Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election
Description
The tech lobby has quietly turned Silicon Valley into the most powerful political operation in America. Pro crypto donors are now responsible for almost half of all corporate donations this election. Elon Musk has gone from an occasional online troll to, as one of our guests calls him, “MAGA’s Minister of Propaganda.” And for the first time, the once reliably blue Silicon Valley seems to be shifting to the right. What does all this mean for the upcoming election? To help us better understand this moment, we spoke with three of the most prominent tech writers in the U.S. Charles Duhigg (author of the bestseller Supercommunicators) has a recent piece in the New Yorker called “Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster.” Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.
Margrethe Vestager has spent the past decade standing up to Silicon Valley. As the EU’s Competition Commissioner, she’s waged landmark legal battles against tech giants like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Her two latest wins will cost Apple and Google billions of dollars.
With her decade-long...
Published 11/19/24
We’re off this week, so we’re bringing you an episode from our Globe and Mail sister show Lately.
That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is...
Published 11/05/24