Category: Policy

Is AI the “Big Bang” or Merely a “Turning Point”? Much Depends on the Answer

According to scholar Carlota Perez, one of tech’s most revered theorists, society regularly goes through technology-driven “revolutions.” These structural cycles can take fifty years or more, and are defined by core technologies which shape life as we know it. Her list of previous cycles include the Industrial Revolution; The Age of Steam and Railways; The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering; and The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production.*

Back in the early 2000s, Perez has identified the Internet (more formally, ICT, or “information communications technologies”) as the dominant technological force driving our current age. Perez’s framing has been a favorite of pundits ever since – and has played a central role in the debate as to whether a much-hyped “Next Big Thing” – crypto, the metaverse, quantum computing – is merely a feature of an ongoing revolution, or the starting gun to an entirely new age.

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How Google Can Win the Future

[Second in a series, first post here]

This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case – that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.

Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic – a major focal point of the government’s case).

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Who Owns Your AI Identity? (Hint: Not You)

As generative AI reaches a fever pitch of investment, product releases, and hype, most of us have ignored a profound flaw as we march relentlessly toward The Next Big Thing. Our most dominant AI products and services (those from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, for example) are deployed in the cloud via a “client-server” architecture – “a computing model where resources, such as applications, data, and services, are provided by a central server, and clients request access to these resources from the server.”

Now, what’s wrong with that? Technically, nothing.  A client-server approach isn’t controversial; in fact, it’s an efficient and productive approach for a company offering data-processing products and services.  The client – that’s be you and your device – provides input (a prompt, for example) which is relayed to the server. The server takes that input, processes it, and delivers an output back to the client.

Non-controversial, right? Well, sure, if the “server” in question is a neutral platform that’s only in the business of processing your data so you can use the services it offers. Banks, for example, use neutral client-server architectures to provide online financial services, as do most health care providers. The data you share with them isn’t used for anything other than the provision of services.

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Zuck Lobbies Trump: Optics No Longer Matter

There is so much…sh*t flooding the zone of late, it’s hard to grok it all. But when the CEO of one of the richest and most morally questionable companies in tech’s history leverages his access to lobby the President of the United States, and it’s just yet another WTF headline, well, it bears comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest man in the world, visited President Trump, the 700th richest man in the world. His goal? To get the President to call off Meta’s impending antitrust trial, one that could go very poorly for the company, both because of the evidence and testimony such a trial would bring the public light, and because one of the possible remedies would be breaking up Meta entirely.

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Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It.

There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!

Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.

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When Tech Gets Too Big To Fail

I opened my annual predictions last week by noting that the technology industry had leapfrogged finance as the most powerful political force in the business world. But the news today that Meta is all but abandoning content moderation in favor of a decidedly Trump-friendly “let them say whatever the f*ck” approach has prompted me to revise that sentiment a bit.

It’s not that Tech has overtaken Finance. It’s that Tech has…become Finance. It’s become the most rapacious, amoral, win-at-all costs industry in the world. Consider:

  • Meta not only abandoned its content moderation practices (which, in turn, will allow it to supercharge its business model), it’s also building AI engagement chatbots aimed at juicing its bottom line, hired a Trump loyalist (and proponent of violence as entertainment) to join its board, and elevated a Trump devotee as its head of policy and communications. The company has pulled out every possible stop to ensure it profits from the next four years of Trump rule.
  • The global financial system is now dominated by the stock performance of tech companies. Nine of the top 10 S&P stocks by weight are tech companies. The entire S&P 500 is, in the words of one economist, “simply NVIDIA in drag.” When this is the case, finance becomes beholden to tech; now it’s tech companies, not banks, that are “too big to fail.”
  • The CEOs or founders of OpenAI, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Ripple, Robinhood, and countless others have given large sums of money to Trump in recent weeks. It’s difficult to see this payola as anything more than bribes and down payments meant to protect Tech’s position in a new world order built on … Tech.
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Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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The Token Act – A Modest Proposal from 2018

I’m in the middle of a rather large project, attempting to consolidate a thread running through roughly a dozen essays I’ve written over the past decade or so. I keep running into borked links when I hit one particular piece – which can be found on LinkedIn, but not this site. It’s a seminal reference post about a fictional “Token Act,” which I proposed while researching Internet policy at Columbia back in 2018. I’m going to repost it here, below, so it’ll live on my own domain from now on. 

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Social conversations about difficult and complex topics have arcs – they tend to start scattered, with many threads and potential paths, then resolve over time toward consensus. This consensus differs based on groups within society – Fox News aficionados will cluster one way, NPR devotees another. Regardless of the group, such consensus then becomes presumption – and once a group of people presume, they fail to explore potentially difficult or presumably impossible alternative solutions.

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Apparently, Brand Safety Is Dead. That’s Good For News, No?

SHOT.
CHASER.

If you want to understand where the zeitgeist is headed in Silicon Valley, you have to study The Information, the clubby, well-sourced favorite read of Valley oligarchs. The publication made its reputation by commanding lofty subscription prices back when nearly all tech news was free; it now enjoys multiple revenue streams, including advertising, events, and a “pro” version for $750-$999 a year. I’ve been a subscriber (of the “regular” variety) for years, and I probably always will be.

That said, every so often The Information runs a story that is so clearly aligned with the interests of the plutocracy it begs to be called out. “Advertisers Retreat From Social Media Policing” is its latest entry in this category. The piece opens with a stupendous straw man: “For several years, a favorite tactic of progressives agitating against social media and conservative news outlets has been pressuring marketers to pull their ads.”

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Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

The 26 words that “changed the internet.” Image NYT.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market. 

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