Yn ystod y cyfnod, roeddwn i'n hoffi cyflwyno Peres Marks, sydd wedi dod o Montreal. Rwy'n hoffi adrodd ei fod yn ffestiwl na fyddai'n ymwneud â'r math o ffestiwl sy'n mynd i mewn i gyflwynwyr cwbl, ac wedyn yn mynd i'w ffwrdd yn ôl. Ond, rydyn ni wedi gwneud rhywbeth arall. Oherwydd, nid ydym yn credu y byddech yn dod. But we made an exception because we didn't really believe you would come. So the background of this is that some of us in the local servos community have been reading your work. Your book, The Road to Nowhere, as I said, is one of the books I most frequently recommend to people to understand how we got into the mess where we are now. You write your newsletter Disconnect. You can follow that with RSS feeds but it's even better if you become a paid subscriber. And you also host the podcast Tech Won't Save Us with endlessly interesting guests. Unfortunately I don't have enough patience to listen to podcasts myself but I'm reliably informed that the podcast is fantastic. So now libertarians no more. Paris, thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah, here we go. I'm excited to be here and to speak with you all. Thanks, of course, to Celina for starting us off. I've been talking a lot about AI recently, so I'm happy that she took the job today so I can talk about something else. But yeah, so in this presentation, we'll be kind of going through a bit of a history of the tech industry. And I want to start off with a few examples before we do that. And so I'm sure you'll be familiar with this guy, Steve Jobs. He is one of the co-founders of Apple, of course. is one of the co-founders of Apple, of course. In 1980, there was this ad for the Macintosh that was kind of presented as an interview with Steve Jobs. And he said, think of the large computers, the mainframes and the minis as the passenger train, and the Apple personal computer as the Volkswagen. The Volkswagen isn't as fast or as comfortable as the passenger train, but the VW owners can go where they want, when they want, and with whom they want. The VW owners have personal control of the machine. Now basically in this kind of response, and you saw this a lot of the time and it became more common, it's really positioning the personal computer and personal technology as something that empowers the individual, right? You know, there are these old technologies before these mainframe computers, they empowered the hierarchical corporations that, you know, are oppressing all of us, but now the personal computer is coming along and that is going to empower the individual, right? We're moving into this new era. And that really forms a foundation of a lot of the kind of ideology and the thinking that has surrounded the tech industry for a long time. If we fast forward, you know, about 15 years, we'll see this guy, John Perry Barlow. Maybe you won't be as familiar with him, maybe you will, but he was the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And so he published this manifesto in 1996 that started with this governments of the industrial world you weary giants of flesh and steel I come from cyberspace the new home of the mind on behalf of the future I ask you of the past to leave us alone you are not welcome among us you have no sovereignty where we gather. So, you know, Steve Jobs was basically saying, okay, the personal computer is giving the individual power, right? Now the internet is coming along. The internet's being privatized in this period. And Barlow's basically saying, you know, states altogether, you need to get out of the way. This internet is empowering us, the individuals. We're going to create this new society with it. You know, and it's a real kind of shot across the bow to say, we do not accept kind of the sovereignty of the state over what is happening with the internet. You know, we are going to make this for ourselves. Notably, in Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, he doesn't mention corporations very much. He only has a lot to say about the state. And this Declaration of Independence was actually published in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, where he was a contributor that year. So, you know, just to give you some of the politics behind that, of course, Barlow was part of the Grateful Dead, you know, this popular band. He was also a speechwriter for Republican, he went on to be vice president under George W. Bush. So he did that for a while too. So you can see this very kind of individualistic, this libertarian politics forming around technology, but there's always this kind of commercial angle into it that we'll get into a bit more. So I want to go back to a bit before Barlow and Jobs to start us off, to get into a bit of this history, to, you know, work our way up to that point, to understand how Silicon Valley, how the tech industry got to where it is today, and how these kind of ideas evolved over a number of decades. So despite that kind of libertarian framing of technology, Silicon Valley itself comes out of World War II. This man here is Fred Terman. He is the son of Lewis Terman, who was a prominent professor at Stanford University, also a prominent eugenicist in the early 1900s. And Terman, you know, went on to be a professor at Stanford University as well. But during World War II two he headed up the radio research laboratory at Harvard which was funded by the US government the US military in order to develop technologies to ensure that the United States and the Allies were keeping ahead of the Nazis to make sure that they were going to win the war right to beat the fascists and so of course this is really where Silicon Valley is formed in this moment. Before that, it's the East Coast around Boston that is really the center of a lot of, you know, U.S. electronics and, you know, what we'd say kind of high technology industries. But it's during that time that a lot of money floods into the Bay Area around San Francisco, which is really the formation of or the beginning of the formation of what we now know as Silicon Valley. And of course, the man who helps to give it the name Silicon Valley is this man here, William Shockley, who is one of the co-inventors of the silicon transistor. So, you know, after World War II is over, and the tech industry starts to move into a new phase, what we see is that the funding that the US military is putting into these technological developments is starting to decline, right? Because, you know, there's not this kind of great threat anymore until the United States finds a new great threat, of course, in the Soviet Union. And of course, when Sputnik is launched in 1957, that spurs another big wave of investment from the U.S. government because now they need to compete compete on this new front and that means a lot more money flooding into the Bay Area into what we now know as Silicon Valley and part of that is to create these semiconductors these silicon transistors that are going to power a lot of these electronics that the United States government sees as very key to its national security, its technological supremacy, and of course to building this industry that it's going to create. But that doesn't mean that the tech industry is always this thing of the military always associated with the government. As the 1960s roll along, you start to see a lot of major protest movements across the United States. The civil rights movement in the early 1960s, the free speech movement on campuses across the United States in the mid-1960s, and of course throughout that period and growing through the 60s, the protests against the Vietnam War. And of course, you know, the United States government is using these technologies that it was funding, that it was having developed in Silicon Valley and other key hubs around the United States in order to, you know, launch that war, right? In order to make sure that it was having developed in Silicon Valley and other key hubs around the United States in order to launch that war, right? In order to make sure that it could find its targets in Vietnam and the other countries around it so that it could do mass devastation in that country to try to hold back the communists. So, of course, you have a lot of people who are very much against that. And, you know, there's a broad kind of anger at the government for being engaged in that, at the military in general in the United States. But there's also a specific focus on these companies that are developing these military technologies and enabling this mass destruction that's being broadcast on television news every evening. And so part of that results in the actual targeting of computer centers across the United States. This map here shows protests against computer centers in yellow and actual sabotage of computer centers in red. And this was a major movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw a lot of attacks on computer centers because, of course, at the time the computer was not the personal computer that we know today but was this main frames they required a lot of space they went in very specific areas right here at the bottom this is a protest at stanford in 1971 in front of one of the computer centers there where people you know were protesting against it because it was helping the United States military process the Vietnam War. And of course this is one of the most notable examples, which is an attack on Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1970. And of course the computer center of the mathematics, the Army Mathematics Research Center was held there. And so you saw this, as you see with the red dots on the map, you saw this in a number of places across the United States where computer centers were actually being bombed and destroyed in order to show that people were against this war, that they didn't want to support it, and they were specifically angry at these companies and these research institutions that were developing these technologies that were allowing the United States to continue this war and to kill so many people. And so that created, you know, with this kind of backlash, it created a number of different groups that were going against it. And so Fred Turner, in his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, describes these groups in kind of two broad categories, which he calls the new communalists, which I think is more commonly referred to as the hippies, so I don't know why he uses that term specifically, and the new left, right? And, you know, these are groups that there are people going back and forth between them. There are people who would consider themselves maybe in one or the other or both. It's not to say that there's two firm, very distinct groups, but largely the way that they approach these issues are quite distinct. So the new left obviously sees changing this, addressing it through politics, right, through mass demonstrations, through creating a political movement that is going to stop the United States from, you know, continuing the war at Vietnam, but also the other issues that they're protesting against around civil rights and things like that, right? The treatment of black people in the United States. The hippies of course are taking a bit of a different route. It's not to say all of them are non-political, certainly not, but it's more focused on kind of the individual empowerment, right? Having these personal experiences, these psychedelic experience to kind of open your mind to think about the world in a different way and it's through these kind of individual experiences that, you know, the world is going to change, right? And so there's this very distinct, you know, division, I guess you could say, between a more individualist approach and a more collective approach, right? One that tries to bring people together toward collective action, and another one that's focused on, certainly, people are getting together and taking drugs and stuff, but it's not the same kind of direct approach that you're trying to see with these political movements and of course this kind of hippie movement starts to bleed into what we see in the tech industry and the ideologies that start to shape it you know as you move out of the 70s and later into the 80s a lot of these hippies set up communes in California and places like that where they're just trying to get away from everything. They're trying to retreat into their own little societies. But as those start to collapse near the end of the 1970s, those people need to come back into society, need to get jobs, need to find a way to justify that to themselves. Now they're working for the man. how are they going to do that, how are they going to transform the way that the system works in order to justify it, and of course that's where we start to get into the creation of a particular ideology that justifies this for people in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area in particular, who would have, you know, opposed these computer centers, who would have opposed this government funding for the tech industry and what was happening in Silicon Valley. And so Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron talk about what's called the Californian ideology that really emerges from here, right? And it brings together the free markets, this focus on free market ideology that's really emerging in the late 1970s, early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and more kind of political movements that are moving away toward moving away from the welfare state and state investment and government involvement in that period but also of course on individual empowerment right how are we going to change the world how are we going to affect change it's not by the big government it's not by these hierarchical corporations it's by the individual right if we just empower the individual then things will get so much better. And of course, in Silicon Valley in particular, in the tech industry, it's by using technology in order to do this, right? So we're not going to change the world through political movements or political action or things like that. If we just create new technologies, if we deploy those technologies into the world, that will mean everything will get better. Forget about who's developing the technologies. Forget about the political program behind the technologies. As long as we just have new tech, that will make everything better. And so this kind of formed a lot of the thinking that was emerging in the Bay Area in that moment. Now, you know, we're moving into that neoliberal period in the 1980s. It might seem like, okay, the government is retreating, everything is being left to the free market. You know, this is Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy with the Japanese prime minister at the time, whose name is Yasuhiro Nakasone, and of course his wife. So this is an important image because, you know, think about what we're talking about now, right? We're talking a lot about disputes with the Chinese around chips and around automotive manufacturing and all this sort of stuff. These debates were happening about Japan in the 1980s because Japan was producing cheaper semiconductors and sending them to the United States and I'm sure Europe as well. And the Americans were furious about it. They were producing cheaper cars that were flooding in the 70s and 80s as gas prices went up and the Americans were furious because their automotive manufacturers were not competitive, right? And so Ronald Reagan put really high tariffs on Japanese semiconductors and Japanese vehicles until the Japanese government agreed to set minimum prices to put particular quotas in place for the number of vehicles that they were going to sell because Ronald Reagan wanted to protect the U.S. market and U.S. companies. And of course, even as Ronald Reagan was cutting taxes and cutting, you know, the state and privatizing corporations, he was significantly increasing the defense budget. And that meant more money for Silicon Valley on top of the tariffs on its competitors and the ways that it was trying to protect the industry from outside competition in that moment. And so there is an important, I think, meeting of the minds here where you see Ronald Reagan, who is promoting this very neoliberal approach, right? We're going to pursue free markets. We're going to rein in the state. We're going to leave it to, you know, private enterprise in order to chart the way forward for the American economy, you know, the American society, the world in general. We're going to push this politics onto the rest of the world. And Silicon Valley, that is embracing something very similar, but with tech at the center of it. And so this is in 1985, when Ronald Reagan gives one Steven Jobs, the National Technology Award. And you know, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the president, he gives awards to a ton of people, like, you know, I'm sure he gave awards to a bunch of other people as well, it's probably not super significant, but for me, kind of seeing these two figures in this photo really does show the combination of this particular politics that is emerging in the 1980s, that is becoming popular, and that is allowing the tech industry to present itself as anti-government, anti-state, as promoting the individuals, promoting this kind of libertarian ethos in politics, even as it's still getting a ton of investment from the U.S. government. It's just not talking about it so much. You know, Apple, of course, got public investment, got public subsidies as it got started, as did many of the other major tech companies that we talk about today. And so it just seems quite notable to see these two in an image in this kind of coming together of this particular politics, even as we let the tech industry pretend like it's something very different and doesn't have these kind of state relationships, or at least didn't for a while. So, you know, we kind of come out of that period, we see that Silicon Valley has been growing, obviously, the personal computer is becoming much more popular. But that's just on the cusp of another major transformation, right? the Internet has been kind of percolating away as an ARPA research project ARPA into DARPA which is you know kind of the defense industries you know part of the way that it uses its money on these research projects these electronics research projects of course you know the internet was previously called the ARPA net when it connected up the universities and these research centers. But Silicon Valley is moving into another phase where it's about to become much more powerful. So this is Senator Al Gore. He later becomes vice president. But in 1989, he's still a nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century. So when we think about these personal computers, when we think about the Internet, it has this ideology around it that is very separate from the state. It's challenging the state. It's not in the same league as the government because it wants the government to kind of stay out of things, right? But here is a very prominent government official who goes on to become the vice president saying, this is in U.S. interest to embrace these things, to expand these things, to push them out into the world, again, kind of questioning that politics that Silicon Valley is kind of stating it subscribes to, right? The kind of Steve Jobs merging of neoliberalism and technological solutionism. In his book, The Promise of Access, Daniel Green says that the US government really saw the internet as an instrument of soft power, right? As it started to go around the world, as it started to become used by so many more people, as its companies went with it. And in particular, in this moment, you know, as the Soviet Union is starting to unravel, the U.S. government really sees it as a way to gain influence in post-Soviet states after the fall of communism. And of course, it was also a great opportunity for its US tech companies. So of course, Bill Clinton and Al Gore become president, vice president in 1993 after being elected in 1992. At that point, the commercialization of the internet is in full swing. Previously, it was a research network. It was non-commercial. These things weren't allowed to be on there, but already private companies were working their way in. And in 1995, the internet is officially privatized, right? It's given over to private industry. You know, you think about John Perry Barlow's manifesto, it's published, or, you know, his Declaration of Independence, it's published the following year, in 1996, early that year, where he's kind of setting out this particular politics, this particular vision for what the Internet should be. But actually, right at that moment, the US government is handing that Internet over to private corporations to do what they want with it, right? Not keeping the private corporations out and saying that this is a space for individuals to flourish and do what they want and kind of be free from the pressures of the market and how companies are going to transform the space. And so, of course, as the internet goes global, as it is privatized and commercialized, U.S. companies got the jump, right? They got early investment to grow, to develop these internet businesses. And then as the internet started becoming accessible in other countries, they rode that wave because they not only had the funding of Wall Street in order to be able to do that, but they were able to develop these companies first. And so as they opened up in, as the Internet became available in other countries, they were there first, they were able to dominate the markets. And because you had this neoliberal idea following it, you need to have your market open to everybody. You can't put in particular rules that are going to, you know, disincentivize particular companies from setting up, from, you know, from growing, I guess, even if they're foreign companies, that benefits the United States immensely as, you know, you start to have Google and Facebook and Amazon and all these companies becoming available in more markets and pushing out local competitors. And of course, in the United States, you have this exuberant few years of investment that comes after the privatization in 1995. This is the NASDAQ's composite stock index that shows just how much the value of that shot up in the years after the internet was privatized. and all of these companies were trying to take advantage of this great market opportunity because you had all these people flooding into the space and the idea was that these companies were eventually going to make a lot of money once they captured these users because this great opportunity was opening up and so Wall Street was all for it. Of course then you have the big decline when the dot-com bubble bursts, but that doesn't mean that Silicon Valley and the tech industry is out of the game, that it's not going anywhere. It just means that it's time to reassess and think about the new model. After that period, when we fast forward a little while, we have the creation of this new class of billionaires, this new class of very powerful people on the west coast of the United States in Silicon Valley. You know, your Elon Musk's, your Mark Zuckerberg's, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos appearing very commanding here. This is after he started working out and really kind of, you know, adding the muscle. After 2008, in particular, there's this real narrative that not just is the tech industry the future, not just are these companies going to be the way that we manage our economy into the next few decades, but it's also that they are going to help to revive the economy after this major financial collapse, right? They are going to create the jobs, the prosperity, and so we need to kind of let them roll out and do their thing, not stand in their way, not put, you know, excessive burdens of regulation on them, because that would just slow down the innovation. That would mean we won't get the kind of benefits that we expect from this thing. And so there was a good decade there where a lot of these tech companies really got, you know, some pretty good treatment because we looked the other way as their business models caused these negative externalities, these issues that we're now coming to terms with because, you know, they are creating real problems. to build up great fortunes, to build monopolistic businesses that give them a lot of power, not just in the United States, but over the politics and the workings of many other countries around the world to the degree that they get very difficult to then rein in, to stop them from doing what they're doing. Now, of course, as their power has grown, a lot of people have not been too happy about that, in particular since 2018 when there's been much more of a focus on the downsides of these companies, the problems that they create. There have been a lot of people who have been protesting against them, not just users, not just people who consume these products, but also the workers who work for them, who can see how it's changing the way that the work is done in a way that negatively affects them by cutting their working rights, by cutting their wages, by causing a lot of issues that we were told, you know, was not going to be how this new economy was going to work, right? Because it was going to enable all this freedom, all these new opportunities. But actually, that's not really working out necessarily as planned. And of course, you know, we're starting to see a greater focus on competition policy, on breaking up these companies, on antitrust regulation, if you course, you know, we're starting to see a greater focus on competition policy, on breaking up these companies, on antitrust regulation, if you know, you're using kind of American speak there, you know, both here in the EU, but also in the United States as well, where there's a greater focus on, you know, how we're going to try to address the harms that have come of these businesses as they have become so large. And so in recent years, you know, we've seen a bit of a shift where these are some of the images we've been seeing of these founders instead when they're dragged in front of Congress or in front of courts because of the problems that their companies are causing. And of course, that has made them very angry, right? Because for the better part of two decades, these people have been treated, you know, very well, right? You had a lot of the media treating them as though they were the future, as though they were building this amazing world for all of us, as though everything that they were doing was positive and shouldn't be criticized. You had governments kind of running at them, asking what they could do to have them expand in their markets, to build new offices or, you know, research centers or things like that. They wanted these companies to be established there. And then all of a sudden, over the course of a couple of years, there's this real shift where now they're the enemy. Now they're causing all these problems that need to be addressed. Now they're being pulled in front of courts, and regulators are asking them to hold themselves accountable for problems that they've caused. They don't like that. them to hold themselves accountable for problems that they've caused. They don't like that. And so they're thinking about how they can ensure that their power, this power that they've built up over these past few decades, is not going to be challenged because, of course, now they're billionaires many times over, some of them with hundreds of billions of dollars. They command these massive companies that give them immense influence, both political and beyond, and they don't want that to go away, right? Who would, right, I guess? And so they kind of have a two-pronged strategy here, where they need to identify another threat, right? They are not the prime problem. There's another problem somewhere else that deserves much greater attention. And of course, you know, after a long time of the tech industry being positioned as more liberal, you know, more progressive kind of form of capitalism, that they were doing something different than these old companies, they are doing what all the companies do, and going after the political right, because they know they can get protection there. So we'll run through both of those quickly on their own. And of course, before doing that, it's important to note that, you know, those quickly on their own. And of course, before doing that, it's important to note that, you know, this relationship between the tech industry and the military never went away. You know, Oracle, which is a very prominent tech company that's not as kind of public facing as, you know, your Googles and Facebooks and things like that, you know, it was basically a CIA project started in the 1970s and 80s. Google, of course, got a bunch of funding from similar places in order to get itself started. As I was saying, a lot of these tech companies got defense funding in order to actually get started, a lot of public funding. But in the United States, because the military budget is so large, a lot of that funding comes through the military for military priorities, right? Security, defense, national security, things like that. And of course, they have long been working for military priorities, right? Security, defense, national security, things like that. And of course they have long been working with a lot of these agencies and jurisdictions, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, working with ICE, which is kind of the immigration force that rounds up migrants on the southern border and throughout the United States. And of course the Customs and Border Protection as well, which does similar things. Google of course signed this massive contract that its workers were opposing with the Pentagon. And it's certainly not the only tech company to have done that. And so these relationships have been there for a while. They're not wholly new, but they're taking on a different form. And think back to the way that the tech industry, as I described, was in the past, right? Where there was a very clear connection between what was happening in Silicon Valley, what was happening in these companies, and the military's priorities. And then in the 1980s, we entered this era where they wanted to appear more hands-off. They wanted to appear to have more distance between the government and the military and what they were doing. They didn't want that association that they were close with them, that they were cozy with them, even though they were still getting that funding, even though they were still benefiting immensely from that relationship, you know, both domestically but even internationally when the United States was going around the world and telling countries that it needed to put protections for the tech industry in its trade agreements so they couldn't regulate them excessively, you know, stopping countries from taxing them, from overly regulating them for a number of years until recently when countries have finally started to push back on those things. And so what you really start to see after 2018 when this critical turn happens is the tech industry looking for another boogeyman, another enemy, right? And that really arises in China, not just because the Chinese tech industry is becoming a threat to the U.S. tech industry, to the global dominance of Silicon Valley over what happens online and the digital technologies that we use, but also because China is a rising power, right? Its economy is growing. It's becoming a geopolitical threat to the United States as well, not so much on the global sphere, but at least around Asia, where the United States is not as powerful as it once was. And so what you see here, of course, is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has long been kind of the most vocally invisible conservative in Silicon Valley. He has been openly opposed to democracy, openly opposed to the rights of minorities, even openly opposed to gay rights, even though he's a gay man himself. And so he basically put out this attack on Google for saying that they were working with the Chinese government, that this was a serious problem, because its technologies were ultimately, you know, defense technologies, ultimately national security interests, and they shouldn't be working with China. And so the following year, Eric Schmidt was formerly the CEO of Google. So he put out kind of a responding op-ed to say, hold up now, we think that China is a threat as well. We are thinking about how we engage with it. And Eric Schmidt has gone on to become a major promoter of AI for military uses, works a lot with the Pentagon and the US government in order to get it to embrace artificial intelligence in military uses, and has been a real advocate for that over the past year or so as well, as this generative AI boom has been happening. So what you really see here is the right wing of Silicon Valley, and what would more often be considered probably like the cent right wing of Silicon Valley and what would more often be considered probably like the centrist part of Silicon Valley, I think it would be a bit generous to call them progressive, basically saying we agree that China is the problem here, right? That China is the threat because it's in their mutual interest to suggest that. Because if they can say the threat is China, then all of a sudden the threat of breaking up big tech becomes something that is much less of a concern because now the United States needs Silicon Valley. Now the United States needs its tech monopolies in order to counter the Chinese threat, in order to counter the large tech companies in China that are posing not just, you know, kind of the geopolitical threat, but the threat to U.S. technological supremacy that it wants to maintain, which is, of course, why we've seen the United States follow with quite a number of policies aimed at reining in and kind of constraining the Chinese tech sector, whether that is banning Huawei from, you know, its 5G and telecommunications networks and then pushing its allies to do the same thing. communications networks and then pushing its allies to do the same thing. Of course, under the Trump administration, the United States had a program which it called the Clean Network. Clean basically meant you clean the dirty Chinese technologies out of your technological systems, whether that's your telecom networks, whether that's the types of devices like phones and tablets that you sell in your country, whether that is the types of apps that you allow people to run. They want that all to be cleaned up. The Biden administration got rid of that quite racist language, but they still kept around the general policy. You know, they're moving forward with a plan to ban TikTok. Joe Biden has signed the bill in order to do that now. And, of course, we've also seen in the past couple of years the Biden administration move forward with very strict rules on semiconductor export and the export of technologies that can make advanced semiconductors because it doesn't want China to be able to develop the capabilities to create these sorts of chips. you really see here is the U.S. government, you know, being fully on board with this project by Silicon Valley, because really it's not wholly or not solely a Silicon Valley thing, right? The tech industry has large, has long worked in China, has largely benefited from being active in that market. You know, Apple manufactures many of their products there. Many of these other services are available there. But they can see that it's much more in their interest to start to limit this relationship to ensure that, you know, their dominance is protected in other parts of the world by the U.S. government and that they try to restrict their major competitors. And of course, the United States does not want to see its global power being challenged either. And so the message that it is sending to its allies is that, you know, you restrict Chinese technologies and accept the dominance of American technologies in your markets and don't challenge that at all. And we'll come back to that in just a second. The other piece of this is, of course, the embrace of the right. This is a photo that's actually surprisingly difficult to find. So it's, you know, Donald Trump was the president. And you see here, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt's in the back there, Tim Cook of Apple, you know, a couple other tech people in there that you wouldn't know as well. But, you know, it's quite common for these CEOs to meet with presidents, you know, this is not wholly a new thing. But there is a really distinct turn during Donald Trump's time in office, where you have the tech industry becoming much more open to the political right, embracing them much more. You see a lot more of these people embracing this kind of woke cancel culture kind of politics, I guess, or discourses in order to divide people up and in order to get people to focus on these sorts of cultural issues rather than the real economic issues and the problems that their power presents. And then beyond that as well, of course, embracing the right has these particular benefits for them, right? They want to escape accountability for the harms that their companies are causing. They certainly do not want to pay higher taxes. And they want to ensure that, you know, the various bodies of the US government is not going to regulate their companies or, you know, put very heavy regulations on what they're doing. And so the Democratic Party is being very open about the fact that they want to see these tech companies reined in. I think there's questions about what will ultimately come of that sort of a project. But the Republican Party and right-wing parties beyond the United States are being very clear with these very powerful figures and their companies that they're probably pretty good, right? That they will protect them, at least to a certain degree, from the accountability, from the higher taxes that they fear. And so, you know, it works much more in their interest as they have become very powerful and wealthy people to align with the political right wing. Of course, it helps that I think a lot of them buy into these policies anyway. They always kind of presented themselves as more what they say in North America. I don't know if it's common here, fiscally conservative and socially liberal, right? It's okay for you to have your minority rights as long as you don't tax us and regulate us and stuff like that. And of course, we see this internationally as well. This is Elon Musk, but he's just very vocal about these things, where he is making distinct connections with far-right and hard-right figures around the world. Of course, this is Javier Millay, the new president of Argentina, who he met just recently. Of course, he's become good friends with Georgia Maloney he attended her kind of youth conservative festival in December in Italy you know not the first trip he's made to Italy in order to see her of course he was recently in Israel after making some anti-semitic comments and needed to kind of you know make things right by showing that he was a supporter of Zionism so he went to Israel to you know meet with the prime minister and the defense minister to show that it was okay. Even if he says anti-Semitic things, he'll support the Zionist project, right? And then, of course, this is Elon Musk with the Hungarian president. That one was last year. I don't think she's even the president any longer. But that trip was actually because Elon Musk had missed this conference that Hungary puts on where they're very focused on, you know, people having more white kids and, you know, the demographic crisis as, you know, a lot of the political right is focused on more recently. And so they were talking a lot about, you know, why it's important to have more babies and all that kind of stuff, you know, on that visit. What you see more generally is this embrace by the tech industry of very right-wing ideologies, very right-wing politics. I'm sure you've seen some of the stuff that Elon Musk has been tweeting, but they generally have these distinct ideologies that are getting closer and closer to fascism. The venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, who is a very influential figure in Silicon Valley, released a manifesto that he called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year, where he explicitly pointed to the Italian futurists as inspirations and a number of very openly fascist figures as things that he wanted to see the tech industry learn from, basically. you know see the tech industry learn from basically and of course beyond that you know there are many examples that I could give but what you see quite recently is the tech industry very much defending its involvement in support of the Israeli military as it carries out its genocide in Gaza. Palatir's CEO just recently said of college activists that you've probably seen in the United States and I know you have a number of them here in Europe as well who are camping out and demanding their universities divest from Israel and companies affiliated with it he said the peace activists referring to the people on college campuses are actually war activists and we you know as the CEO of Palantir is the real peace activist here. And of course, Google has fired over 50 workers it is now who protested a contract that they have with the Israeli government, wanting them to end that, Project Nimbus it's called. And of course, they also make their Google photo tools available to the Israeli military to put together their targeting lists, their AI-generated targeting lists for Gaza. And, of course, beyond that, Apple and Meta workers have also released open letters about their own company's involvement and what they've been doing. So this is, you know, a bigger issue that is happening here where these companies very clearly feel that they are unaccountable to very many people at all. So I think the big question then to end off the talk is how to respond to these sorts of things, right? And I think it requires us to recognize a few things. The first is that the internet was always a project of US power. We had these narratives around the internet that it was about liberation, that it was about this kind of libertarian empowerment of the individual. What we've actually seen is that the corporations very much took it over and having that spread internationally was always something that benefited the American government in the American state as those companies spread internationally and then of course brought all the wealth and data that they gained from that back to the United States. Also, you know, allowed the United States a lot of influence into the culture and politics of a lot of other countries. Containing China in this, you know, when we focus on these things, is about geopolitics and protecting Silicon Valley ultimately. Obviously, the United States has its geopolitical concerns, but part of the reason that this movement has gained so much power in the United States is because the tech industry is very much behind it, because it sees it as its way to protect its own power and its own influence to make sure that, you know, it is both not out-competed by the Chinese, but it is also not reined in by regulatory efforts domestically as well. And then the other piece of this that might be a bit more controversial is that state power will be necessary to rein it in and set it on another course, it being the tech industry, of course. And obviously we have had these narratives around the problems with the state, there are a lot of problems with the state, and how the internet was supposed to free us from the power of the state, the influence of the state for a long time. But what we see very much is that if these major areas of concentrated power that the tech industries and the tech companies represent are going to be reined in, it's not going to happen just by individuals working hard on their laptops and coding powerful things to try to stop them. Certainly it requires movements, it requires union organizing, it requires people being very heavily involved in order to force the state to take action, but it is the state that has ultimately the levers to start to rein in the power of these major tech companies. You know, I think it's interesting if we think back to these like tech libertarian discourses that come out of the 1980s and the 1990s we have this um you know this character of the hacker right this person who has these tools that the tech industry has given to it you know these personal computers and things like that these coding languages and these skills that the person is able to develop and that allows them to like take on the world and take on these hierarchical power structures. Sure, that's right to a certain degree, but if we're facing off against Amazon and Apple and Facebook and all these other major tech companies, it's going to require a bit more than that, I think. And so if we look at what Europe is doing, for example, because I think if we look at the United States, we can see ultimately that the government there is not going to be our ally, right? That the U.S. government benefits from the global dominance, the global power of Silicon Valley, and it's not going to rein in that power because ultimately that means it's reducing its own power. So that means it's, you know, governments and states outside of the United States that are going to have to be the ones that need to act on that, that need to try to move that forward. So what we see, of course, in the European Union is a movement toward greater regulation of American tech companies in particular, you know, tech more broadly. But then the question is, what is the right approach in order to do that? And what we see in the European Union is that the focus is often on constraining American tech companies to build up national champions in various parts of Europe that are still kind of based on the same exploitative extractive model that Silicon Valley pioneered and pushed out to everybody else. You know we see in France for example that activists there are increasingly protesting the government's allowance of algorithmic surveillance tools especially in the lead-up to Olympics, because it helps French companies that are trying to sell those tools, not just domestically, but internationally as well. Rosie Collington has done great research on what's happening in Denmark, where it's basically eroding its public services to allow tech companies to use the data and to offer kind of similar services to what is being offered through the welfare state so that it can try to have this export market of tech platforms and tech services, but ultimately that's degrading the welfare state and the public services that it offers to its citizens as well. You know, in the UK, they're literally selling off the NHS's data to Palantir. You know, this is kind of the degree that these things have reached. And so ultimately, that leads to the question of, you know, what do we do instead, right? And ultimately, it requires not just reining in these major tech companies, these US tech companies in particular, and relocalizing power within, you know, countries that right now do not have so much power over their technological futures. But questioning this model more broadly, right? Is this the way that we actually want to build technology? What would a better way of approaching technological development look like that actually works for not just the United States and its major tech companies or the major national champions that are developed along similar models, but the actual publics of these different countries, along similar models, but the actual publics of these different countries, where we think that, you know, if we want the internet, if we want technology to be this force for good in the world, how is that enabled, rather than just ensuring that it makes more money for some major companies, but continues to harm, you know, not just people in your own country, but in many other parts of the world as well. And that requires a much more fundamental rethink that goes far beyond technology to politics and economics and things like that as well, which is, of course, why these conversations cannot ultimately be just technological. So thanks so much. Thank you.