Macrodoses #5: The Election
Will we survive the vibes?
In 1996, John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, began his seminal manifesto as follows: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
In 2024, tech leaders followed Donald Trump’s electoral victory with simpering notes. “Big congratulations… on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” wrote Jeff Bezos, fresh off blocking the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. “We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone,” posted Sundar Pichai, the CEO of a company Trump recently described as “a whole rigged deal.”
The “tech vibe shift” is not only a left-to-right move. It’s also an industry-wide pivot from technolibertarianism to state capitalism with American characteristics—from a dream of escaping government control to actively facilitating it. Elon Musk will be one of the top advisers in the new Trump administration, jumping on a call with Volodymyr Zelensky just last week. Sam Altman spent the last two years touring DC and presenting himself as AGI’s safest steward. The military-industrial complex is undergoing a renaissance under the shiny new banner of “American Dynamism”; CEO Palmer Luckey of neo-drone-factory Anduril bragged that “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
To be clear, the US government has always been a key incubator of emerging technologies. It’s well-known, for instance, that DARPA played a critical role in jumpstarting R&D for the internet, GPS, and self-driving cars. Yet it feels like a relatively recent phenomenon to see such an open embrace between the sectors, and never as much PDA as in the Trump-Vance(-Musk) campaign.
So why the shift now? There are several candidate factors. The DOD has big and growing coffers, especially in the specter of hot wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and an escalating rivalry with China. Increased regulatory scrutiny from both parties has shown Big Tech that it’s much more fun to be on Big Government’s side when the DOJ comes knocking at the door. And finally, there’s the logistics of it all: Why go to the trouble of setting up a network state when you can capture the established one?
Today, the Reboot editorial board shares its reactions to the 2024 election. Kevin, Morry, and Shohini start by theorizing what went wrong for the Democrats. Jessica and Shira examine micro-vibe-shifts in the political rhetoric around AI and biohacking, and Hamidah and Jacob speculate on how the Trump administration will deal with high-skilled immigration and nuclear energy. Finally, Hal shares his top tips for protecting yourself and your community against government surveillance.
Will we survive the vibes? Let’s find out.
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Which Economy?
By
When experts, pundits, and failed state house candidates talk about "the economy," they point to statistical indicators and clean charts of data sliced into discrete timeframes. But people don't experience the economy through employment numbers or percentage point shifts in GDP. And when they are asked by pollsters about the state of the economy, they aren't reflecting on government statistics; they aren't even necessarily thinking about the present. Instead, what they’re doing is more like taking an inventory of economic wounds. They are thinking back on a half-decade of accumulated instability and anxiety, of pandemic-era job losses, of price fluctuations. They’re thinking about the slow erosion of their plans and dreams.
Now, in the wake of electoral defeat, center-left think tanks and wonks seem determined to continue to tell voters they're wrong about their own economic reality. They point to charts and tables showing the strength of the economy, as if statistical aggregates and lossy indicators were, in some sense, more real than lived experience. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke liked to remind his readers every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing, that our frameworks and analytical lenses can obscure certain details even as they highlight others. In this case, an overreliance on quantitative understandings of economic life have led us into a situation where leading figures in the world of professional liberal politics mistook their statistical representations for the territory they were meant to map. Rather than admit that their understanding of economic reality might be incomplete, they've decided that voters are unqualified to speak for themselves.
There's something both futile and dangerous about this rush to discredit voters' economic perceptions, a problem which extends beyond the normal hazards associated with economists' delusional sense of omnicompetence. When someone's daily struggle with instability is met with lectures about macroeconomic indicators, it doesn't change their reality, it only deepens their alienation from institutional expertise. It makes them distrustful and angry. It makes voters question if you are really on their side.
Politics Happens Through the Eyes
By Morry Kolman
One of the odd quirks of symbolism that Roland Barthes gives attention to in his book Mythologies is election photography—the pictures that are taken and shared of the people that want to represent us. Writing about the political posters he was seeing around France at the time, he reflected on the fact that they rarely had any words. For all the bluster about policy and vision that were theoretically the substance at hand to vote on, the actual campaign material seemed to care less. This choice, Barthes concluded, "is therefore above all the acknowledgment of something deep and irrational co-extensive with politics." It is a cope of its own right, one that accepts that an image is more effective than a vision.
I think we would be wise to take his point more seriously. The "iconic photo test” postmortem going around the internet as of late is by no means an accurate measure of political strength, but it appears to be a reliable one. If there was one realm in which Trump had a lock on, it was the visual one: the mugshot, the fist in the air, the McDonalds drive-thru. When I think of a lasting scene from the Kamala campaign, the most I can think of is when she went to that bakery and got some sweets. Maybe, maybe, when she went all the way across the stage to shake Trump's hand. Are either of those iconic? Are those even—if we may hack away at the word candidate—candid? No. Of course not. Kamala was at her symbolic peak the first day she took over as the Democratic nominee, and even then, her symbol was a negative: she was not Biden. Compare this to Obama’s Hope Poster, or even Bernie’s bird. The popular fervor around these candidates were part and parcel with these symbols and (an article in its own right) gave their followings a usable and repeatable motif to rally their content around.
I do not like the idea of the president being decided by something as abstract and unaccountable as taking a good picture, but to ascribe the loss of the election to largely a matter of the media's (or educational institutions', or so on) failure at adequately conveying the facts of policy matters and the environment at large is to bury your head in the sand. People see, and at a certain point, therefore, politics happens through the eyes. Symbolism, fantasy, and iconography are venues of political competition that liberal ideas of rationality and proper communication—the ideals that fuel wishes for better education or Sorkin-esque policy discussion on primetime news—do not have tickets to. One side’s “media” strategy is well aware of this fact, and actively constructs complete fabrications where they bus fake migrants to the homes of bougie liberals, catch their reactions on film, and post them to the 8M+ million followers of The Nelk Boys for their follower's glee. The other part loses. If we do not want to lie, we at the very least have to take a serious look at how we attempt to tell the truth.
Aesthetic Right Wing Vibes
By
One of the predominant takeaways from Gen Z swinging right relative to 2020 was that progressive ideas don’t have social or alternate media megaphones.
Right-wing ideas are powerful because they can get traction through channels that aren’t explicitly political. A lot has been written about Joe Rogan and Twitch streamers, but a huge volume of content targeted towards women quietly advertises right-wing ideas too.
“Day In My Life” influencer content is my guilty pleasure. But it rests on an individual-oriented, aspirational aesthetic that is politically anesthetized. These women, some with as few as 10k followers, put on display activities which implicitly advertise that lifestyle improvements are achieved through individual, not structural agency, and via reinforcement of gender roles: hours of gym footage, high-definition cooking shots where the boyfriends are always lurking in the background and never helping, and meditating and journaling deployed to reach personal (financial) potential. The most extreme version of this is trad-wife content, of which the most prominent influencers are Evangelicals or Mormons. Unpolitical, evangelical content like this makes “traditional” lives seem like a better tradeoff when working women are still paid less and do more domestic labor.
If their goal is to make left-wing ideas more appealing, it’s not obvious how progressives could use the existing influencer playbook. Right-wing ideas benefit from being able to leverage historical aesthetics or the currently-wealthy to show that the aspirational vision is concrete. They can say,”We’ve achieved this for some,” or “We’ve achieved this before,” and “You can have it too if you buy this one thing,” even if it’s not real. Progressive ideas are often trying to build a world that doesn’t exist yet, and has a vision for collective responsibility that’s difficult to visualize. The best outcome of Medicare-for-All is the counterfactual of limited medical bills. It’s unclear who would pay for a product ad in content that promotes community organizing.
I don’t think this means Dems should give up the fight to own alternate media, but I do think that copying the right-wing playbook and incubating insincere content slop (“Joe Rogan of the Left”) won’t cut it. I want to see content that makes it cool to have walkable cities, cheap rent, public transit, and shows what free time adults can have if they have government-run childcare and a livable minimum wage. Many of these things exist in the US in pockets and certainly abroad—it’s about sourcing and funding the right content, and playing the culture war ground game of visually appealing to people's most basic desires.
“Anthropic x Palantir” doesn’t seem like much… for now
By
Two days after the election, Anthropic and Palantir announced a new contract with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide access to Claude for “U.S. Government Intelligence and Defense Operations.” In the words of our very own
:
It’s a good tweet, because the optics really are funny, but I also wanted to figure out what the contract actually meant.
I’ll caveat this by saying it’s hard to untangle the alphabet soup of B2B-SaaS-meets-bureaucracy-meets-PR-speak. If we believe Palantir’s own press release, the contract seems like nothing more or less than letting (higher-security) office workers use Claude, which has been available to lower-security government agencies via AWS’s GovCloud since this summer. If I had to guess, the only reason for the new three-way engagement is so that Claude can be served through Palantir’s AI Platform, which has higher security accreditation than GovCloud, and can therefore be used by employees with more stringent security requirements.
In some ways, this makes the contract—and the self-congratulatory messaging around it—seem almost mundane. It turns out that “supporting national security” means, essentially, to let office workers ask an LLM to “come up with five ideas for boosting team morale” or “rewrite this email to be more precise.” I expect the overall impact of this on national security to be approximately proportional to the impact of LLM access on desk worker productivity, which is to say, probably minor. And as I wrote last year, Anthropic is a company and Claude is its product; it should not be so surprising, or so uniquely concerning, that it’s selling it.1
This does, however, raise questions about how the relationship between “highly capable” AI and the military might develop, and what governance is going to look like. For one, Anthropic’s current Acceptable Use Policy prohibits customers from using the system to “produce, modify, design, market, or distribute weapons, explosives, dangerous materials or other systems designed to cause harm to or loss of human life”—among other things that U.S. intelligence and military agencies are known to do (misinformation, election interference, surveillance, attacks on infrastructure…). Is it just me, or… are these policies almost certainly guaranteed to be violated if Claude is being used by DoD, CIA, NSA, and so on? I wonder about the precedent being set here, and while the current contract seems to have nothing to this effect, it would certainly be cause for concern if, for example, Anthropic started doing custom work of any sort.
Finally, to bring it back to the election, and associated vibe-shifts—of course this contract, and the decision-making behind it, was all done far before election day. But I have to wonder about the timing and the tone of the announcement… or maybe I’m reading too much into it. (See also Zhanpei’s excellent essay on the rhetoric of AI in war.)
(For what it’s worth, OpenAI seems to be looking for pretty much the same thing, though I haven’t seen as much patriotic horn-tooting from them. Yet!)
(Bio)hacking Eugenics
By
Amid the many issues that were strongly featured on the campaign trail, public health was notably absent—especially in comparison to 2020. This election was the second election since Covid’s disruption, but the virus wasn’t explicitly present on the trail except as one of the catalysts for Biden’s dramatic dropout. Still, Covid has been very present, although unacknowledged, in political life. One of the pandemic’s more sinister effects has been a country-wide rise in eugenics.
At its core, eugenics is the belief that the “genetic makeup” of a population can and should be improved over time, often by attempting to control who is allowed to have children. In the absence of other indicators, this tends to default to people who are white, wealthy, and visibly healthy—that is, not disabled. Eugenics is the undercurrent that fuels Covid denial, anti-masking, pro-natalism, and anti-vaccine “health consciousness.” All of these are present, in varying quantities, in Silicon Valley. And while tech bros have been biohacking for years, it’s only recently that major figures have become quite so obsessed with fathering children, biological age, and sperm health. It’s a clear sign that eugenicist “health-consciousness” and pro-birth attitudes are on the rise in the tech world, and in the US writ large.
Perhaps the best-known articulation of eugenicist ideologies in Silicon Valley is the pro-natalism of Elon Musk and his ilk, who are investing in (and using) fertility technologies that can enable genetic testing to produce “superior” embryos. But your more garden-variety expression of eugenics has to do with the conflation of health and virtue. It’s good to care about your health and to work to improve it, but as soon as we begin to value specific visible articulations of “health” too highly, the line between “getting healthier” and eugenics gets…blurry. In the context of eugenics, being visibly healthy becomes a kind of social capital. Many people who abide by eugenicist ideas don’t say—or perhaps even know—that they think health is the paragon of virtue, but they spend far too much time and energy trying to get as healthy as possible for it to be just a passing interest. Bryan Johnson, perhaps the best-known youth-chasing biohacker today, has begun cozying up to vaccine deniers like RFK—and I don’t think that’s an accident.2
It’s important to note that neither party is innocent of eugenicist ideas—this became especially visible around Covid. Biden’s Covid policies mostly included denying that the virus was a serious issue, despite mounting evidence that Covid has a high probability of causing long-term complications—otherwise known as disabilities.
I’m not sure where this leaves us, going into a second Trump term. It’s clear to me that Trump empowers eugenicists, and that Silicon Valley does, too. All I can do, as someone who’s neither working in public health (nor directly impacted, since I am not (yet) disabled), is encourage you to wear a mask, get vaccinated—and most importantly, to care about the health and well-being of others, including those who don’t fit the mold of the bio-hacked hyper-productive tech bro.
Maple Syrup and Eagles
By
I’m Canadian, a member of the select bunch of lucky foreigners. As I drain my brain from the land of maple syrup and feed it to the eagles, I must first beg the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the right to work. For me, it’s easy, supposedly so. It’s a pain, but the non-beneficiaries of NAFTA have a much harder time. Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Tesla get tens of thousands of applicants for any given role but are still almost always searching for the exceptional. After all, tech is nothing without its talent.
Trump’s been tech’s best friend, with endorsements from Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the like, and we’ll see whether high immigration policies are, too. In an ideal world, in the words of Trump, green cards are stapled to college degrees.
But we are far from the ideal. As it is, international students on the F-1 visa have a year or three years (if they’re a STEM grad) to work post-grad with Optional Practical Training (OPT). Then, they’ll probably find a full-time role with an employer sponsoring their H-1B. There’s a fixed number to allocate, so an employer most likely enters the lottery hoping that their desired hire draws lucky. Then, if the odds are in your favor and you live here long enough, you may get a green card. It’s a costly, tedious process: some follow through, others drop out from the fatigue, and many stay in it, anxious, annoyed, and afraid.
If Trump’s cameo turns out to be dishonest. Then, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and its hope to attract more bright scientists worldwide will be put to a halt; plans to expand OPT won’t be realized; and the “Einstein” (EB) and the “Genius” (O-1) visas will become much tighter pathways to entry.
Having “made it,” Elon, Thiel, and the rest of the mafia are arguably model, high-skilled migrants. Both hailing from South Africa represent the (emerald-dusted) American Dream. That said, if you believe Twitter’s acquisition bought our political attention, maybe we can hope that the right-to-stay will, too.
Is the Nuclear Energy Revival Incoming?
By
Does the second Trump term herald a revival for nuclear power? Nuclear energy has long been more strongly supported by Republicans, but the past few years have brought increasing attention to the energy source from both climate and industrial policy perspectives. There are even nuclear influencers—though their efficacy is unclear. The past year has featured an incessant wave of stories on nuclear power as an enabler for ever-larger data centers, with both the Biden White House and the Trump campaign expressing a greater interest in funding the deployment of newer nuclear tech like small modular reactors. In the wake of the election, some nuclear energy analysts predicted that nuclear would be a rare opportunity for “climate hawks” in the face of… otherwise unfriendly currents for renewables.
A key problem, though, for anyone claiming victory for a nuclear renaissance: the two halves of the Trump-aligned right seem to have rather different reads on the technology. On one end, the Elon Musk-esque tech right has embraced nuclear as a tool for both energy abundance (too-cheap-to-meter is back!) and owning the wind-and-solar-focused left, with language about “unleashing” nuclear power making it into the Republican party platform. On the other, Tucker Carlson is literally claiming that demons invented nuclear power. The jury is still out on whether the nuclear boosters or demonologists will achieve their policy goals. Regardless of whether we see any actual new reactors built in the US in the near term, there’s not a better example of the strange bedfellows of this coming administration and its orientation towards tech and energy policy—perhaps a sign that overheated claims from tech barons about a return to the “Roaring 20s” may not prove accurate.
How we can (try) to keep each other safe
By
In my piece from last year, Threat Model, I wrote about how extreme privacy practitioners’ imaginings of worst-case scenarios
exert a pull on [them] like moths to a flame. What if someone starts stalking me? What if my political ideology becomes criminalized? What if my identity becomes criminalized? What if I win the lottery and need to lay low for a while? Does my threat model account for that? Ultimately, what keeps privacy extremophiles captivated by what is, in reality, a mostly intellectual game is the submerged threat (and perhaps even the desire) that it suddenly could become much more real.
For tens of millions of migrants, hundreds of millions of women, and uncountable others (allies of the aforementioned groups and other perceived political enemies), the election results underscore that this is not a “mostly intellectual game.” Whether they know it yet or not, for many US residents the task ahead is to evade, for as long as possible, a malevolent and technologically-enabled bureaucracy that can compel companies to turn over sensitive information in order to destroy their lives.
It is clear that most major technology platforms hope to be on the good side of this administration—better to be the facilitator and executor of state power during Trump II than its enemy. What will that mean? Google and Apple may be legally obligated to turn over data about visitors to abortion clinics when law enforcement agencies submit “geofenced” warrants. Meta will continue to turn over chat data to prosecutors so they can put abortion seekers in prison. Palantir will continue to build ICE the tools it needs to enable mass surveillance and deportation.
If there’s one thing we continually assert here at Reboot, it’s that technology (on its own) cannot save us. But we also know that technology is a catalyst for social change, both positive and negative. Cory Doctorow writes that technology is useful
because it can temporarily shield you from the all-seeing eye of a corrupt state… And what you need to do during that temporary, technologically-dependent window is reform your society so the government is just and responsive and transparent. Technology cannot substitute for a just society, but it can help you create that society.
I’m trying to create that temporary, technologically-dependent window for change by:
Getting off X/Twitter and trying to embrace more decentralized and federated alternatives (@harold.bsky.social) that enable data sovereignty, interoperability, and less surveillance. I’m also trying to cultivate my own corner of the internet that isn’t run as a monopolistic fiefdom.
Shifting as much of my personal communication as possible to Signal or other end-to-end encrypted apps.
Using VPNs (and Tor, sometimes) to protect my network information.
Limiting the sensitive data (Android, iOS) that apps can collect about me (location data is critical, but this also applies to health apps, particularly for tracking menstruation).
I’d urge you to consider some of these measures as well (in addition to publicly protesting and fighting against the policies that the incoming administration will attempt to enact), since protecting your individual node of a sensitive network doesn’t just protect you—it helps protect everyone you’re connected to.
We can’t be your left-wing Joe Rogan, but subscribe to Reboot for more critical analysis of tech and politics:
🌀 microdoses
Election results from 2016 to 2024 by neighborhood in NYC shows how ethnic minority neighborhoods swung right over time
Jerusalem Demsas rebuts the “voters hate women” theory of the loss
A calming gallery of restored lily and rose illustrations by Pierre-Joseph Redouté
I might say something stupid
We ran 80,000 simulations and spent each of them running 80,000 more
Something to look forward to
💝 closing note
How do you think the 2024 election will change tech going forward? Let us know in a comment, or send a letter to the editor.
Four more years of, uh, whatever this is,
— Reboot team
To its credit, I guess (?), the press release mentions “responsible” AI only twice.
the 2024 election will affect tech through
1. resurgence of big tech if/when lina khan is fired. not sure about the status about the FTC’s antitrust cases but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them were dropped.
2. AI arms race might escalate as Trump seems to be hiring people with hawkish views on China. I expect to see arguments for additional gov investment in AI to stay ahead of China.
3. section 230 might get repealed / reformed