Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that the world should accept negative externalities like users dying or losing jobs to AI for the sake of technological benefits. That worldview was repudiated in Tuesday’s election.
Voters across Red States, Blue States, and Purple States rejected the cruelty and corruption of the current political and economic order. They are tired of a system run by kleptocrats.
Tech leaders courted the administration
The main difference between Donald Trump’s current term and his first is that Silicon Valley oligarchs have lined up to support him. Photos from his inauguration and a gilded gala with China’s President Xi Jinping show every major tech company CEO flattering the president, giving gifts, and trying to capture the political process.
They have been rewarded for their fealty. The administration has let Big Tech do whatever it wants over the last two years.
Government cuts and policy shifts
Elon Musk was given control of the federal government. He used that power to slash critical programs, lay off tens of thousands of public servants, and replace human expertise with teenagers and AI algorithms. His companies continue to rake in billions in government contracts. His AI tools are integrated into critical systems. The cuts led by his Department of Government Efficiency have, conservatively, killed many thousands of people around the world.
Trump has pardoned crypto criminals. His family has made billions of dollars in cryptocurrency scams. He has overseen the rise of a gambling and prediction market-based economy rife with insider trading and misery. The idea that the administration would crack down on this is implausible.
He has installed manosphere podcasters, X trolls, and conspiracy theorists into top administration roles. They have performed even worse than their low expectations. The administration has leveraged commercial surveillance companies to build a brutal, tech-powered mass deportation campaign. Its communications strategy is best described as inscrutable AI slop shitposting.
The cost of living crisis Trump has caused is another factor. He started an illegal war in Iran that has driven up gas and diesel prices. He levied tariffs on America’s allies for reasons that defy explanation. This has driven up the price of everything even as his administration slashes regulations on fossil fuel companies and big corporations.
Data centers and AI policy
The Trump administration has let Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella do whatever they want. Their products drive mass anxiety and have caused corporations to bet that the future is widespread mass unemployment. Trump has cheered on the construction of data centers even as his base of supporters has said they do not want them in their communities.
He has said American communities should “let data reign” and that if communities “want to be successful and rich” they should build more data centers.
Money spent by tech and crypto interests
Elon Musk spent $474 million trying to help Republicans maintain the status quo. Super PACs tied to the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries spent roughly $250 million to largely support Republicans and oppose Democrats, according to Molly White’s Tech Influence Watch project. A16z and people tied to it spent roughly $94.4 million trying to influence the election, according to White. This is just a small sample of the ways that Silicon Valley attempted to put its thumbs on the scale of this election to prop up a deeply unpopular administration.
Voters rejected the tech vision
Voters aggressively rejected Trump and Silicon Valley’s vision for America. People do not want to accept “some bad things happening” to pad the valuations and pocketbooks of billionaires and trillionaires when the “bad things” include worsening wealth inequality, a housing and cost of living crisis, mass automation and unemployment, mass surveillance, cuts to government services, foreign wars, loud, polluting data centers that employ a few construction workers while they are being built and no one after that are being used to increase profits for out-of-state corporations, and a culture war that infringes on the civil rights of immigrants and trans people.
Specific election outcomes
This was a rejection of Trump and the Republican Party, but also a rejection of big tech. Across the country, there were 40 ballot measures about AI data center projects. Voters chose to restrict 39 of them.
In Ohio—a state that has become extremely Red in recent cycles—Democrat Sherrod Brown cruised to a five-point win running on a campaign to rein in data centers. Vivek Ramaswamy, a Peter Thiel acolyte and billionaire venture capitalist, was absolutely trounced by Amy Acton, a public health official who supports data center moratoriums and vaccines and presented herself to the state’s voters as being a normal person and not a deranged Twitter troll.
In New York State, Governor Kathy Hochul won reelection after enacting the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in July. Her opponent Bruce Blakeman called the moratorium “crazy” and vowed to end it if he won.
In Texas, Musk spent $212 million trying to elect the wildly unpopular Ken Paxton. In exchange for lighting this money on fire, Texas has, in James Talarico, its first Democratic Senator in nearly 40 years. Talarico began his campaign by saying “The people at the top — the Elon Musks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — they spend so much time and energy keeping us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power.”
Musk barely tweeted Tuesday. Once it became clear his preferred candidates had lost and that people do not want AI data centers, he finally suggested “data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” presumably because it is clear people do not want them here on Earth. Jason Calacanis, the intolerable venture capitalist and host of the unlistenable All In podcast, tweeted a bunch of prediction market screenshots of the Talarico race and said he “never expected Texas to turn blue. Ugh, I moved here to get away from the left lunacy!”
“Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently. “But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves.”
What it means
Silicon Valley spent wildly on the election and Republicans have spent much of the last decade trying to press structural advantages to gerrymander districts, suppress the vote, and sow doubt on our elections. The sheer anger voters felt was enough to overwhelm these efforts Tuesday, nearly without exception. The only main outlier was a billionaire wealth tax ballot measure in California, which looks likely to fail after billionaires spent $379 million opposing it.
