Francesca Hong is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin next week. If she goes on to win the general election, she’ll become the first democratic socialist governor in American history. 

But, when Bernie Sanders, the most famous democratic socialist in the country, was asked Wednesday if he’d endorse her, he said: “I don’t think so.” He said he’d met her a few years ago, and that she “seems very very nice” — but said he wasn’t familiar with her race.

Indeed, while leftists and socialists who’ve long been eager to overthrow the Democratic establishment are excited about Hong’s campaign, some are increasingly sounding a bit wary of her chances — and wondering whether she’s the best representative the movement has to offer given the electoral stakes in this swing state. 

For instance, when Hong was asked this week about an old deleted tweet in which she called to cancel Thanksgiving due to its celebration of colonialism, she didn’t exactly disavow it. Instead, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “views can evolve” while also stressing the holiday was “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

Moderate Democrats cringed, of course. But what was more notable was how many fellow leftists joined in — even to some of her biggest fans, the answer seemed like political malpractice. It also brought to the surface simmering tensions within the left over how to navigate social issues more broadly, a divide that’s becoming more relevant now that their candidates are on the cusp of wielding actual power. 

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, fresh off campaigning with Hong, posted on X: “love fran, this was an opportunity to turn this back on how thanksgiving is about to be unaffordable due to trumps wars.” (Two days later, Hong tried a do-over on the answer, claiming Thanksgiving was actually her favorite holiday.)

Another source of concern, for some, is Hong’s tendency of giving elliptical answers when asked about her old support for abolishing police and prisons — saying she won’t do it as governor, but remaining reluctant to disavow the idea as a long-term goal. 

Sanders has been a longtime critic of “defund the police” rhetoric. And in the same interview where Sanders said he likely wouldn’t endorse Hong, he said, in response to a separate question: “No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote defunding the police.”

Hong’s rhetoric is reminiscent of how many people in progressive spaces talked about culture, identity, policing, and prisons back during the “Great Awokening” era, peaking in the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But some on the left increasingly believe that those positions alienate voters — particularly the working-class voters they’re trying to mobilize. 

This new left conventional wisdom, said to be embodied in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is that socialist candidates for office should quietly downplay or even explicitly renounce those old causes — as Mamdani did for police defunding — in favor of a laser focus on issues like affordability, stopping data centers, and opposition to Israel, where public opinion is on their side. 

It’s a sort of left-wing version of “popularism” — the center-left credo that Democrats should campaign on popular ideas that poll well, and abandon unpopular progressive stances. In other words: Don’t scare the normies.

But not everyone on the left is so eager to jettison these stances for purportedly optimal campaign messaging: After all, a major organizing principle for many on the left is their willingness to stand up for what they believe in even when it isn’t popular. 

For instance, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani ally who successfully challenged a House Democratic incumbent this year, stood by her old calls to abolish policing and borders — though, unlike Hong, she’s running in extremely blue terrain. 

“Five years ago, the left was collectively making the case for abolition &/or defund, & gaining public opinion wins,” leftist podcaster Briahna Joy Gray wrote. “Today, they’re making the case for why elected progressives are justified in abandoning this agenda.”

All this is symptomatic of a deeper divide on the left, not just about today’s political strategy, but about race, class, and gender more broadly, and how 2020-era cultural issues fit into their movement today. 

Many class-focused leftists view the period they now jokingly call “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” as a cringey mistake, and seek to blame Democratic elites for it. But others on the left still think and talk about race, identity, and social justice causes just like they did in 2020 — indeed, to them, these issues might be why they joined the left in the first place.

Some on the left now want to move on from “woke 1.0”

In 2021, Chi Ossé, campaigning for New York City Council, tweeted: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

When a critic of his on X unearthed that old post earlier this year, Ossé — now a council member — gave a pithy response: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”.

The citation of “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” is a now-common shorthand among parts of the online left to describe — and distance themselves from — what they now view as the more dated or inconvenient aspects of the impassioned social justice activism they participated in during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Typically, this doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting causes like racial justice altogether. Rather, it is often intended to acknowledge that the tactics used a few years back didn’t work, and that a new approach is necessary to try and achieve those goals. (Indeed, “woke 1.0” implies that “woke 2.0” is either coming or already here.)

Among those who use the term, there isn’t a consensus about what’s an outdated relic worth abandoning, and what’s a worthy cause worth preserving. However, there’s probably the most consensus that the sweeping, totalizing identity-related rhetoric and assertions that were common at the time haven’t aged well. Not only did they repel winnable voters, but they fueled constant arguments inside progressive organizations, to the point that some activists likened the discord to undercover federal plots to disrupt left-wing groups in the 1960s. 

Take it from Chevalier. The victorious congressional primary challenger has stood by her old tweets about police and borders being fundamentally wrong. But when the New York Editorial Board asked her about “woke 1,” she said it was “indeed crazy” — because there was too much “divisive rhetoric” that hurt the left’s effort to build solidarity.

“At the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision,” Chevalier said. “And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke. That actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements.”

To others, the true core of “woke 1.0” is unpopular, fringe-sounding cultural causes — like, say, calling Thanksgiving problematic. In response to the Thanksgiving clip, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted: “Hong has a lot of strengths but this woke 1 stuff is a major weakness.”

“Socialists must practice effective communication,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, wrote. “Reply to a Thanksgiving question: The only thing threatening to cancel Thanksgiving is the rising cost of groceries.”

The deeper disagreement inside the left on economics and identity issues

Underneath some leftists’ attempt to turn the page from “woke 1.0,” there’s a deeper and more longstanding divide on the left between those who want to prioritize economic issues — and those who care deeply about identity-related causes too.

To broadly generalize, we can think of the left as having three main strains, focused on economic justice (class politics), social justice (causes related to identity and culture), and foreign policy (war, empire, and — especially nowadays — Israel). But not everyone prioritizes them in the same way, or joined the movement because of the same issue.

Amid the rise of social media-powered identity related activism, some on the economics-focused left have expressed concern that progressives’ language, approach, and tactics were hampering what should be the left’s top priority: mobilizing the working class. The Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, for instance, has criticized “left identitarians” as “fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics.”

Some on the class-focused left go further, characterizing “wokeness” as essentially an op by their political enemies. 

According to this potted history, it was Hillary Clinton who first opened the Pandora’s box of weaponized identity politics, and she did this to defeat a Bernie Sanders campaign that was overwhelmingly focused on economic justice. Clinton characterized Sanders as insufficiently attentive to gender and racial issues, famously questioning whether breaking up the big banks would solve racism and sexism. His record of more moderate positions on hot-button issues like guns and immigration, which had helped maintain support with culturally conservative independents back in Vermont, also came under attack. 

But by 2018, the rising left — embodied by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all first elected that year — had fulsomely embraced identity-related causes alongside economic ones, believing them to be compatible and interconnected.

All this built up to the 2020 racial reckoning, in which the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin spurred massive nationwide protests and impassioned demands from the left for societal change. And some activists insisted this change had to include not just defunding but outright abolishing the police.

Yet the racial reckoning ended in disappointment, an “anti-woke” backlash soon followed, and rising crime seemed to discredit the idea of doing away with police. And though the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still calls for taking “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system,” there’s an increasingly open debate on the left about whether it should.

“The idea that police/prison abolitionism flow from ‘core socialist principles’ is pretty odd,” Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, posted recently.

“We need to create a permission structure on the left that allows socialists to have normal socialist beliefs about police & prisons (fairer, fewer, and more humane) instead of “abolish” which is flatly anarchist, and incompatible with any form of state socialism,” the socialist Cassie Pritchard wrote.

Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, fired back: “In what fantasy land are police not the natural enemies of workers and their movements? There is no ‘reforming away’ that core truth.”

How these tensions play out in Francesca Hong’s campaign

With Hong holding a large lead in recent polls, some Democrats — fearing what lies ahead for her in the general election — have essentially been trying to coach her into giving what they view as better answers on these “woke 1.0” questions.

When Jon Favreau interviewed Hong on Pod Save America this week, he asked about her old tweets — saying he was only focusing on this because Republicans would be sure to spend millions attacking her, and “I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

Asked about how her views on policing have evolved, Hong said: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.”

Favreau then asked if she still believed police exist to uphold white supremacy (as she tweeted in 2021), and Hong said, “No.”

But when Favreau asked specifically why she changed her mind on that, her answer was difficult to parse.

“When you talk to people who are most justice-impacted — a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities — justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people’s lives,” she said.

Then, when asked how her long-term vision of a world without prisons would work, Hong said: “What I know is attainable and the policies that actually meet the urgency of the moment and understanding the realities of it, means that we have to ensure that we’re funding our local governments, that we’re bringing justice to victims.”

She added, more succinctly: “What may have been aspirational is not primary.”

In late July, Universal and IMAX extended 70 mm IMAX showings of The Odyssey through mid-September. In New York City, these screenings basically sold out immediately, save for a few seats in the front row. People trekked to AMC Lincoln Square 13 — one of only 25 theaters in the US, 41 in the entire world, that can screen the film in this format — to wait in line to buy tickets in person because the app was constantly crashing. Similarly, September screenings across the country are still packed. 

This phenomenon signals to me that there are a lot of people (Virgos? Oracles?) who have a better grasp of the future, specifically the 30 days between August and September, as well as the concept of an upcoming Wednesday, than I will ever possess.

I also see it as a sign that scarcity is the most powerful social currency of the moment. Like a cup of frozen yogurt people wait hours for or a Trader Joe’s tote that incites a hot frenzy, seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece in its intended format is just the latest and greatest example of how access to something limited or exclusive has become a dominating cultural force.   

Why seeing The Odyssey in 70 mm IMAX is an odyssey in itself

Paul Hardart, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business who specializes in the marketing of film and television, sees the demand to see The Odyssey in this specific format as a collision between scarcity, and high value cultural currency. Hardart said that in order to really understand why the movie has become such a phenomenon, you have to understand that there’s a higher bar for going to see a movie in a theater than there used to be. 

“Coming out of the pandemic, what has changed — particularly in the movie business and particularly the theatrical movie exhibition experience — is people go to comedies, dramas, and adventure movies less frequently,” Hardart told me. One of the big motivators to get people off the couch and into a multiplex is the promise that the movie will be an experience.

“To get me out of my home, it’s got to be worth it,” Hardart said of the current mentality, adding that The Odyssey is exactly this type of movie. “I want to have an experience and I’m going to go with my friends and you know what, I might pay extra for it. I’m going to go see The Odyssey the way it was intended.” When you’re able to get an 70 mm IMAX ticket, not only do you get to see this great work of art, but you also get to tell everyone you were able to do so despite it being so difficult. 

“I saw it in a regular theater and I felt like a loser,” Hardart added. It’s not that the regular, non-70-mm viewing didn’t have great performances, or beautiful cinematography, or any of the factors that contributed to all of the critical adulation that the movie’s received. Hardart thought it was fantastic. But he wanted to see it in the way Nolan intended, in a format that’s only available in 41 rooms in the entire world.  This experience-first approach isn’t specific to movies; Hardart is also seeing it happen at concerts, festivals, and any kind of in-demand, exclusive event.

“If you go to the US Open, they have those Honey Deuce drinks; so many people there are taking selfies of themselves drinking these $25 drinks,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re there for tennis. But I think some of them are there to say, ‘I went to the Open, I had the experience, and I drank this bespoke drink, and I want you to like me or respect me or think I’m cool.’” 

The dopamine-fueled reason we want things that no one else has

Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at NYU Stern, studies the things people buy to feel cool, and the broader subject of consumer culture at large; he introduced me to a concept called signal theory. In the context of consumer behavior, it’s how we try to communicate to others that we’re hip, or smart, or likable — any trait that might not be immediately observable —  through the things we buy and possess. Thanks to social media, our experiences have become as visible and effective as material objects in telegraphing an identity.  

“We’re all constantly trying to show people who we are and what we’ve done and the life that we have,” he told Vox. “And scarcity is really gasoline on that fire.” 

There’s still massive social currency to be mined.

The more difficult it is to have an experience, the higher its social value. Watson said that humans get much more satisfaction when they’ve experienced or purchased something before everyone else has. Once everyone has access to the thing we’re using to signal, its social value goes down. 

This may help explain The Odyssey’s 70 mm IMAX phenomenon. Because there are a limited number of showings, seats, and theaters, it’s going to be a long time before the number of fans who’ve seen it in 70 mm outnumber the people who haven’t, if that day ever comes. There’s still massive social currency to be mined. 

There’s also the fact that humans love the anticipation of getting our hands on something, maybe even more than obtaining it, according to Ginger Pennington, an associate professor at Northwestern University. Pennington studies human motivation and consumer psychology. 

 “The pleasure that you’re feeling is more intense right before you get the thing you’re coveting than when you get or when you actually have it and are able to consume it or use it,” she said, explaining that the positive hit resembles the pleasure some people get from gambling, and is part of what drives shopping addiction. 

Essentially, getting to the front of a frozen yogurt line is going to be more satisfying than whatever the frozen yogurt tastes like; nabbing a Trader Joe’s bag is going to make us much happier than stuffing the tote. And perhaps finally getting tickets to The Odyssey will give you more pleasure than actually seeing The Odyssey. Though, to be clear, I do not pretend to know how intensely one can love The Odyssey or Christopher Nolan. I just know I need to see it in 70 mm.

In 2014, Narendra Modi pioneered the use of social media and digital campaigning in India to become prime minister. Known as one of the first global politicians to harness the power of the internet, he has the most social media followers of any world leader currently in office. 

Today, over a decade since Modi’s digital-first political campaign, an internet-fueled youth movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (or the Cockroach People’s Party) is using the same social media platforms to organize protests, successfully forcing the resignation of one of Prime Minister Modi’s top advisers. The Indian government has responded with a crackdown, arresting protesters and increasingly censoring X, Meta, and other social meda sites. The legacy of the Cockroach Janta Party will be complex: On one hand, it brought to the forefront important conversations around Gen Z unemployment and meritocracy; on the other, it may have pushed the Indian government to create stricter new censorship laws to silence future dissent.

The internet that helped propel Modi to power is becoming a tool that a new generation uses against him. How much further will Modi’s government go to censor its people and restrict free speech? 

Read more about censorship in India and the Cockroach Janta Party:

• Censorship tracker on MediaNama, a live list of censorship following the Jantar Mantar protests in New Delhi
• “Social Media Modi-Fication: Narendra Modi’s use of Social Media in Indian Elections 2014”
• “India CJP protests: Young women face harassment and abuse”
• “Activists decry AI surveillance at CJP protests”
• “India’s young are more educated than ever. Why are so many jobless?”

If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

Young American men are in trouble. They are the loneliest demographic in the Western world. Their social circles are shrinking. At all ages, they are significantly more likely to die by suicide than their female peers.

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades. 

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play. 

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?

In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.

Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”

The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them. 

What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it. 

In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?

The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.

It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.

Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.

Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?

It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically. 

Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.

I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.

A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?

I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them. 

The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.” 

When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”

How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?

One of the best examples was in 2022, when Epic Games did fundraisers for the Red Cross through things like Fortnite. Their game store raised more money for the charity and its work in places like Ukraine than were donated to it by the countries of France or Italy.

You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities. 

That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.

I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?

Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds. 

This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society. 

The loss of investment in third spaces, especially for teens, is definitely something we’re seeing in the US as well.

You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?

I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association. 

Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work. 

So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”

Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games. 

It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent. 

Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign. 

It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.

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In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.

Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began. 

At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war. 

And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable? 

Quite worried, indeed. 

When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap. 

These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world. 

Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks. 

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.” 

About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.

“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant. 

How did this happen at all? 

When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators. 

Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.

The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents. 

How do we avoid cyber-armageddon?

If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go. 

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly. 

Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises. 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” 

Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.

At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.

Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress. 

In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely. 

As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”

The acrimonious Democratic primary contest in Michigan is over: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will move on to face the Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers this November for a must-win seat in controlling the US Senate.

Al-Sayed’s victory, as the first Muslim major-party Senate nominee, is historic for Muslim Americans. But the race also pitted various constituencies of the Democratic base against each other, and set the Democratic establishment and heavy AIPAC spending against El-Sayed, a progressive political newcomer.

To get a better sense of the significance of this moment, and to get an on-the-ground perspective of the repairing of bonds that Democrats must now do to prepare for the general election, I turned to another trailblazer: Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.

In 2023, Dearborn became the first majority-Arab American city, and a large percentage of its residents are Muslim. Hammoud was the first of both communities to be elected mayor. He has long been on the front lines of how these communities engage with, or feel left out of, the Democratic Party. He was a prominent voice of the Uncommitted movement back in 2024 which urged people to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries in 2024 in protest of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Gaza war. That issue pushed many residents out of the party. Later that year, Dearborn, along with Michigan, shifted right, with Donald Trump winning a plurality of the city’s vote and contributing to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s eventual loss.

Two years later, things are very different, he told me. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You endorsed and campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed. How are you feeling today, and how is your community feeling?

Many of us are feeling exhausted because we haven’t slept. But what I can tell you, honestly, is that many people are feeling hopeful. In addition to, obviously, the outcome of the elections yesterday up and down the ballot, what was hopeful this morning is just seeing the whole party come together.

So kudos to Congresswoman [Haley] Stevens, to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, to Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, for announcing right away that we know what we’re facing down in November, we have a lot more that we agree about than we disagree about; it’s time to come together and continue marching forward and to build this momentum and this movement.

But I think overall, people are just feeling inspired. I’m out and about today, and a lot of people are just approaching, talking about how hopeful they are.

How much of that hopefulness is about the possibility of El-Sayed making history as a Muslim American in the Senate?

Listen, most certainly I’m not going to take away the significance of a potential first. And as a fellow Abdul — I mean, Abdul is just short for all of our full names — it’s beautiful to see a son of Michigan who’s authentically himself, welcomed and uplifted by the people of Michigan. What is more American than that? That you’re willing to support a candidate regardless of the direction in which they pray, because of the direction in which they lead? And that is the American story.

I’m wondering, are you worried at all about the spotlight that this has all brought, or fearful about more ugliness? Already the GOP is trafficking in Islamophobia: Mike Rogers tweeted out that he’s going to save Michigan from El-Sayed, just as when he went after terrorists.

The ugliness and the Islamophobia and the bigotry is not going to be anything new. Keep in mind, what did they do to our first Black president, whose middle name happened to be Hussein? How much Islamophobia was thrown out there at the idea that he may have been Muslim? 

And when we’ve had women run for office, whether it was Secretary Clinton or Vice President Harris, you saw the sexism come out. Time and time again, regardless of who you have at bat, this type of hateful rhetoric always seems to emerge. And unfortunately, the algorithms seem to promote it. 

That’s honestly what’s most problematic: a lot of the rhetoric you do hear online, it’s fake accounts, it’s bots, and it’s because these social media owners and operators, these conglomerates and these monoliths, are so afraid of the president that they’re unwilling to have a check on hate speech. Rather than focus on the hate, again, people feel hopeful because you have candidates who are authentically themselves, who are not only welcomed and accepted, but uplifted and supported. And it’s because they spoke to a set of values that people of all faiths, of all backgrounds, of all ethnicities, of multi-generational, multi-ethnic coalitions that were constructed, all share. And they’re a set of values that we want to apply globally and they’re not exclusionary.

A lot of money was spent on painting an educated, kind man as misogynistic, who is married to a far smarter physician, who is the father of two young daughters. And I’m a girl dad myself, married to a far smarter physician. But stereotypes, they get acted on for the purposes of immediate political satisfaction…there will be some carryover as a result, with Republicans now utilizing those stereotypes, trying to cast fear because of Abdul’s name, Abdulrahman. They tweeted out his full name. He’s Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, I’m Abdullah Hussein Hammoud, so unfortunately that will happen. But again, I choose to believe that people are bigger than the naysayers and people are bigger than all the negativity.

Was there anything about El-Sayed’s contest that reminded you of your own run for mayor?

Obviously my race was far smaller. And I’m in the city of Dearborn, where people expect somebody with a name like mine to come to office, although we were the first at the time. I’ll tell you, even then in that race, in a city like Dearborn, there was a lot of rhetoric that said Hammoud could be the mayor for some, but not the mayor for all.

And you hear that underlying nature with the Mike Rogers attack ads, with the Republican Senate campaign coming out and saying, look at his full name. 

What is wrong with that full name? It’s a beautifully American name. And so yes, there are similarities in that sense, similarities in other candidates who were the first who rose to power. 

What surprised you about this primary? 

On the ground, we felt like there was a lot of momentum. And obviously I’m talking about the city of Dearborn, and obviously El-Sayed took nearly 80 percent of the vote here.

I would say that this election was also a stark reminder that people are hungry for a politics that answers to working families, not to corporate PACs and special interests. And the influence of big money has too often drowned out the voices of everyday people. And so, it’s beautiful to see that there’s an opportunity to restore a government that works for those it was meant to serve. And I think that is an underlying story that is foundational to the campaigns we’re seeing not only in Michigan, not only in the US Senate race, but in campaigns all across this country. It’s the mini versus the money, as Abdul would say.

How have things changed since 2024? Trump made major inroads with Muslim and Arab American communities back then — how does it feel now?

What’s changed are candidates who are trying to build authentic connections with people on the ground on a set of values and ideals that we can all corral around, versus in 2024, just being told that, well, the other candidate is worse.

Everybody knows what Abdul’s platform is. And remember, people in Dearborn didn’t vote for Abdul because he’s Muslim. They voted for Abdul because he showed up, he knocked on the doors, he went to places of worship. He canvassed and rallied. He had an agenda that wanted to tackle the main issues that so many working families are facing, economic issues. 

And obviously in ’24, slightly different, but I would say that people did not feel heard in 2024. And yes, Trump came to the City of Dearborn. I rejected meeting with Trump. I spoke to the threat that Donald Trump presented, to unravel the very fabric of America, and we see that happening each and every single day. But unfortunately at that time, the [Democratic] party was not willing to move. And I think there were lessons happening in that election, and I think we’re kind of seeing that play out right now.

You were a pretty vocal leader of the Uncommitted movement back then. My colleague Astead Herndon recently made the case that El-Sayed’s campaign has its roots in this movement, and in some way his victory came about because of those 2024 efforts. I’m wondering if you agree, or how you think about that legacy.

For me, getting 100,000 votes for Uncommitted, I don’t categorize it personally as victories. For me, it was, can you demonstrate that children being blown up in their homes or in their schools, or in hospitals being bulldozed, that these are things that universally we as human beings should all be opposed to? And you saw a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition be constructed around that.

It wasn’t an Arab, a Muslim issue. And in this election, what I see is that that coalition grew.

We’re still seeing atrocities unfold, but what is beautiful is people are bold enough, daring enough to come forward now and say, “Hey, why send our tax dollars for death and destruction when we need to build and uplift and support working families here?” Blind to who is being killed or murdered. And I think that’s ultimately what we were trying to achieve. 

The Uncommitted movement was an anti-war coalition, a pro-justice movement. And I think that’s what you’re seeing manifest in these candidates on the ground. And so I don’t like to consider anything a mere victory. It’s one election. We’re in another election right now. And ultimately victory is when working families feel seen, feel heard, and when policies change to change their lives for the better.

That is victory and that has yet to happen.

You mention this multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition. I’m wondering if there have been any constructive interfaith conversations you’ve heard, or had, in this primary.

We worked a lot with organizers on the ground when they asked us, how do you mobilize and canvass in cities like Dearborn? And we told them, it’s not the traditional sense where you send out a text message or do phone banking. You got to show up. You got to be seen in community with them. 

We believe in authentic relationships. And I think that the same is true about many communities where they don’t want you to show up just during election time. And so I think the coalition-building and the community-building has been happening for quite some time between myself and my residents, obviously.

We educated them; when we did do canvassing, I gave them the tips about the cultural norms, the greetings. Don’t jump right into politics. Ask somebody: What do they care about? Find the issue that matters to them and try to uplift that somehow and speak to that. Show up multiple times. “Oh, I appreciate you passing by a place of worship once.” It’s not enough. You should be there every single week, if you authentically mean and stand by the idea that you want this community to support you. What are you doing today? Today’s the day after the election — are you coming back?

It was a pretty bitter race at times, particularly on the Israel and Palestine question. Lots of attempts were made by Republicans and Democrats to drive a wedge between Muslim and Jewish voters both in Michigan and in other races around the country. What’s it going to take to rebuild trust, to repair relationships? 

Prior to the genocide in Gaza, there’s been strong relationships between the Jewish community, the Muslim community and the Arab communities. The City of Dearborn is a city that uplifted its Jewish uncle Bernie Sanders twice in the presidential election. I personally endorsed Andy Levin when he first ran for Congress against Congresswoman Haley Stevens. We’re in contact. 

I’ve worked with Jewish Voice for Peace (the pro-Palestinian national Jewish activist organization) for several years now. We just put up the Wall of Tears mural in the City of Dearborn, which highlights the nearly 20,000 children in Gaza that have been killed. They brought the idea forward to work with us. 

Sometimes the media likes to speak to a relationship that is fraught with many issues. The reality is we know that antisemitism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment are one and the same. When you see a rise in one, you see a rise in the other, and we have to counteract all this together. And we have to distinguish between criticism of a government and criticism of a people.

Well before he became CEO of one of the most valuable startups of all time, Dario Amodei was a 26-year-old PhD student studying biophysics at Princeton, obsessing over how his money would leave its mark on the world. 

On what one might assume was likely a fairly modest academic stipend and with no discernible inheritance from his parents, an Italian-American leatherworker and a project manager for libraries, Amodei gave $10,000 in 2009 to a relatively new charity evaluator called GiveWell. Founded by two ex-hedge funders before effective altruism was even a phrase, GiveWell ranked charities primarily by a single dispassionate metric: dollars per lives saved. 

It was the kind of approach that clearly appealed to Amodei — though it may not have gone far enough for him. In 2010, he wrote a guest blog post for GiveWell dissecting the effectiveness of two of the group’s top global health charities: VillageReach and StopTB. Both charities could save a life at roughly comparable costs — around $545 — but while StopTB treated or prevented tuberculosis in adults, VillageReach’s interventions mostly saved babies and children. Most people would probably feel that saving a child trumps saving an adult; indeed, even effective altruists often agree on the grounds that children have more life to live left. 

Amodei, though, viewed that as a liability for VillageReach. An adult death, he wrote, is “perhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infant’s death,” because adults “are capable of deeper and more meaningful experiences.” As uncomfortable as such a calculus may be, he wrote, “on a practical level one is forced to make difficult decisions with limited funds.”

Though he declared StopTB to have “superiority on cost-effectiveness,” Amodei ultimately gave VillageReach higher marks for their tightly controlled “chain of execution” — the full sequence of steps between a dollar of donation and a vaccine reaching a child. That was important enough to Amodei that, despite his initial reservations, he ultimately gave VillageReach his entire $10,000 donation in 2009 — enough to save, he estimated, the lives of 20 babies across rural Africa. 

But Amodei hoped the ultimate impact would be even greater. “The money I give out is not just a one-shot intervention,” he concluded, “but also a vote on what I want the philanthropic sector to look like in the future.”

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The future, it seems, has arrived. Amodei is now a multibillionaire, his fortune poised to skyrocket further if and when Anthropic goes public, as many expect it to do later this year. He is one of dozens of new billionaires and millions of new millionaires minted virtually overnight by the AI boom. 

There have already been plenty of aftershocks to this emerging AI megawealth, like the stratospheric San Francisco housing market, the nerdmaxxing of sex work, and the proliferation of all-you-can-biohack peptide raves. 

But the most consequential, and perhaps weirdest, way this burgeoning AI-ristocracy plans to burn through its cash is by giving a huge chunk of it away. Amodei is one of several AI multibillionaires — alongside his co-founders at Anthropic and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — who have pledged to donate most of their wealth in their lifetime. But even their obscene degree of collective wealth — they are worth $111.8 billion as of this writing — is only one slice of an AI bonanza that seems poised to balloon into one of the most consequential waves of American philanthropy of all time, one deeply shaped by the same utilitarian impulse that guided one of young Amodei’s first big donations. 

“I am having thousands of conversations with people who are perplexed by their own fortune and determined to give with thoughtfulness and urgency in a way that I haven’t, frankly, experienced before,” said Nick Allardice, CEO of the effective-altruism-aligned anti-poverty group GiveDirectly, whose work is grounded in research on the efficacy of unconditional cash transfers. “It’s just really important that people get started, that they don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”

This is neither your father’s, your grandfather’s, nor your great-great-grandfather’s philanthropy. If Gilded Age industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, a devout baptist, gave in service of their religiosity or, as was the case for Andrew Carnegie, their reverence for civic duty, then most of today’s AI barons carry forth their own spiritual tradition, one at the very least informed by the vigorously optimized commandments of the effective altruism movement. They appear far less likely to fund Carnegie-style works like opera houses or libraries than they are to put their faith — and their billions — in what they believe they can measure, calculated on the cost benefit analysis of a life saved or an apocalypse averted. 

In some cases, as Amodei did as a grad student, they’ve already begun the process. “These are people who have committed themselves to giving back even before they were very wealthy,” said Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, an organization that developed a campaign popular with effective altruists to give away at least 10 percent of their yearly income, “people who have been building the habit of giving for a very long time.”

And it is, to be clear, a very particular kind of giving. Amodei was the 43rd person to sign the 10 percent pledge the year after it launched in 2009, and its roster has since swelled to over 11,000 people, including more than a dozen current or former Anthropic employees. Donations made through Giving What We Can’s platform are on track to grow by 40 percent this year, Hoeijmakers told me, and support for animal welfare charities — a cause particularly and unusually popular with effective altruists — has already exceeded its 2025 total. 

“We have the resources available to tackle things that we should have tackled a long time ago,” like eradicating malaria or putting an end to factory farming, Hoeijmakers said. “I hope this funding wave, if it comes, will show that we can actually solve global problems at scale if we put our mind to it and our resources.”

Devoutness has long been a virtue in philanthropy, which largely originated in religious tithing, and there are plenty of worse things to have faith in than numbers. Having a communal guiding philosophy will undoubtedly help effective altruism’s newly flush disciples follow through on their promises far more prolifically and consistently than they would without it. And despite its high profile, less than 1 percent of total philanthropy came from effective altruism last year, according to Hoeijmakers. Most rich people prefer to give to the normie causes, like their alma maters, not to the sort of chronically underfunded global problems — like protecting animals or fighting lead poisoning — that effective altruists justifiably care most about. 

Now, quite suddenly, there’s about to be much more money to go around for these causes, which as Hoeijmakers hopes, could help finally address some of the enormous, entrenched global problems that more traditional philanthropists have all but ignored. 

But such piety also carries its own risks. In a viral Substack post from May, Stripe executive Nan Ransohoff argued — rather dismissively, but not incorrectly — that “traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it” in this new wave of AI-funded effective philanthropy, that these donors “will have an affinity” for “tech-caliber talent and execution” and will be “by default wary of folks who come from traditional philanthropy.” Ransohoff called instead for Silicon Valley to build its own new ecosystem of funds and “philanthropic startups” to cater to this new wave of wealth, emboldened with the “speed, intensity, and execution of a top technology startup.” Many of those old-school philanthropic people wrote indignant rebuttals to Ransohoff’s piece, arguing against their own obsolescence at a time when a number of the organizations they support are increasingly starved for funding. 

Those responses are, in aggregate, also correct, after their fashion. The new AI philanthropists will likely aspire to new models and approaches, as Ransohoff rightly argues. But they reinvent the wheel at our collective peril, not least of all because ignoring past efforts and steamrolling over existing infrastructure might make even the most optimized giving less efficient, and certainly less informed, than it would be otherwise. 

“Acknowledge what’s here and what’s working — don’t just ignore it,” said Nicole Taylor, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. “These folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.”

How much money are we actually talking about?

As Ransohoff pointed out in her piece, a lot of money is on the line here — and, along with it, a lot of cautious hope about how it might get spent. 

Ransohoff posits that if you add up the promises of Amodei and his fellow co-founders, the worth of the OpenAI Foundation — the nonprofit that owns a big chunk of OpenAI’s profits — and rumored contributions from Anthropic employees, then the AI wealth boom could, in theory, lead to at least $37 billion and as much as $100 billion in total annual giving, a sizable boost to the roughly $617 billion that was given in the US in total last year.

“These folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.”

Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation president and ceo

This projection should be treated with cautious skepticism. For one thing, hundreds of billions in cash are not just sitting around in some Bay Area money vault; much of today’s AI wealth is wrapped up in potentially volatile equity, and many lofty philanthropic pledges ultimately fail to reach their full potential. 

“What people say before they become extremely wealthy, and then how they behave after they become extremely wealthy, sometimes diverge,” said David Goldberg, founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, which recruits tech leaders to donate a portion of their future earnings. It doesn’t help either, he said, that some tech luminaries — namely, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – have come to treat most philanthropy with disdain in recent years, an ethos that has permeated some parts of the sector. Musk, it’s worth noting, actually pledged to give most of his wealth away himself back in 2012, though, like many other ultra-wealthy signatories of the Giving Pledge, he seems quite unlikely to keep that promise.  

That’s not to say AI money isn’t already flowing. Coefficient Giving, a grantmaker that evolved out of GiveWell, is poised to steward a large portion of the coming philanthropic bonanza. For most of its history, the group operated essentially as the private grantmaking operation for Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. But it recently made a significant pivot towards operating pooled, multidonor funds for anyone interested in causes like lead exposure, farm animal welfare, or questions of AI safety. Just last month, Coefficient Giving announced it would donate $1 billion to GiveWell alone this year, more than five times the $175 million the group initially pledged seven months ago. They chose to do so explicitly, because Coefficient Giving expects to receive much more funding very soon.

There’s also the OpenAI Foundation, which has already begun pumping $100 million into Alzheimer’s research, and Anthropic, which recently announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to invest $200 million worth of grants, API credits, and technical support into global health work. And plenty of Silicon Valley elites have begun making promises of their own. Earlier this summer, David Silver pledged to donate 100 percent of his equity proceeds from his UK-based $1.1 billion startup Ineffable Intelligence — the largest commitment in Founders Pledge history — and many signers of the Founders Pledge will see their portfolios skyrocket in response to the coming wave of AI IPOs. 

But Goldberg does believe there’s a risk that as people get rich fast, they will donate money “much, much slower” than they intended, simply because they get “too busy, they don’t have the right support, or there’s some form of analysis paralysis.” 

All of this is to say that the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom are not going to function as some sort of charitable monolith. Some, like Musk, probably won’t give much or anything to charity at all. Others may park their money in donor-advised funds — a kind of secretive charitable investment fund — or, eventually, a private foundation, both of which tend to dole out their money gingerly, meaning donors can enjoy the tax benefits of charity many years before they actually opt to help anyone with their money. 

Effective altruism is about to have its big break

While its name recognition may be relatively high these days, the effective-giving movement is still on the margins of American philanthropy. But if this new wave is anywhere near as big as everyone says it will be, then that won’t be the case for long. 

For the uninitiated, my ex-colleague Dylan Matthews has written plenty on what effective altruism is, but, in sum, it is a movement that believes in goodmaxxing, in the idea of using rigorous research to save the greatest number of lives possible, including future human lives and farm animal lives. Once an EA poster boy, Sam Bankman-Fried sullied the movement in 2022, which may help explain why some prominent adherents — like Amodei and his sister and co-founder Daniela, whose husband Holden Karnofsky co-founded GiveWell — have distanced themselves somewhat from the movement in recent years. 

But even when donors shy away from the term, the causes and principles of utilitarian evaluation that have defined effective altruism from its early days still permeate the new moneyed corners of Silicon Valley, particularly among those most poised to give a lot — and to give a lot quickly. 

Ask any animal welfare or global health nonprofit — or, better yet, an expert-led pooled fund with a reputation for rigorous charity evaluations — and they will tell you that they are preparing for, and possibly even beginning to see glimmers of, a windfall. 

“We are very much anticipating a significant influx of funding,” said Dan Shannon, CEO of the Humane League, which fights to end factory farming. “I am cautiously optimistic that this could be a real sea change for us,” because “even if it’s a fraction of the big numbers being bandied about,” it could do a lot for a movement that operates on less than $300 million per year. 

He said he’s been speaking with other leaders about the possibility of creating a pooled fund to absorb more cash, which has become an increasingly popular solution for donors who want the rigor of a 2010 Dario Amodei-style deep dive on a charity’s methodology and effectiveness without having to do the math or thinking themselves.

Among the more idiosyncratic elements of their ethos is their fixation with existential risk, as in, how likely is this thing — this mirror bacteria; this nuclear war; this asteroid; or, of course, this artificial intelligence — to destroy humanity? Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic in the first place because he believed OpenAI had failed to take the safety risks of AI seriously enough. 

Much of the new EA wealth will likely go toward efforts to make life on Earth better now or in the near future through donations to causes like medical research, animal advocacy, or anti-poverty interventions. But another, more controversial chunk of it will go toward mitigating existential risks, especially that of Silicon Valley’s own Frankensteinian creation: AI itself.

“If you’re breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it? I wrestle with the question myself.”

David Goldberg, Founders Pledge founder and ceo

It’s that last cause that has proven most controversial. If these billionaires are so afraid that AI will break the world, then why, you might ask, would they not just stop building it in the first place? Is there not an inherent contradiction, a conflict of interest perchance, in the sense that those tasked with making sure AI does not, let’s say, build a bioweapon, take your kid’s job, or make everyone dumb, are doing so with money made from the very thing they’re trying to regulate? 

In other words, “If you’re breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it?” asked Goldberg of Founders Pledge. “I wrestle with the question myself.” In the end, “this is a technology that’s coming, regardless of who’s building it,” he reasoned, and it is better that the presumably good guys — the ones bothering to think about the consequences at all — build it first.

If you broke the world, can you fix it?

Even if the AI bubble pops, and if the much-discussed giving boom ends up smaller than many anticipate, it could still lead to significant changes for some of the world’s most neglected problems. And if it is close to as big as it’s expected to be, then what happens next could be gravitationally transformative, reshaping how the world lives, considers animals, and adapts to its most disruptive technological breakthrough in a century. 

“I don’t think most people think about factory farming as something that could actually be eradicated. Full stop,” Shannon said, but “my grandparents lived in a time without factory farming, and I think my grandchildren could live without factory farming,” and “that could ultimately be the legacy of this wave of philanthropy.”

Ending the pervasive use of cages — “probably the cruelest way that animals are treated on industrialized factory farms,” says Shannon — could cost as little as $500 million over 25 years, or less than 1 percent of the $60 billion that Ransohoff estimates Anthropic employees may have sitting in donor-advised funds, thanks to Anthropic’s generous early gift-matching policy, which could quickly turn into real cash once the company goes public. 

“There’s so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world. We live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.”

Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO

Developing a new vaccine costs an average of $886.8 million, which may sound like a lot, but it is equivalent to less than 6 percent of Amodei’s newfound fortune. It is less than what the OpenAI Foundation has pledged to invest in disease research and other causes next year alone. 

Then, there’s, perhaps, the biggest target of all. Ending extreme poverty everywhere would cost just over $300 billion annually, according to one analysis — which is a hefty price tag, but less than one-fifth of what the wealthy spend on luxury goods each year. “There’s so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world,” said Allardice of GiveDirectly. “We live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.” If this new wave of giving is wielded well, he said, then “we have the potential to collectively raise the floor of human experience.”

That’s a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a bunch of bustling young tech workers still processing what it means to be quite suddenly, dazzlingly wealthy. It is also a lot of faith to place in an industry that has left more Americans feeling scared than hopeful about what a future flush with AI portends. 

If you aim to fix global poverty, but the technology that made you rich also threatens to make everyone else poor, then whose side are you really on? To be clear, many of the AI-ristocracy have fretted, often apocalyptically, over the implications of their creation long before most of us knew we had anything to worry about. But that doesn’t mean they know how to fix this, and, at the very least, they will not do so alone.

The last time the ground shook from such a supermassive earthquake of wealth was arguably during the Gilded Age, when robber barons and industrial tycoons turned American charity — until then, mostly almsgiving and poorhouses — into big business. They seeded enormous philanthropic empires like the Rockefeller Foundation and beloved institutions like Carnegie Hall. But, even as their exorbitant fortunes made life indisputably better — birthing the modern library, the yellow fever vaccine, and many social services — they were often built atop systems of vicious exploitation. When those systems changed, as they did eventually, it did not come from the benevolence of industrial barons, but from sustained public pressure for better labor protections.

Effective giving was born out of the conviction that many of the world’s most important causes go vastly underfunded, which, in turn, demand relentless prioritization of the limited funds that exist. If those causes are no longer underfunded — a plausible scenario if AI wealth continues to grow at the pace many expect it to — then that might change the calculus of how effective altruists decide what’s worth funding. It might even open up some wiggle room for new causes, including somewhat less measurable — but not necessarily less impactful — approaches. “Now we’ll be thinking more about what we can do with a lot of resources; which larger problems can we solve?” said Hoeijmakers. “You’ll put slightly less relatively into evaluating every small dollar on the margin.” 

This already seems to be happening, to some extent, at places like Coefficient Giving, which, in recent years, has begun adding new funds for causes like housing policy reform that fall out of effective altruism’s traditional purview. “We don’t want to be only appealing to the subset of people who happen to be interested in effective altruism,” CEO Alexander Berger told my colleague Bryan Walsh last year. “Our aim — and so far we’ve seen some success — is being a resource to people who have never heard of effective altruism or are not interested in it or don’t find it very motivating or welcoming. And I think that’s good.”

The optimal outcome here is not that Silicon Valley wealth edges out everything else, but that the siloes begin to break down altogether and that there is enough money to go around that the sector no longer needs to make overly intellectualized trade-offs, like young Amodei sitting in his dorm room, ascribing a number on the relative worth of a parent versus a child. 

“It’s tough to find the right balance between caring and hard-nosed realism,” he wrote at the time, “but it is possible, and it is, as far as I know, the only way to truly change the world.” He’s about to search for that balance on a much bigger scale.