No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon
Responding to Noah Smith
[image from Christian Wiedeger, Unsplash]
Noah Smith has responded to my criticisms of his attempted fisking of Acemoglu and Johnson with his own counter-criticisms. Unsurprisingly, I don’t think his response is convincing. Before we get to the main course, though, two amuses-bouches; one mistake of mine, and one of his.
Noah correctly points out that a tweet that I screenshotted at the top of my third post, where Noah celebrated being screenshotted by Elon Musk, was meant sarcastically rather than sincerely. It may be useful to provide some background to how I made this mistake.
In early 2025, I wrote to Noah expressing my unhappiness with some of his writing about Elon Musk. I felt that Noah was soft-pedalling criticism of Musk’s politics (the “real Elon” discussion here) and I disagreed sharply with Noah’s suggestion that we were about to see Musk’s organizational genius made manifest in the DOGE project. It seemed to me that Musk had sketchy far right sympathies. Furthermore, far from being an all-round mastermind, I believed that Musk didn’t have a clue how government worked and was about to precipitate an unmitigated fucking disaster.
Some of the frustrations expressed in that post came from my side of this conversation, but I didn’t want to quote from it. I searched on Google to find what I thought was a representative tweet that could serve in lieu. I was wrong. I should clarify, in case anyone wonders, that I’ve told Noah in advance that I’d summarize my side of the conversation to explain the origin story without quoting his responses, and he hasn’t objected. Old history, but if he wants to provide his side, or indeed publish the whole damn conversation, he has my blessing.
Now for Noah’s mistake - in his original post, he complained about the “the patent absurdity of [Henry] citing Robert Reich as an authority on [the] opinions” of “techno-industrialists.” I quickly emailed Noah to point out that I was not quoting Robert Reich, former labor secretary, but Rob Reich, current Stanford political theory professor. Noah has since updated to acknowledge his mistake, describing Rob as “a Stanford scholar who makes a living criticizing philanthropic activities by rich people.”
This dismissive description seems to me to be curmudgeonly. Even if Noah disagrees with Rob, it is fair to say that Rob, as former “Marc and Laura Andreessen Faculty Co-director” at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, has a tolerable acquaintance with the Silicon Valley elite. Nor does it accurately reflect the range of what Rob thinks or does - I wonder (perhaps mistakenly - happy to be corrected) whether Noah went with what he could find with his own quick Google search.
I’m highlighting this, because Rob’s actual experience with “key people in Silicon Valley” as recounted in his jointly written book, System Error, provides some very useful context.
Several years ago, Rob received an invitation to a small dinner. Founders, venture capitalists, researchers at a secretive tech lab, and two professors assembled in the private dining room of a four-star hotel in Silicon Valley. The host—one of the most prominent names in technology - thanked everyone for coming and reminded us of the topic we’d been invited to discuss: “What if a new state were created to maximize science and tech progress powered by commercial models—what would that run like? Utopia? Dystopia? Ultimately human evolution propellant?”
A researcher at the secretive lab leapt into the conversation. Not a hypothetical question, he said. We have already spec’d this out! Your first thought is that we should find an island and build there, but it turns out to be difficult to optimize for scientific discovery on islands. Creating infrastructure is difficult. You have to find a plot of land elsewhere, and all the desirable plots of land are already occupied. So the first problem you confront is: What do you do about the natives? We decided that the best approach is to just pay them to leave.
The conversation progressed, with enthusiasm around the table for the establishment of a small nation-state dedicated to the maximal progress of science and technology. Rob raised his hand to speak. “I’m just wondering, would this state be a democracy? What’s the governance structure here?” The response was quick: “Democracy? No. To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge. Democracy is too slow and it holds science back.”
Noah has persistently framed this debate as one between the stalwarts of technological progress, and carpers and begrudgers like myself, who are driven by our envy for our superiors in actually getting stuff done. In the past, he has described this in lively terms as “the traditional class resentment of the shabby educated elite for the wealthy titans of industry.”
As per Rob’s dinner, I (and Acemoglu and Johnson too, if I understand them right) start from an altogether different position. We ask whether the most crucial decisions over how we organize society, politics and markets should be taken by a small and self-selecting elite who want to optimize for their preferred path of technological development, or whether instead these decisions should be shaped through democratic means.
If Noah thinks that my arguments are driven by resentment, I believe that his claims stem from a Candide-like naivete that renders him unable really to see power relations in the modern economy, or even assimilate the arguments that other people are making about these power relations. People on the left regularly complain about the cynicism of those who view the world in terms of market efficiency. Such criticisms dramatically underestimate the force and importance of true faith. I don’t have any doubts of Noah’s sincerity (I find much of Noah’s writing frustrating, but very much like the human being behind it). Still, I believe that Noah is sincerely wrong. Since his beliefs are shared by many other people, and are highly influential in policy debate, I think it’s useful to explain how they are wrong, where they come from, and how they lead to an utterly misleading understanding of the political economy of tech.
The below doesn’t properly address Noah’s claims about the need to cherish genius entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk to hold them back from embracing the dark side of the force. That is in part because I’ve already said much of what I would want to say on that topic, here and elsewhere. But it is mostly because this post is already too long without it [if you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road].
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I found reading Noah’s response essay to be a quite disorienting experience. His personal copy of Acemoglu and Johnson’s book seems both to be unaccountably missing a lot of material that was in mine, and to have added a fair amount of material that I can’t find in my own. So too for Noah’s description of what I myself have argued.
Take, for example, Noah on Acemoglu and Johnson’s account of surveillance. Noah acknowledges that he hasn’t thought much about surveillance, but takes me to task for suggesting that Power and Progress has lots to say about it. Noah says, on the contrary, that the book seems to have had only one three page section on surveillance, which exclusively talks about it in the context of monitoring workers.
As far as I can tell, they never once address Henry’s core concern, which is that digital surveillance will lead to broad political disempowerment. So I only feel a little bad about not mentioning that in my review.
I hate to make Noah feel bad, but one out of eleven chapters is devoted to just this topic. In the authors’ own words.
In this chapter we argue that the pernicious effects of digital technologies and AI on politics and social discourse were not inevitable and resulted from the specific way in which these technologies were developed. Once these digital tools started being used primarily for massive data collection and processing, they became potent tools in the hands of both governments and companies interested in surveillance and manipulation. As people became more disempowered, top-down control intensified in both autocratic and democratic countries
That Noah somehow didn’t absorb what this chapter says - and is trying to score points off me on the basis of his incomprehension - suggests that there is something badly wrong with how he read the book.
Arguments sometimes appear as mysteriously as they disappear. Noah appears to have discovered big sweeping claims that I can’t find myself. Noah says:
when Acemoglu and Johnson talk about the “power” that techno-industrialists wield, what they actually mean is persuasion. Here’s what I wrote in my book review: “It seems like Acemoglu and Johnson, confronting the question of why regular people bought iPhones and signed up for Facebook and shopped on Amazon and started talking to ChatGPT, simply decided that techbros must have tricked them into it.”
I’ve looked through the book again and don’t see even a hint of such a claim anywhere. If Noah can point to specific source material for this claim, he absolutely should!
I read Acemoglu and Johnson’s actual argument as addressing general trajectories of technological development, and whether these should be set (in broad outline) solely by a small group of tech entrepreneurs, or instead should be subject to democratic control. Acemoglu and Johnson do not claim, or try to claim, that particular products are popular only because of techbro trickery. Instead, they suggest that popular products regularly come with strings attached, which users might reasonably not be particularly enthused about.
For example, when Acemoglu and Johnson talk about search engines, they explain how Page and Brin’s PageRank algorithm was an “important breakthrough” in making the vast amounts of information on the Internet accessible to ordinary people. Their objection is not to the technology, but the particular trajectory of commercial surveillance associated with it. This is not just a different argument but a fundamentally different kind of argument than the one that Noah says they are making.
Noah says in his response to me that “Power and Progress was a strong contender for the worst nonfiction book I’ve ever read all the way through.” Based on this and other evidence (discussed in the previous essays) I fear that the book that Noah read was not the one that Acemoglu and Johnson actually wrote, but the very different one that he largely composed for himself in his own head. It is terribly easy to excoriate a book for its bad arguments when you yourself have inserted them into the text.
To be clear: I do not believe for a moment that Noah is being dishonest. Vera Tobin’s fantastic book, The Element of Surprise, has a lot to say about “the curse of knowledge” in the context of detective fiction and related genres. When we believe that we know what is going on in a book, our preconceptions bar us from seeing what is actually being said. Again, I think that Noah genuinely believes that he understands what Acemoglu and Johnson are trying to do and say, even while he is weaving his own fantastical catalogue of intellectual crimes. When Noah suggests elsewhere that the reason that people like Bill Janeway disagree with him about the book is that they haven’t read the book with sufficient care, while he, in contrast, has read Power and Progress in “excruciating detail,” I’ve no doubt that he completely believes what he is saying. When you have convinced yourself incorrectly that you know what a book says, it takes a lot of hard work and serious thinking to unravel your misconceptions.
I don’t think that Noah has put in that work either on Power and Progress or on the other critics, such as, for example, myself. It would be invidious for me to comment on his suggestion that I am one example of a broader class of embittered intellectuals, whose opposition to the tech elite is driven by resentment.
a fairly large portion of the left-leaning intellectual class in America has become fairly-to-very resentful of the American tech industry, and has spent an enormous amount of intellectual effort on criticizing that industry. Both Power and Progress itself, and Henry’s defense of the book, channel those ideas and appeal to that sentiment … The core conceit of anti-tech thought is that a class of wealthy industrialists — the “techbros”, if you will — is hurting society by building and investing in technologies that have major negative side effects, and that the solution is to bring these industries under greater democratic control. … Henry’s perceptions of this debate are too clouded by class enmity toward the techno-industrialists and toward anyone who seems to make excuses or carry water for them
Noah believes that these jealousies have led me to make mistakes: those, I can address.
Henry believes — and claims, many times, in his two posts — that I think techbros managed to persuade Americans to embrace Big Tech simply by making good arguments in a free, equal, open, unfettered Marketplace of Ideas. In fact, I do not believe this. I believe that Americans embraced Big Tech — and tolerated the vast fortunes of techno-industrialists — because they liked the tech itself.
Again, this isn’t actually what I say. I wasn’t writing about Noah’s grand theory of Why People Love Tech (which had not then been unveiled in its full glory), but trying to unravel Noah’s criticisms of Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory of power, which were in large part about the marketplace of ideas. E.g. when Noah talks about how:
the power of these entrepreneurs is nothing more than their ability to talk in an “unrestricted marketplace of ideas” with “freedom of the press and speech." Such an understanding of power is “useless and even counterproductive” since it assumes that “people just hearing arguments and deciding that those arguments are right means power has been exercised.” Power becomes a “residual” explanation: “[t]he only way you get there is by just assuming that all outcomes are due to power and then … applying the label power to whatever you think produces the outcomes.”
If that summarization of Noah’s own words is misleading, I would genuinely be interested in knowing, and would be very happy to correct.
Finally, when I describe Noah’s own influence as a blogger as a kind of power, Noah accuses me of circular reasoning.
What bothers me about this definition of “power” — and what should bother you — is that it’s tautological. Why does Noah have power? Because people like his arguments! And why do people like his arguments? Because he has power! The problem with that definition isn’t that it’s empirically hard to falsify; it’s that it’s unfalsifiable.
My suggestion here draws on the broader claims about power in that post, which have been complemented in two others. Noah largely ignores the discussion across all three posts of why various theories of power are not, in fact, unfalsifiable. Ash, Chen and Naidu’s NBER paper, discussed in all three as well as Acemoglu and Johnson’s post, looks to measure the power of ideas in sophisticated ways. If Noah has problems with their identification strategy, then he should explain what they are. The resulting debate would certainly be entertaining, and might even be informative. Two other posts provide a list of mechanisms through which Acemoglu and Johnson say that power-as-influence works, which Noah completely ignored in his original critiques, wrongly suggesting that their single argument was that power depended on luck and eloquence. All these mechanisms could be turned into falsifiable arguments (some more readily empirically testable than others). Noah does accept in his new response that one of these mechanisms (who has money?) can be a source of power, but that is pretty well it.
On the particulars of Noah’s complaint: I am not able to say how much of Noah’s success depends on his native talent, any more than I able to say how much of my own (quite different) success does. I have no information on the alternative universes in which we are talentless hacks so that structural factors alone are at work. What I can say, based on what we know from social science is that much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success (both of us were around and active at a moment of phase change in online culture, so that the Polya urns spoke in our favor). Also, personal connections help: anecdotally, the statistics would suggest that a very large amount of my readership is an unintended by-product of one particular relationship.
Similarly, it is difficult to disentangle the ways in which our greater or lesser eloquence makes us more or less persuasive, from the fact that we are highly connected nodes in the relevant networks. Some people pay attention to what we say because they like our arguments. Some people pay attention because they think that we are influential. It is a fool’s quest to try to separate the two out, but there is excellent reason from cognitive science to believe that when we try, we are systematically likely to overestimate our own individual awesomeness, and to underestimate the external power asymmetries that magnify our voices.
And - jumping ahead to the next section - the capacity to deploy social resources to shape others’ choices via social influence, is indeed a form of power. Ernest Gellner, in his classic liberal/sociological history of the human species Plough, Sword and Book (see Brad DeLong for broad outline), talks about how pre-modern societies were ruled by coalitions of the ‘sword’ (those who could deploy physical coercion) and ‘book’ (those who could shape collective knowledge and beliefs). Those politics are far more complex in modern societies where coercion is often less openly deployed, and where literacy is close-to-universal, but sword and book are still the most crucial channels of power. If anything, I think that the book has gained very substantially in relevance, as more of our social structures have come to rely on coordination rather than violence.
So in short, I don’t think that Noah’s criticisms of either Acemoglu and Johnson, or for that matter of me, are either accurate or good. There are remarkable incongruities between what Noah thinks he has read, and what he has in fact read. There’s a lot more that I could say here, but I don’t want to drive away more readers than I have to.
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So why does Noah have such a hard time seeing what is on the page in front of him? Based on his most recent post, I think that Noah is afflicted with a serious case of what Tom Slee calls MarketThink, in his unjustly neglected book, No-One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart.
Noah argues that Acemoglu and Robinson’s entire book is an exercise in cope. They construct an elaborate, sweeping and tautological account of power because they can’t handle the truth about Big Tech:
They tried to argue that any persuasion, not just purchased persuasion, is power. Why did they try to claim that? Because on some level, I think they know that Americans embraced Big Tech for a lot more reasons than simply because billboards and Super Bowl ads told them to. They realize — or at least, they strongly suspect — that the techno-optimist arguments of the 1990s, the 2000s, and the early 2010s carried real, inherent persuasive force that had little to do with the money in Bill Gates’ or Steve Jobs’ bank accounts.
In Noah’s book, techno-optimist arguments carry “real, inherent, persuasive force” because they stem from genuine consumer satisfaction. Acemoglu and Johnson’s theory in contrast:
seems sort of like a definition intentionally designed to delegitimate consumer choice — to say that people bought iPhones and signed up for Facebook and shopped on Amazon and talked to ChatGPT because someone wielded power over them, rather than simply because they wanted to. And it seems like a definition designed to explain away the broad popularity of big tech companies as something nefarious and illegitimate.
Again, none of this helps explain what Acemoglu and Johnson are saying, but it is absolutely helpful in explaining Noah’s own thinking. He is riffing on the notion of consumer sovereignty: that consumers know what they want, and can get it thanks to free markets. That people buy iPhones tells us that they like iPhones. That they sign up for Facebook tells us that they like Facebook. That they shop on Amazon tells us that they like to shop on Amazon. And so on. That, then, transfers into people’s broader attitude to Big Tech. We know that Big Tech is popular, because people like to buy the products of Big Tech.
Noah himself is doing a tautology here. He assumes that we know what people want because they buy it, and we know that they buy it because they want it. I suspect (but don’t know) that Noah doesn’t realize that he himself is engaged in tautology, because it’s so fundamental to the way that he thinks. In fairness, there are a lot of people who think that way.
As Tom says:
MarketThink is a way of interpreting the world. The success of a company proves that customers like it. … Once you adopt the MarketThink worldview, there is no longer a rationale for collective approaches to social and economic problems.
The last sentence is a bit strong as a description of Noah’s beliefs about Big Tech, but it goes in the right direction. That, I think, is why Noah has difficulty processing Acemoglu and Johnson’s (and my) alternative perspective. He is committed to an understanding of markets that makes it genuinely difficult to understand words written by people who do not share this commitment
Equally, as you might imagine given that Acemoglu and Johnson share a Nobel Prize in economics (to Noah’s mild dismay), you can be an economist without fully embracing MarketThink. Pretty well all economists recognize (rightly) that markets have great advantages, but not all believe that those advantages are universal. And economics itself provides methodological toolkits for understanding many of the ways in which MarketThink can lead you astray.
MarketThink has many things in its favor. It is immediately intuitive. Quite often, it is more or less right. Markets are a miraculous social creation, and can often be wonderful. But if all you have is MarketThink, you are going to miss out on many of the squirrelly complications of real life markets.
Tom’s book provides a very accessible tour of these complications, as once recognized by Alex Tabarrok a fervently libertarian economist and MarketThink exponent extraordinaire. Alex once wrote in the opening paragraphs of a review (he has since expunged those paragraphs for some unexplained reason, leaving only his criticisms)
Slee’s book is the best of the anti-market books: it is well written, serious, and knowledgeable about economics. In fact, I regard Slee’s book as an excellent primer on asymmetric information, free riding, externalities, herding, coordination problems and identity - Economics 301 for all those budding young Ezra Klein’s [sic] of the world who think that Economics 101 isn’t quite right.
Tom begins the book by arguing that the success of a company does not necessarily mean that customers like its consequences. He starts with a toy example of Wal-Mart coming to town, creating a big box store in the suburbs. If I like cheap prices as well as other things, then this will make me happy. I may enjoy the social interactions of the high street with all of its little shops, but I can keep that, while also now economizing on my shopping bill by doing my bulk buying at Wal-Mart. But if everyone else does what I do, then the high street is likely to dwindle away, or even disappear.
This is, of course, a toy finding based on posited preferences. Perhaps people generally prefer to shop at Wal-Mart or Amazon, regardless of its consequences for the broader economy. No doubt many do! Equally, Polly Mackenzie in the Financial Times last week:
The new UK government’s cut in business rates for pubs and music venues is, by my count, the 12th tweak to the much-loathed property tax in a decade. When politicians start fiddling like this, it’s usually a sign that the problem is bigger than they want to admit. That’s certainly true when it comes to our high streets, which seem to matter more to people when voting than when shopping online.
Libertarians might say we should give up: if people wanted high streets, they would use them. The more interesting approach is to wonder why there is such a disconnect between people’s choices and their political demands.
Walk down almost any high street in England and it becomes obvious. The boarded-up pub, bank or bakery, the market hall or community centre that became a bar, then a waffle house and then closed. Tens of thousands of buildings across the country sit derelict or vacant and no economist’s lecture about “revealed preference” offers consolation for this not-even-managed decline.
If I care about both prices and sociable interactions across small stores, and shop at Wal-Mart like everyone else, I may end up with lower utility, even though all I have done is to exercise my free choice in the open market. My individual choice conducts, combined with the choices of others, to a collectively unfortunate result - in technical language, individual choices may result in collectively sub-optimal equilibria. Game theory, which studies strategic interactions, is rife with such findings. The assumption that people shop on Amazon because they are happy with the overall outcomes is not always right. Such claims are, much of the time, a reasonable first approximation. Equally, as Tom says:
Unfortunately, much political and business discussion today has adopted the MarketThink line that pretty much everything is like a free market, pretty much all the time. … But economies and (even more so) other aspects of society are made of intricately connected, constantly interacting choices. Many of our choices, the outcomes of those choices, and how we feel about those outcomes all depend on the choices of others, whose choices likewise depend on ours. Claiming that the free market basically decides how such a world works is not merely a simplification, it is simplistic.
Tom’s book goes on to discuss other aspects of this problem. Networks bollocks up a lot of standard efficiency arguments, because the value of a network to any one individual depends on how many other people are in the network. This then, creates some obvious power asymmetries. If you don’t like how Twitter/X is treating your data these days, but your livelihood depends on contact with other people who use the service, you may be stuck. You may be stuck even if all those other people hate it too - coordination costs make it hard to defect.
On a much bigger level, the same is true of banks or countries that might want to depart SWIFT or the dollar clearing system because the US is liable to weaponize it against them. It is very costly for them to defect because everyone else relies on these fundamental infrastructures of international exchange. The results for global power relations - as Abe Newman and I have discussed extensively - are dramatic.
This is not a general argument against markets or other such forms of economic exchange. Tom quotes Amartya Sen:
To be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations between people … The freedom to exchange words, or goods, or gifts does not need defensive justification.
What it is is an argument that one very often (and perhaps even usually) cannot separate exchange from power relations. Tom again:
The core of the problem with the market is not the practice of exchange, but the opportunities it gives for manipulation by those with the resources to do so: to turn exchange into exploitation.
Twitter/X - and Meta - and in different ways Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the other big platforms - systematically take advantage of such asymmetries. To observe this is not to express resentment but to recognize reality. I can both love Apple products (which I do) and be aware that Apple has used its dominance of high value aspects of the mobile phone market to create an App Store that rakes off rents at scale. Inside every hungry entrepreneur, there is a bloated monopolist struggling to get out.
As Alex notes, Tom’s effort to build these ideas into a general account of power relations is one of the weaker aspects of the book. But there are other ways to use game theory to think about power relations. As Jack Knight argues, mixed motive coordination games, in which players have good reason to coordinate, but different interests in which equilibrium to coordinate on, provide an valuable simple model of power relations. Actors’ breakdown values - the payoffs they get if they don’t coordinate - are a straightforward index of bargaining strength. Those who are more indifferent about whether a deal is reached are better able to hold out for equilibria that they prefer.
Over time, as identifiably different classes of actors with different bargaining strength interact, informal institutions can emerge that concretize these power asymmetries. There is a small, valuable literature in economics and social epistemology that uses evolutionary games to model the consequences. Danielle Allen, Cosma Shalizi and I have a paper in the works that looks to figure out how this works at the level of social-institutional trajectories, combining compartment models and evolutionary dynamics into a single mathematical framework (which is all Cosma’s).
The TLDR of all of this is that exchange - including decentralized exchange - regularly involves some combination of (a) collective advantage, and (b) asymmetric power relations. Much of political economy then, involves actors trying to make sure that the coordination solutions that are reached advantage them rather than their rivals. None of these arguments are unfamiliar to even vaguely literate economists. But popularizing economists tend very often to throw away these complications, in favor of crude MarketThink.
It appears to me that Noah is engaging in just this kind of popularization. He starts from MarketThink, while Acemoglu and Johnson start from the belief that tech development is substantially about strategic interactions, in which some actors are trying to gain advantage over others, and in which path dependence is rife. Despite repeated invitations from me (in all fairness to Noah: more harangues than invitations), Noah has systematically declined to engage with Acemoglu and Johnson’s actual arguments, instead coming up with the arguments that he would have preferred them to have made, and refuting the latter entirely to his own satisfaction.
Acemoglu and Johnson do not even hint that consumers are being tricked into liking tech products. Instead, their framework suggests that consumers are regularly at the wrong end of the bargaining interaction in coordination situations. If they want Google Search, they have little choice to accept the surveillance economy that goes along with it. Coordinating against power is extremely hard. When Noah asks, rhetorically, “What can I say or do that would alter this brute fact — that humanity has once again chosen to give their lives over to the machine?,” he needs to realize this is not a choice they necessarily had much control over. Men (and women) make technological history, but not in the circumstances of their choosing.
Noah is not only at liberty to disagree with my arguments, but is actively encouraged to. This, however, would require him to stop fighting with what he imagines people have written, and engage with what they actually say. He can’t just help himself to the assumption that market outcomes in tech faithfully reflect consumer preferences without actually talking about these markets actually work. An argument that engaged with the evidence of tech markets would be genuinely clarifying - we do not want voting on technological choices all the way down, and figuring out the practical balance between democratic control and entrepreneurial energy is a real and important endeavor.
Equally, engaging with these realities would involve, in my estimation at least, addressing the ubiquity of network effects, extensive evidence of accelerating tech enshittification, the transformation of corporate control structures into princely domains, and the fact that many of the tech elite who he wants to defend are perfectly frank about their desire to escape the confines of market competition. It may only be my envious resentment of Silicon Valley elites that makes me think all this! Noah should feel encouraged to provide actual factual information that demonstrates that I am wrong.
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Of course, Noah is not the only proponent of MarketThink. There is a lot of it about, especially in Silicon Valley, which helps, I think, to explain why many of Big Tech’s ambitions are increasingly unpopular with ordinary people. If you can remember Rob Reich’s anecdote a few thousand words ago, it is practically a parable of how AI companies and infrastructure providers are being walloped by opposition to data centers. Rob describes how founders, funders and lab people regarded democracy as an obstacle, and wanted to just pay people to go away. That is exactly what data center builders are doing now, and it is not turning out to be a universal winning strategy.
Jasmine Sun has been doing the work of actually going out to talk to people who oppose data centers, and finding out what they think. She talked to Ezra Klein about what happens when AI companies pay to try to make the opposition go away. It doesn’t work:
one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is: Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems — that if you just make the check bigger, everything is going to be OK.
And I think people have a sense for: I’m being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I’m losing here.
And, in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger, or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually just makes people more suspicious. In the Abdul El-Sayed Senate race in Michigan, his No. 1 hit on opponent Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from AIPAC, from DTE, from Big Pharma or whatever.
And so I think we’re in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.
People - at least the people she talked to - are more interested in having a say than in getting money.
The phrase that you hear a lot from A.I. critics is: Why is this being shoved down our throats? Or with ChatGPT, it’s not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT, it’s people are saying: Why are you forcing me, at my job, to use A.I. to do something worse when I could do it better?
And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to A.I. that has arisen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It’s not explained by their being worried about specific technical properties of large language models that might lead to rogue A.I. or misalignment or whatever, which are the safetyist arguments.
It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.
And I think that’s also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It’s not just: It’s going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers.
I do agree with Noah on one thing: that Big Tech’s current approach is in serious political trouble. But, as Jasmine suggests in her own newsletter, it is important to take the people who oppose the current model of Big Tech seriously even if you disagree with them, rather than dismissively suggesting they are driven by irrational grudges. I don’t think that Noah - or the people who he aligns with - are really doing that yet. That may be a mistake.