The CEO of Amazon Web Services tried to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers.

Google launched its first advanced chip into orbit to pave the way for space data centers.

Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups. 

That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut. 

A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.

But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself. 

When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.

According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.

“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”

The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.

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A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.

For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”

Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere. 

Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.

The post We’ll never know the art of Jeff Landry’s Meta, SpaceX deals appeared first on Salon.com.

‘They Are the Party of Data Centers’

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) has some major data center skeletons in his closet from his time as lieutenant governor of Ohio.

He knows it, his Democratic challenger — the longtime Ohio elected official Sherrod Brown — knows it, his colleagues in the Senate know it, voters back home are well aware (thanks to an ad blitz from Brown’s campaign in recent months). For the past several weeks, Husted has been trying to convince his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate to pass a piece of legislation that functions as little more than a press release to state utility regulators; I’ll get into that more below. The bill would, essentially encourage our nation’s Big Tech oligarchs to cover the cost of rising utility expenses tied to data centers and AI model training.

I wrote about the dramatic saga surrounding Husted’s legislative push as a remedy for his past fervent support for data center development in Ohio extensively here if you’d like to catch up. The TL;DR is that after years of championing new data center construction in the state as Ohio’s lieutenant governor, Husted is now calling for regulations to be placed on who foots the electric bill for data center-related spikes in energy prices in local communities. He is also joining Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in supporting a pause on sales and tax breaks for tech companies that want to build new facilities in Ohio. (It’s not just Republicans and it’s not just Ohio; several other states and even blue cities are passing new regulations or have placed temporary moratoriums on data center construction in their areas.)

Husted’s long-shot bid to try to pass the bill, called the Ratepayer Protection Act, was blocked by Senate Democrats this afternoon. While Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) voted with Republicans today, it wasn’t enough to overcome the 60 vote filibuster in the upper chamber and Senate Dems were able to block it on a procedural vote, 57-43.

While the bill passed the House 417-3 earlier this month, Senate Democrats (besides the four who voted with Republicans) have been roundly criticizing the legislation as nothing more than a show pony for Husted to use during the waning days of his campaign to combat Brown’s relentless attacks.

Also, the bill is simply limp. It requires that state utility regulators consider implementing the new federal standards that direct Big Tech companies to cover the cost of rising electric bills and grid updates needed to run their data centers — within two years of the bill’s passage. Republicans like Husted have argued that the legislation would compel state utility regulators to act on the new federal standard. But even some Senate Republicans have joined Democrats in saying the bill is little more than a suggestion. Per MS NOW:

“Would I like to do more? Yeah,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said. “But on the other hand, is it better than nothing? Yeah.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., agreed that the bill doesn’t accomplish much, noting that most utilities are “managed through local and state decision making.” 

But he also agreed that it “probably would help” Husted in his re-election efforts.

My colleague Emine Yücel was up on the Hill this afternoon as senators headed in to vote on the legislation. She was able to catch up with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who each slammed the measure and the GOP’s last-minute attempts to do clean up on its past position on accelerating nationwide AI development.

“Donald Trump is going to tweet 10 times between now and the election how much he loves data centers. Their position is clear. They are the party of data centers. They are the party of fealty to the AI industry and this fakery that they are putting on the floor right now isn’t going to fool anybody. So they’re desperate,” Murphy told reporters including TPM.

Murphy continued, going off on the Trump administration and President Trump personally for his role in encouraging the Big Tech oligarchy:

The data center conversation is a proxy for corruption. You know, people see that there is a deep integration between these big billion dollar tech companies and the Trump administration, and they don’t like it, and the proliferation of data centers is a sign to people that the only thing that matters in this administration is money and billionaire corporate power … Yes, sometimes this is about water use and land use, but it’s really a question of corruption and the data centers are an avatar for a corrupt relationship between the technology companies and the Trump administration. That’s why, that’s why the last bill they’re doing is an attempt to change two years of this corruption story. It’s going to laughably not work.

Warner put his opposition to the legislation quite frankly.

“The American public does not like data centers, capital data centers. They’re concerned about job dislocation, and they’re now concerned about safety,” he said. “And we are ignoring not just the CEOs, but frankly, you talk to the banks, you talk to corporate America … they need the safety assurance as well.”

— Nicole LaFond

Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.

The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development. 

Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

 

When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading. 

For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right. 

But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration. 

By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts. 

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Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry. 

An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.

This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly. 

On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”

Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.

The post Fox News tries to cool conservative anger over AI appeared first on Salon.com.

‘We Are Not For Sale’

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson officially kicked off his reelection campaign last Sunday for the Feb. 23, 2027 mayoral election where he will face a crowded field of challengers. At least 14 people have announced their intention to run for mayor of the Windy City, though that number is expected to drop once nominating petition filing deadlines pass in late October.

I’m talking to you about the Chicago mayoral race because, in one of his most sweeping actions he’s taken since launching his reelection bid, Johnson today announced a city-wide temporary moratorium on data center development and expansion in Chicago for 12 months. The move is backed by a handful of city alderpersons, and the ordinance will block any new construction or expansion while the city of Chicago focuses on developing a “comprehensive regulatory framework for data centers,” a press release announcing Johnson’s ordinance said.

Johnson is selling it as a temporary pause that will give the city time to develop a strategy for how to allow local data center development that spurs economic growth, while not actively allowing for the kind of rampant construction that Americans across the political spectrum now vehemently oppose. Community resistance to these new facilities has reached a fever pitch as we enter the final stretch of the midterms campaign cycle. A growing mountain of evidence shows the infrastructure that houses cloud computing and artificial intelligence model testing is increasingly draining communities’ water supplies and contributing to rising electric costs.

“Chicago is open for business, but we are not for sale,” Johnson declared in a statement announcing his decision. “We welcome innovation, investment, and the jobs and opportunities that come with it, but growth must be done responsibly and in a way that protects the health, safety and quality of life of Chicago residents.”

Some of his opponents in the mayoral race argue the measure doesn’t go far enough, claiming the mayor is just buying himself time for his reelection bid. Others, like Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, have claimed that backlash to data centers is overblown and that a temporary ban on new construction ignores the fact that there are already 39 active data centers operating within city limits.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has already joined a handful of other state leaders that have overturned or temporarily paused new tax breaks for Big Tech companies looking to build new data centers in the state. Ohio is another place where Republican candidates are desperate to show voters they support some level of softening of the state’s decade-old tax incentives for data center construction.

Several other cities across Illinois have already placed a pause on new construction of the facilities as public backlash spreads. Chicago joins several major U.S. cities that have recently placed new restrictions on development while they try to sort out how to properly regulate new construction and to pass off any monetary or environment costs onto the major tech companies fueling the AI boom. (Americans are increasingly revolting against AI itself as whistleblowers warn of doomsday scenarios and artificial intelligence threatens jobs).

It’s a bipartisan issue that elected officials across the political spectrum are rushing to be on the right side of. Except President Trump, who has actively insulted Americans who are suspicious of the new projects and whose administration is actively trying to change federal policy that allows for community input at the onset of new data center construction.

When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas,” host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” gathering face-to-face with his audience isn’t just network promotion — it’s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change.

“I love live events,” he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having “a head start” on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. “There’s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it’s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.”

Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW’s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network’s top anchors — including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — for in-depth conversations with thousands of Texas viewers ahead of the November midterms.  

Hayes will arrive in Texas with a deep respect for his viewers, whom he calls “sophisticated and informed” about the issues — from Democratic hopes surrounding state Rep. James Talarico’s Senate campaign to fights over data centers, development and the future of Texas communities. But he will also be bringing a theory of what’s been happening in the Lone Star State over the past several years. Describing the state as, “on its own terms,” perhaps the country’s most successful laboratory for right-wing policy, Hayes said that Texas’ long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.

 

“There [are] certain parts about the Texas model that have genuinely been successful,” Hayes conceded. “Housing is pretty cheap. It’s been pretty fast-growing, and in that cheap housing and fast-growing, it’s a place that’s diversifying, and a lot of immigrants have made a life there.” 

But the state’s Republican leadership has to face reality: “If people want to move to Texas, which a lot of people do, then the state’s composition is going to change,” he said. The same in-migration fueling the Texas boom is also, in some measure, quietly padding the GOP’s own coalition. “[The state GOP] have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship to that.” 

This tension surfaced most recently in the backlash to social-media posts by former Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency with a remit that goes beyond its name, regulating oil, gas, alternative fuels, pipeline safety, and surface mining and reclamation. French posted a photo on X after Texas’ upset win over Ohio State showing University of Texas students — many of them South Asian — in the stands, and appeared to condemn a changing, more diverse Texas. Hayes said the response from prominent Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, was partly about the political consequences of alienating the growing number of South Asian Texans, some of whom may already be conservative or Republican-leaning.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the people in the photo are Republicans,” Hayes said, referring to the image French criticized. “This is Texas.”

Hayes sees Talarico as a serious test of whether that opening can be exploited into statewide electoral gains for Democrats. “Talarico, I think, is a strong candidate, and I think he’s got a real shot,” he said. Texas Democrats still need “a whole bunch of things to break the right way” to win statewide, he cautioned, calling Texas “the great white whale” of statewide Democratic politics — a state the party hasn’t won in three decades. But this cycle, Hayes argued, offers real structural openings. Ken Paxton, he said, is “a worse candidate” than even Sen. Ted Cruz; he isn’t an incumbent and lacks basic retail political skills. “He’s a real dud on the campaign trail,” Hayes noted, adding that Trump himself may be reassessing his endorsement calculus in real time. 

Against that backdrop, Hayes was direct about Republican efforts to turn Talarico’s faith and masculinity into political liabilities. “They are all but calling him a gay slur,” he said of the GOP’s campaign against him, adding that the assault on Talarico’s masculinity “reeks of desperation.” 

Hayes did not dismiss the possibility that Paxton and the GOP’s attacks on Talarico could work with some voters, particularly in a polarized environment where campaigns often seek less to persuade than to cement partisan loyalties. “You just need to snap people back to their fundamental, their partisan fundamentals,” he said. A Republican voter who may have doubts about a candidate can still be nudged toward the familiar conclusion: “I don’t really like the Democrat. Those aren’t my people.’”

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But Talarico, Hayes suggested, may be better positioned than past Democratic efforts to resist that hyper-partisan reflex. What makes Talarico’s race worth watching this cycle, in Hayes’ framing, is less about the candidate himself than about the structural gap that’s opened up on the other side. He noted that Democrats haven’t come this close in decades: Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Cruz, he noted, came down to roughly “2.3 points” — the modern high-water mark for a statewide Texas Democrat. “Talarico has run a phenomenal race, and he’s a really good candidate.”

While Hayes expects the midterms to dominate the conversation in Arlington this weekend, audience members, he said, often arrive with their own closely held theories about what messages Democrats should use — and what could stop what he called “the desecration of our country” by Donald Trump. He anticipates intense interest in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure behind it, particularly data centers. The issue, Hayes said, has become more salient to his audience in recent weeks as AI tools have visibly improved and communities are increasingly confronting the land, water, power and development demands associated with data center construction.

“The data center issue really gets something deep in people,” he said. “I think Texas is an interesting place for it.”

Along with Georgia and Virginia, the Lone Star State has become central to the national conversation around data centers. It’s become a wedge issue in at least one Texas congressional race — alongside anger over the Trump administration’s attempt, which has been temporarily halted, to build a border wall in Big Bend National Park, and broader frustration with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (On Monday, Abbott ordered the state’s environmental regulators to stop approving permits for the construction of new data centers pending an electrical audit.) Hayes compared the reaction to a form of territorial politics. “It’s territorial in a literal physical sense — the ground, your backyard, your community, the park that you love.”

For Hayes, the Texas event is a chance to hear directly from people confronting the physical consequences of the state’s rapid development. The event also offers Hayes an opportunity to put into practice the central concern of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” which examines how digital platforms commodify attention. MS NOW’s live event asks whether journalism can build something more durable than a click or a fleeting social-media interaction.

“I like people,” Hayes said. “I feel energized by them.” Such direct relationships, he stressed, are the core asset of modern journalism, even as tech platforms continually insert themselves between news outlets and their readers and viewers through algorithm tweaks. “As everything gets kind of disintermediated and chopped and screwed, and the platforms insert themselves between you and the audience,” he said, “what do you have? You have the people that like and respect your work . . . Nurturing that is pretty darn important.”

The post Chris Hayes says GOP’s domination of Texas is coming back to bite them appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump is going all-in on artificial intelligence, dismissing growing concerns over AI and data centers as politically motivated “hoaxes” while promising that his administration will not “hinder or stifle” the rapidly expanding industry.

Trump announced Saturday that he is forming an “AI Force,” which he compared to the Space Force created during his first term, and will soon appoint an AI “czar.”

“We will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president provided few details about what the new force would actually do, including where it would sit within the federal government, what authority it would have or how it would differ from existing federal AI initiatives. Trump instead argued that harmful uses of AI could be addressed through the existing criminal and civil justice systems.

His embrace of the technology comes as some Republicans are confronting growing opposition to the data centers needed to power it ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio warned Republican candidates in a memo this week that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.” Fabrizio advised candidates to address concerns about electricity prices, pressure on power grids and water consumption rather than offer blanket support for new construction.

Trump took the opposite tone Saturday, claiming opposition to data centers had “largely failed” because communities discovered they brought “Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets.”

Some Republican candidates have gone further than Fabrizio’s messaging advice. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in his state and called for slowing AI development while the government develops additional safeguards.

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Trump, meanwhile, framed rapid AI development as both an economic imperative and a competition with China, claiming the technology could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product.

His enthusiasm extends even to the technology’s name.

Hours before announcing the AI Force, Trump asked his Truth Social followers to vote on replacing “Artificial Intelligence” with “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence.”

The post Trump thinks AI needs its own “Force” now appeared first on Salon.com.

Big Tech Skeletons

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) was appointed to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacant Senate seat after Vance became vice president. He is currently running in the November 2026 special election to serve out the remainder of Vance’s term and is fending off an aggressive challenge from longtime Ohio Democrat and former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

While Husted is a household name in Ohio thanks to his 25 year political career as a Republican in the state, there is one element of his legacy as lieutenant governor in Ohio — the position he held until Republican Gov. Mike DeWine hand-picked him for the Senate — that is not just coming back to bite him, but making Brown’s job incredibly easy: Husted’s past fervent support for new data center construction in the state.

As lieutenant governor, Husted was a stanch supporter of Ohio’s tax breaks for data center development, which were passed by Ohio lawmakers a decade ago to spur economic growth in the state. Ohio is currently home to at least 240 data centers — with one currently being constructed in Pike County that’s on track to be the world’s largest.

Ohio is one of several states that previously passed sales tax exemptions for the equipment needed to run data centers in order to help fuel the artificial intelligence boom. But that was before public outrage at the rampant development of new facilities for training AI models boiled over, among Americans of all political stripes, to become a dominating issue of the 2026 midterms. Husted was a major champion of new data center development in Ohio. He led ribbon-cutting ceremonies and issued press releases celebrating the construction of the new facilities in the state for years as a top official. Here’s one from February 2019, celebrating news that Google would construct a new $600 million data center in the state.

“Google investing in Ohio to open a new data center is great news for our state,” he said.

Republican Shapeshifting 2026

Uproar at how the data center boom is impacting water supply, air quality and affordable electricity in communities across the nation has only reached a fever pitch in the last year or so. Politicians, primarily Republicans, who previously championed both data center construction and unregulated AI advancement are now scrambling to change course as these issues become politically toxic.

I wrote about this last week, but Ohio is one of several states that once encouraged data center construction with tax breaks for Big Tech companies whose politicians are now looking for ways to pause or repeal those tax incentives in response to voter demands that elected officials do something — anything — to keep the burgeoning American tech oligarchy in check:

Husted is one of many Republicans trying to shape-shift on an issue they staunchly supported even months ago. While President Trump does all he can to make it impossible for members of the Republican Party to hold any position of nuance (You’re either 100% swallowing what Big Tech is shoving down our throats or you’re “backwards and poor”), Republican leadership in Congress has tried to create a middle-of-the-road policy position for vulnerable members and candidates this fall. It goes like this: Republicans are all for data center construction as an economic driver for rural and urban communities, but tech companies need to be footing the bill for rising electric costs.

It’s a messaging framework that Husted himself has adopted in recent weeks as he looks for ways to adjust to the public’s scorching outrage and his opponent’s relatively easy task of skewering him with related attack ads. In August, he told the local Ohio Statehouse News Bureau that he is in agreement with DeWine and Ohio state legislators’ push to, at the very least, place a pause on sales and tax breaks for tech companies constructing the new facilities in Ohio. He argued that big tech has done “a terrible job of talking about the value and virtue of” their technology.

“They’ve earned that backlash,” Husted said. “They haven’t been as forthcoming about the benefits that will come in terms of local jobs and construction worker jobs and reduced property taxes, and they haven’t offered things like paying the energy bills for local communities, for the power plants they build.”

Meanwhile, in Congress, Husted is using the last remaining days of the legislative session before the upper chamber goes on recess to try to convince his colleagues to take up a bill that he’s co-sponsoring that would force the tech companies behind data centers to cover the cost of utilities for their buildouts. The “Ratepayer Protection Act” would require state utility regulators to make sure that data centers and other big energy consumers cover the cost of any updates to the grid that need to take place to ensure their operations, among other things.

Politico has a new piece out today unpacking how this legislation is working its way through Congress and the work that Husted is doing to try to get his colleagues on board with quick passage in the Senate if it clears the House this week (tl;dr, it’s unlikely that Senate Democrats will jump to help a vulnerable Republican senator amid slam-dunk attack ads being lobbed at him by one of their former colleagues).

Rethinking a Deal With the Devil

State officials and elected leaders who once championed tax exemption deals with the executives of companies like Amazon, Google and Meta for the development of data centers in their states are now having second thoughts — and some states are taking steps toward making those deals a thing of the past.

It’s a sign that elected officials are belatedly taking notice of voters’ fears about data centers, unregulated AI advancement and the broader agenda of the tech industry. Rampant construction of new data centers around the U.S. has prompted panic about spikes in the cost of electricity, drained water supplies, pollution and artificial intelligence stealing human jobs. It’s underscored by the extreme economic uncertainty that everyone is facing — except, maybe, tech executives and the people who design their messaging.

The Wall Street Journal has a new report out this week examining 10 different states that had previously granted tech companies sales tax exemptions for the equipment needed to run data centers. In each of those states, officials are now having second thoughts. The piece focuses especially closely on Ohio and the work that state legislators did more than 10 years ago to encourage Big Tech investment in the state by offering the sales tax exemption, and the ways in which the artificial intelligence surge of the last four years has resulted in over $1.5 billion in savings for tech companies developing data centers there.

After substantial public pushback, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine back in May placed a pause on new applications for sales-tax exemptions, and some state lawmakers are pushing for the sales-tax exemption to be repealed. Several other states are considering similar actions to end or pause these ongoing tax breaks for tech companies, which “seem to have more money than God,” as one Ohio lawmaker, state Rep. Tristan Rader (D-OH), put it to WSJ.

Elected officials and politicians across the political spectrum are grappling with how to address the sweeping and righteous outrage against data center construction in rural and urban communities across the country. The notable exception is President Trump, who has maintained his allegiance to his big tech friends — who are funding his ballroom, and who donated to his inauguration, among other things. He memorably told Americans that only communities who want to be “backwards and poor” should oppose the new construction. His Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is proposing a federal policy change that will make it easier for data center construction to move forward without input from the public.

Republicans are struggling with how to walk the line, but the backlash has been so severe back home that many are fully breaking with the Trump administration on the matter. Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance have attempted to carve out a reasonable place for Republicans to stand should they not want to bow down whole hog to tech oligarchs, like Trump. The two have both independently suggested that states should look at mandates for tech companies to “be putting power back into the grid” as one way to address Americans’ concerns that the mammoth AI facilities are spiking electricity costs.

Related Reading

As Rader, the Ohio Democrat, said above …

WSJ: More Money Than They Ever Imagined—and No Clue How to Spend It

Bigger Than Politics

You may have seen by now the deadly warning from an Anthropic researcher who resigned from his job and warned that unregulated AI models had the potential to destroy humanity in the next four years.

“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” Anthropic research Jason Coxon, who worked on training models, said on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he continued.

Lawmakers across the political spectrum are calling on Congress to do something to prevent what Coxon and others from Anthropic have been forecasting.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway.

It's past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job. We can start with my bipartisan FRONTIER… https://t.co/P32aesPI8V

— Lori Trahan (@RepLoriTrahan) September 9, 2026

Congress needs to convene a special session on AI and what the future of the U.S. looks like. There are very real impacts to society as we know it. Partisan politics aside, there are massive implications of a race towards super intelligence. This is not a doomer post, as some of…

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) September 9, 2026

One Funny Thing

I’ll bring your attention to one matter in today’s edition of Where Things Stand that is less existential than the threat posed by America’s tech oligarchy. The White House apparently got involved in the recent mystery surrounding Fox News’ ousting of longtime Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo.

Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said during an interview with Newsmax Tuesday that the White House reached out to network executive to let them know they were dismayed by the decision.

“But suffice it to say that Suzanne Scott got a call, and basically the White House let her know that that kind of thing is totally unacceptable,” Navarro said, referencing the Fox News Media CEO.

Navarro went on to complain about how “out of control” Fox News is, suggesting that the network has become anti-Trump — a suggestion that flies in the face of how often the network bolsters the president’s agenda. After news of Bartiromo’s ouster broke, reports surfaced suggestion the longtime host reportedly shared details of internal editorial decisions with the White House.

“The bigger story here is, forget about anybody thinking that Fox is a conservative network that’s friendly to MAGA, that’s friendly to Trump,” he said. “They’ll feed you some red meat over there — the easy stuff, the trans stuff, stuff like that — but when it comes down to MAGA things, Suzanne Scott gets rid of everybody over there who wants to talk about MAGA issues.”

What to Read From TPM Today

Josh Kovensky and Layla A. Jones report on the Trump administration officially moving to exclude certain noncitizens from being counted in the upcoming Census, finding that the new, official policy is actually more extreme than the draft version that TPM was first to report on in August: Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census

Kate Riga covered oral arguments today in the abortion pill mifepristone case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: Appeals Court Skeptical That Louisiana Can Sue FDA Over Mifepristone Being Mailed into the State

John Light helps unpack the convoluted legal situation in Missouri regarding which maps to use in the upcoming election — and what it reveals about the Trump administration’s approach to sowing legal chaos in the election administration process this fall: Dueling Missouri Court Decisions Give Us a Preview of the Kind of Midterm We’re in For

Yesterday’s Top Story

Making Sense of That Big Story Saying Netanyahu Was Warned About Oct 7

What I’m Reading

Jeffries says Trump is too ‘corrupt’ to focus on Americans’ struggles

Trump says he’d consider pardoning Michael Cohen 

Associated Press will stick with Lake Ontario over Trump’s renamed ‘Lake America’  

Democrats are taking a convoluted, complex provision that was included in Republicans’ Big Beautiful bill to pin the blame for the national boom in data center construction squarely on Republicans ahead of the midterms.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is most widely known for making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and offsetting the cost of those tax cuts by gutting social safety net programs for America’s most vulnerable. But the legislation did a lot of other seemingly anodyne things. For one, the bill expanded and made permanent an IRS tax incentive program that began in 2018 to encourage and support economic growth and job creation in rural areas.

During President Trump’s first term, the IRS designated certain “economically distressed census tracts” as Qualified Opportunity Zones in order to spur economic growth in those areas. Under the program, investors can receive tax breaks for job creation in rural parts of the country, according to this IRS fact sheet (might come as a shock but I do not have any prior knowledge about QOZs, as the IRS refers to them, and had to do some research to write about this particular part of the tax code 🫠).

Anyways, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) was a champion of making these tax credits permanent and expanding incentives for rural development, and oversaw getting provisions about the IRS program worked into the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law last summer. Republicans at one point championed the expanded tax benefits included in the bill as an opportunity for more data center construction in rural areas, according to Politico.

But that was a different time when opposition to data centers wasn’t known to be the one issue uniting Americans across the political spectrum, which my colleague Josh Marshall and I have written about a bunch in the past few weeks. Republicans are now struggling to message on the issue as the head of their party, President Trump, makes it impossible for them to hold any nuanced position on the matter — and therefore speak to voters’ outrage about the data center explosion.

Democrats are leaning in to this.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) launched a new rhetorical flex over Republicans on the increasingly bipartisan issue during his news conference on Monday.

“Every single House Republican but one or two voted to unleash data centers on the American people in an unfettered fashion,” he said.

The details of what Republicans actually did to expand the tax incentives are incredibly in the weeds, but the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown from summer 2025 here, and so does the Brookings Institute.

But Democrats’ messaging about the expanded program and Republicans’ interest in expanding it for the purpose of big tech development is catching on, per Politico:

The next day, a senior House Democrat — Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts — made a similar observation on the chamber floor.

“A year ago, Republicans were bragging about giving tax breaks to Big Tech in order to build data centers,” McGovern said. “With November on the horizon, some House Republicans are acting as if they did not turbocharge the data center build-out.”

Comer Claims McConnell Will Be Back for Next Session

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) told CNN that the senior senator from his state will be back to his duties in the Senate at the start of its next session on September 14. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not performed his work duties in months and was hospitalized in mid-June. It took weeks for his office to share information about the hospitalization.

After conspiracy theories swirled online about McConnell being secretly … not alive anymore, the Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear began calling on the senator to give Americans some sort of proof of life and update on his health. Reports surfaced that he may have suffered some sort of cardiac episode at his home in June. In July, McConnell announced that he had been hospitalized after a fall and was in a rehabilitation center. He was discharged in early August.

“I have not talked to Leader McConnell. I’ve talked to his staff, many of whom are from my district originally. And they have all said it’s their goal for Senator McConnell to be here when the Senate comes in,” Comer told CNN Thursday.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Convention Part 2

ABC News has more reporting today on Republicans who are up for reelection this fall — and even some in solidly red districts — skipping out on the Republican Party’s unconventional midterms convention in Dallas later this month. That’s primarily because they want distance from Trump, who is set to headline the event with an anticipated speech spinning his deeply unpopular record so far this term.

Yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand had the details on Politico‘s survey of nearly 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. The majority of them said they’re skipping the affair.

ABC spoke to a handful of the most vulnerable House Republicans, and they all said they didn’t plan to attend or were still undecided. About 100 Republican members of Congress and candidates are expected to make the trek — and shell out the $25,000 to $100,000 that each attendee has been asked to contribute to the House Republican campaign committee in order to attend.

Vance’s Subtle Dig

Vice President JD Vance hosted the White House press briefing Thursday, since no one has been hired to replace Karoline Leavitt since she decided to leave the Trump administration. Reporters asked him about his ongoing friendship with Tucker Carlson, despite the former Fox News host’s stark criticism of major elements of Trump’s second-term agenda. He responded saying he was bothered by people who stopped being friends with his wife when he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, but his response also appears to contain a subtle dig at Trump, who throws literally anyone and everyone under the bus for any perceived double crossing.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” Vance said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

Read This From TPM Today

Hunter Walker checks in on Vice President JD Vance’s adventure into filling in a White House press secretary this afternoon. He repeatedly contradicted himself about whether or not the U.S. is, in fact, at war with Iran: White House Iran War Denialism Reaches Absurd New Level in Briefing Where Vance Both Confirms and Denies Bullets Are Flying

Yesterday’s Top Story

Trump Calls on His Most Loyal Henchman to Shut Down Facts He Doesn’t Want Reported

What I’m Reading

Maria Bartiromo Out at Fox News, Fox Business  

Schools Giving Aid to Minority Students Could Lose Tax Exemptions Under Trump’s New Rules

ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks

Trump Is Making It Impossible

President Trump has made it impossible for Republicans to seize on a relatively easy, bipartisan issue that could help them win over voters in the midterms if they spoke about it in the right way. As he espouses bombastic rhetoric about how only “poor and backwards” people oppose data center construction, Republicans have struggled with how exactly to cross him on the matter.

American opposition to data center construction in their communities is one of the only issues that voters across the political spectrum can agree on at the moment. TPM has been tracking the bipartisan outrage aimed at the tech industry’s attempts to expand this construction boom in rural and urban communities around the nation. A May Gallup poll found that more than 70% of Americans are anti-data center, primarily because of their fears about tech companies coming in to their towns and building facilities that drain local water and energy resources, all for the purpose of expanding the capabilities of artificial intelligence that could eventually be used to strip human Americans of their jobs.

The backlash is simple, relatable and widespread enough that some Republicans — including anti-regulation Republicans who have embraced accelerated AI development — are attempting to message around data center differently heading into the midterms given how universal fears are among voters. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, has, at least temporarily, blocked new data center projects from connecting to the state’s power grid. After extending an open invitation to tech companies to come and build in Texas, Abbott softened his stance amid mounting voter backlash about rising energy costs tied to the projects.

Trump has made any attempt at nuance nearly impossible for members of his party facing reelection. He’s paid back the tech company executives who donated to his inauguration and funded his White House ballroom by using his second term to push for unregulated AI expansion and is even pushing new rules that make it more difficult for local governments to get public input on data center construction.

Earlier this week, the president planted himself firmly in alignment with Big Tech interests by suggesting only communities that want to be “poor and backwards” should be opposed to the construction of the facilities and the natural gas plants that run them.

Likely recognizing the vulnerable opening Trump created with his hard line on the matter, Vice President JD Vance tried to dial that back a bit, suggesting that tech companies should “be putting power back into the grid” in the communities where they’re building. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to do something similar on Monday.

“These entities need to be self-sufficient,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station. “They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level.”

The Trump administration has, reportedly, tried to press data center developers to sign a pledge that they will try to keep electricity costs in check in the communities where they’re doing construction. But you wouldn’t know it from Trump’s rhetoric. It appears that both Thune and Vance are trying to give vulnerable Republicans a reasonable message to voters on an issue that could be an easy win — if Trump cared about Republicans winning the midterms more than maintaining the Big Tech oligarchy he’s enabled.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Dallas Convention

The Republican Party is hosting a bizarre midterms convention in Dallas later this month in an event that will feature President Trump as the headlining speaker. He’s reportedly planning to use the moment to tout his perception of his record so far this term, in hopes that it will somehow bolster Republicans’ prospects in November (unclear how his cratering approval rating factors into all of this).

But the GOP convention in Dallas is not exactly something that Republicans are rushing to attend — and why would they? Trump has actively made it harder for Republicans to have anything concrete to campaign on this cycle, both in the data center realm, as I unpacked above, and also on other issues, like his obsession with the SAVE Act (and torpedoing easy wins while pressuring Congress to pass it).

Politico surveyed more than 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress to see if any were planning to attend. Most are not:

The 45 Republicans cited a variety of reasons for skipping the first midterm convention put on by a major party in more than four decades. Some cited prior obligations such as fundraisers or events in their districts that were planned before the convention was scheduled in June. Others had personal conflicts, like weddings and family events, and still others raised qualms about the five-figure-minimum fees that party officials want attending lawmakers to pony up.

And some Republicans in tough races are steering clear of the gathering — which has come to be called “Trump-a-palooza” in some GOP circles — as they face growing hesitation about associating themselves with the polarizing president so close to the election.

But Maybe They’ll Come to This

MS NOW reports:

President Donald Trump is hosting vulnerable Republican incumbents facing tough re-election contests for dinner in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, according to a White House official with knowledge of the invitations.

The invitees include GOP lawmakers who are locked in competitive races this November, according to the official, who declined to provide a full list of the Republican attendees.

Here’s What Else You Should Read From TPM Today

Josh Kovensky has new details on the Trump administration’s use of a tool that Congress created in 2001, in the early days of the War on Terror, to investigate groups that oppose the Trump administration’s agenda: DHS Brings PATRIOT Act Tool to Bear in NSPM-7 Investigation

Emine Yücel has a new piece out today that outlines how Democrats have evolved on the issue of expanding the Supreme Court: What Democrats Have, and Haven’t, Said About Supreme Court Reform

“The destruction of a professional military has to rank among the most egregious and long-lasting of Trump II initiatives targeting government itself, along with his attacks on the merit-based civil service system, his abusive misuse of the Justice Department, his elimination of USAID, and his running roughshod over Congress’ power of the purse,” David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo: The Pentagon Purges Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Yesterday’s Top Story

AUDIO: Colorado GOP Gov. Nominee Tells Wild Exorcism Story About Fighting ‘Satan In Person’

What I’m Reading

ICE Plans to Pay $5 Million to Create National Voting Database 

Tillis renews calls for Hegseth’s ouster 

Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread 

In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.

Today's links

• Surveillance vs guillotines: Someone's gonna fleece these rubes, why not me?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DeCSS; Warhol Worm; Camgirls x Amazon wishlists; 2021 State of Tech (in 2001); RIAA v grieving family; Stasi disguises.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Surveillance vs guillotines (permalink)

In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").

This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.

The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.

During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.

And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.

Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.

Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.

Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.

That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.

Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein

Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.

Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.

This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.

In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.

Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.

Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:

https://www.dw.com/en/east-germany-spy-agency-stasi-surveillance/

Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.

Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.

But why? Why spy?

East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!

Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.

Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.

The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:

https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/

Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.

Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.

But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:

https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide

The Trump years are the Palantir years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

The Trump years are the facial recognition years:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition

Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.

It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/

Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can reliably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.

But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:

https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/private-intelligence-firms-selling-dossiers-on-ai-data-center-critics/

These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.

They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):

https://www.404media.co/the-roboguard-revolution-is-short-circuiting/

Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.

As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.

In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.

In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

In reality, commons need not be tragic and many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for hundreds of years:

https://archive.org/details/governing-the-commons/page/4/mode/2up

But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay https://archive.is/7t58c#selection-2140.1-2140.2

• Zack Polanski Promotes Radical Plan to Break Up Britain’s ‘Billionaire Media’ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/10/zack-polanski-promotes-radical-plan-to-break-up-britains-billionaire-media/

• Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/subaru-socialists-and-the-great-disappointed

• Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality

• LAST CALL FOR HOPE 26 TICKETS https://www.2600.com/content/last-call-hope-26-tickets

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Wonderfully thorough backgrounder on DeCSS https://web.archive.org/web/20010816194008/https://lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html

#25yrsago Warhol Worm https://web.archive.org/web/20010814171036/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/warhol.html

#25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html

#25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

#25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/

#20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html

#20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html

#15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html

#15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html

#15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s

#15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html

#10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/

#10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html

#10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/

#10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/

#10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

• AI, automation and enshittification (Telecoms.com)
  https://www.telecoms.com/ai/the-telecoms-com-podcast-ai-automation-and-enshittification

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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