Yglesias does one of his "radical centrist" takes on the movement of the Democratic Party towards cultural leftism. There are a few nuggets in there that have some merit, but I remain convinced that the turn of white working class voters away from Democrats is mostly about "vibes" and the poisoned media landscape, rather than real policy issues.
Paul Krugman writes today about how Silicon Valley turned against Democrats, when Democrats tried to rein in the worst abuses of tech companies - especially the pernicious influence of social media.
Seems to me there's an opening here.
People generally are favorable towards technological advances in theory. What Krugman notes is that tech companies are following the model of enshittification. He quotes Cory Doctorow's definition:
First, companies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.
I think we've all seen that dynamic when a new technology or app comes along and it's great! Then it gets slowly worse. The best example of this is Facebook, which started out fun and is not so choked with ads that you really can't connect with your friends, many of whom left. The same is doubly true with Twitter, though often for different reasons. (Nazis. The reason is Nazis.)
Secondly, the real villains are not the engineers and inventors. The villains are Silicon Valley, which is less a cradle of innovation and more an ecosystem of venture capitalism. There's no better example of this than Elon Musk. Musk isn't some genius inventor. He's a rich guy who got into a growth industry - batteries - at the right time after being involved in PayPal - which is also didn't invent. He's a venture capital dudebro who knows enough about engineering to seem like Tony Stark. He's not.
Yes, the oligarchs of Wall Street are bad. Some are really bad. But per capita, the "bad billionaires" really seem to be concentrating in Silicon Valley - Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks. OK, those are just the South African broligarchs, but still. There's a hard right turn among a cohort of these guys that is nakedly anti-democratic and makes them natural enemies not only of the Democrats but of democrats.
Running against Silicon Valley will not be easy, as many Democrats are cozy with the overall tech community - many of whom still support Democratic policies. There is a lot of money there.
Still, we have Musk mining American's personal data to feed his AI monster. We have the rise of AI itself, which figures to have incredibly disruptive impacts on Americans. We have the coming crypto crisis, which figures to be for Silicon Valley what 2008 was for real estate and Wall Street.
There strikes me as being a real opportunity here for Democrats to get right with working class voters, especially as the economy teeters from the effects of Trump's trade wars and deportations. Tie it to these authoritarian, nerdy techbros.
No one really like the idea of billionaires. No one really like the state of tech, including social media. Focus some of your energy there.
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