Op-Ed: What hope, digital America?

Let us just bow our heads and take a hushed moment to consider the wisdom of Carter (not this Carter or that Carter, but this dude). 

Jimmy was not a popular president, mainly because he was a kind man and generally opposed to slaughtering the citizens of other less wealthy countries, which is today considered to be the gold standard of any rootin’ tootin’ POTUS worth their salt.  

Back in 2015, however, Carter absolutely nailed the root cause of the United States’ political problems. Discussing the impact of money in American politics, he remarked, "It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now, it’s merely an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery." 

Mic drop by the nonagenarian peanut rancher!   

In my lifetime, the amount of money spent by businesses on lobbying in the U.S. has increased by – checks notes - 20,000%. It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of those inducements come from the three industries that have also seen the same scale of growth over that period: military suppliers, oil companies, and big tech (which was late to the party but now out-influences the other two, combined, spending around 15% of its revenues on lobbyists and lawyers).   

The defense cabal wants the U.S. to continue engaging in wars (wish granted). The oil industry wants to keep the price of oil between $50 and $70 per barrel and enjoy zero-sum tax status (requests: ratified).   

So what does big tech want? Why, to be left alone to do whatever it feels like doing. This primarily plays out in the form of aggressive obstructionism of any regulatory or legal restrictions on its profit and growth agendas.  

Big tech’s legislative interference has had a profoundly negative impact on the communications industry in North America.  

It’s the reason net neutrality is dead (and that its rules were never applied to hyperscalers when it was still alive, even though they offered services that competed directly with the ISPs). It’s the reason BEAD funds to improve America’s poor broadband are already a year-and-a-half late in being distributed (and will probably be the same again before they really kick in). It’s the reason the U.S. has no national digital industrialization strategy. And it’s the reason we are the only nuclear power in the world without regulations governing the use of AI in fission reactors.  

America’s shift away from a system of checks and balances mandated by popular sovereignty to pay-to-play realpolitik has both crippled the functions of government (which is why there have been no constitutional amendments since 1992) as well as ostracizing Congress from the process of governance itself.   

As we reach the midpoint in the decade, the time-honored but outdated principles of the American Constitution have been evicted not by Neoconservatism or Neoliberalism but by Corporatism in its most blatant and pernicious form. (And, at its heels, leashed in like hounds, corruption, demagoguery, and an expanded-military-oil-big-tech-complex crouch for employment – see diagram).  

How it started:  

How it’s going: 

As I pointed out in 2018, a world subjugated by big tech is not a good world for most of the population of this country -- and worse for 100% of the population of every other country. By undermining the legislative process, companies like Google, AWS, Oracle, Palantir and Meta are creating the perfect laboratory conditions to expand their businesses, irrespective of the consequences for everyone else. The brakes are off. The guardrails have been removed. We are running the engine (and the economy) on drag-race-proof methanol. For America, this equates less to a free-market economy and more to an unethical free-for-all.  

Over the AI precipice, we go  

The situation is set to get much worse as the need for AI regulations comes into focus. 

This week, in the same breath as announcing an $80B investment in building AI data centers, 

Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith fired off a warning to upcoming President Trump not to engage in “heavy-handed regulations” that could slow down the private sector. “The most important US public-policy priority should be to ensure that the US private sector can continue to advance with the wind at its back,” Smith said. Unsaid: let us do what the f*** we want, or just maybe we build those data centers in Canada. (Or Mexico, which would be pretty funny, honestly). 

Big tech companies’ profit agendas are incompatible with the U.S. national mission – regardless of what President Trump’s new consiglieri and tech ombudsman Elon Musk claims. Unchecked, the current situation will result in America continuing to fall further and further behind other developed countries in building out the Industry 4.0 infrastructure that will define the economic competitiveness of every country on the planet for the rest of this Century.  

I don’t see a solution to this crisis coming from the American government. It’s broken, so it needs to be fixed, but it’s broken, so… the whole thing is amazingly American – a little bit M.C.Escher, a little bit M.C. Hammer.  

And so, to paraphrase Roosevelt, “What hope, digital America?”  On my travels around the world, I have seen first-hand that it is the countries with authoritarian leadership that are able to implement industrial digitalization fastest and most efficiently – Hungary, Turkey, China, Saudi and so on. President Trump fancies himself as a strongman leader, and it’s possible he could use his bigly clout to force through the necessary digital strategies to catch U.S. infrastructure up with the rest of the world. Maybe. He’d have to grasp the nature of the digital problem first, and I’m not sure he will. 

It’s more likely that we are heading over a made-in-America hubris waterfall here, venturing into uncharted digital territory on an irreversible course that, by the mid-21st century, will have cratered the economy and led to the demise of the American Dream and its Supersized empire—doomed by our inability to confront big tech, undone by technology, the very gift that America bestowed upon the rest of the world. And if that’s not a paradox for the ages, I don’t know what is. 

Oh, and a very Happy New Year to you all!  

(supposedly) trying to serve.