Senator Manchin, like establishing universal pre-K and expanding Medicaid.”When it comes to combatting climate change and easing child and healthcare costs, he said, “something is certainly better than nothing”.
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      Why right to repair matters – according to a farmer, a medical worker, a computer store owner

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      TechnologyWhy right to repair matters – according to a farmer, a medical worker, a computer store owner Biden’s recent executive order makes taking action on the strict rules imposed by manufacturers a priority, affecting workers across several industriesKari PaulMon 2 Aug 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 10.17 EDTA tractor. A refrigerator. A smartphone. A ventilator. They may not seem to have much in common, but in fact they all share increasingly high tech features. And when they break, they need fixing.Yet, thanks to strict rules imposed by manufacturers, our ability to do so remains extremely limited. Companies frequently withhold the information and tools needed to repair devices from consumers, with some warranties outright banning third parties from tinkering with products.But that could all soon change. Joe Biden earlier this month signed an executive order that called on federal agencies to prioritize consumers’ so-called “right to repair” their own devices, whether that means choosing an independent mechanic or doing it themselves. A week later, the Federal Trade Commission took heed, voting unanimously to prioritize the issue. Meanwhile, 25 states across the US are also considering some form of right to repair laws.It remains to be seen how the FTC will act, but with potentially major changes on the horizon, we heard from people who’ve run into difficulties trying to repair high-tech equipment – everything from farming equipment to wheelchairs and other medical devices – who shared their frustrations and their hopes for change. The farmer: ‘Right to repair is going to save some lives’ Walter Schweitzer is a 59-year-old farmer in Montana who has been working in agriculture his whole life and advocating for the right to repair for more than a decade. For him, Biden prioritizing right to repair was a huge moment.“It’s going to sound a little funny, but listening to the announcement I had tears come to my eyes,” he said. “Because I felt like someone heard me, someone is listening, and they’re going to try to do something about it. I’ve been waiting for that for years.”The majority of tractors today are internet-connected, and resolving errors requires special diagnostic tools that only manufacturers, such as John Deere, and authorized dealers have access to or are allowed to use. They often charge hundreds of dollars in call-out fees for repairs, which can take weeks to complete.Schweitzer said while he has long been championing the right to repair, the issue became personal for him last year when a tractor broke down in the middle of harvesting his hay. A representative from the tractor company told Schweitzer they couldn’t send a mechanic to fix the vehicle for more than a week.With rain on the horizon threatening to ruin his crop and the window to harvest beginning to close, Scheweitzer entered a race against time. He ultimately made the emergency decision to continue the harvest with a 40-year-old tractor – one that was not connected to the internet.His malfunctioning machine would not end up being fixed for more than a month, a wait that would have lost him thousands of dollars. In larger operations, he said, farmers could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of a technology outage they are not allowed to fix themselves.“Farmers are an independent bunch,” he said. “If we have a problem we tend to like to try to fix it ourselves. And to tie your hands behind your back, to not allow you to fix your tractor when you got a hailstorm coming. That’s stressful.”Scheweitzer said these problems exacerbate the challenges farmers face, from soaring expenses to falling food prices and increasingly volatile weather. The rate of suicide in the industry is already higher than average – one 2015 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found male farmers in 17 states took their lives at a rate of 1.5 times higher than the general population.“The right to repair, it might save us money; the right to repair is probably going to mean a more resilient food supply – but you know what the right to repair is really going to do for farmers?” he said. “It’s going to save some lives.”The nonprofit: ‘everything is online now’Amber Schmidt is a manager at Free Geek, a Portland-based nonprofit that repairs old electronic devices and redistributes them to community members in need. She said the current right-to-repair restrictions by manufacturers have made made it extremely difficult to salvage old devices.Sometimes a specific part is needed but cannot be purchased separately from a manufacturer. Independent repair workers have to buy them from less-reputable sources, putting machines and even user safety at risk.“It is really difficult for us to do the work we need to do when we don’t have access to the tools, parts or diagnostics we need to safely and effectively repair things,” she said.The inability to repair old devices also creates massive amounts of electronic and electrical waste, she added, putting untold strain on the environment. More than 50 million tons of e-waste is generated each year, less than 20% of which is recycled.With school and work increasingly online, especially during the pandemic, access to affordable tech is becoming a crucial equity issue, Schmidt said. “Everything is online now,” she said.But the digital divide persists: nearly a quarter of adults with household incomes below $30,000 a year say they don’t own a smartphone, and 41% do not own a desktop or laptop computer. In contrast, nearly all adults in households earning $100,000 or more a year have such devices.Greater flexibility to repair old electronics would mean more affordable devices for the people who need them, Schmidt said.“I am hopeful that the new executive order will help create a system where people can get their devices repaired where they choose to,” Schmidt said. “This will help get computers back into the hands of people who don’t have access to them otherwise.”The computer shop owner: ‘Repairs have become like buying cocaine’Louis Rossmann is an independent repair technician who owns a shop in New York City that specializes in the repair of MacBooks – particularly logic board issues, where the main piece of hardware in a computer is compromised.In those cases, he said Apple will often charge customers $1,500 to fix a problem he can fix for as little as $200. Doing so requires finding manuals and parts only provided to certain vendors approved by Apple. Rossmann frequently scours forums online and obtains parts from unapproved manufacturers in China to get the job done.“Often I have all the equipment and knowledge I need to do the repair, but I have to wait for the chips or other parts to come through the black market,” he said. “It’s a legal gray area.”Apple argues its devices must go through approved repair firms for security reasons – but that assertion has been called into question in recent years following privacy scandals, including one in which technicians stole illicit photos from a woman’s phone.The work Rossmann does is technically not allowed by Apple’s user agreements. But he said he feels an obligation to help his customers, who often come to him having lost all their computer files due to water damage or other issues. Apple has in the past sued independent repair shops for using certain unapproved parts in iPhone repairs.Rossmann has amassed a following of 1.4 million people on YouTube, where he shares videos explaining how to repair a variety of devices whose manufacturers withhold such information from consumers. He said tech firms have sent him cease and desist letters regarding his channel in the past, but he doesn’t plan on stopping. Right to repair could save him money and hours of work finding the correct parts to repair devices, which are not readily offered by manufacturers.“I don’t feel bad at all – this is something that used to be natural,” he said. “For over 100 years, if something breaks on your car or on your air conditioner or washing machine, repair people are able to get access to what is needed to fix it. It is only in recent years and on computers that doing repairs has become like buying cocaine or something.”The hospital worker: ‘Care is being compromised and delayed’Ilir Kullolli is the director of clinical technology and biomedical engineering at Stanford Children’s Health. He says the right to repair has massive implications for medical technology, and has been advocating on the issue since 2011.Kullolli said in-house repairs of their own medical devices such as ventilators, defibrillators and anesthesia machines saves hospitals and patients time and money. But often manufacturers withhold the training, device manuals and software needed to complete the repairs.“We are impacted in so many ways, the worst of which being patient care is compromised and delayed,” he said. “Waiting for a manufacturer to show up means you often have to delay a case from going to the operating room, or in some cases even cancel it.”He said in some cases a repair can take more than five days, especially in rural areas where local technicians are not as accessible. This issue came into focus during the coronavirus pandemic, when delays to repairs on ventilators and other critical devices became a matter of life and death.In addition to such grave instances, he said the right to repair devices can save struggling hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars. Data shows allowing local technicians to repair their own devices is at least one-third cheaper than going to the manufacturer, he said.Kullolli is tentatively hopeful that the executive order – which did not put any legislation into action but prioritized the issue at a federal level – will bring change.“I’m just glad that the executive order got signed, and I’m hoping it will put us on the right path to get everyone access to the ability to repair devices, which we all deserve,” he said.TopicsTechnologySilicon ValleyUS politicsInternet of thingsfeaturesReuse this content More