Big Tech Backs Trump to Cut Taxes, Boost Crypto, Replace Workers with AI: Tech Investor Roger McNamee

By Roger McNamee, Amy Goodman 

December 28, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!


Silicon Valley and tech billionaires are lining up to support the incoming Trump administration. With the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as one of Trump’s closest advisers, Trump has hosted Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for dinners at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon, Meta and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all announced donations of $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural committee. Trump has placed tech executives all over his new administration, including PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, venture capitalists Scott Kupor and Sriram Krishnan, and tech boss David Sacks, whom Trump has picked to be “czar” of crypto and artificial intelligence. “The core things come down to displacing workers with artificial intelligence, displacing the currency with crypto, and getting rid of any kind of taxation on wealth that might come up,” says author and former tech investor Roger McNamee, who encourages people to consider using less Silicon Valley tech products. “We have been accepting all kinds of invasions of privacy, all kinds of surveillance, all kinds of manipulation in exchange for convenience. … Could we do with less convenience for a while in exchange for regaining human autonomy?”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at the influence of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires in the incoming Trump administration as tech companies line up to support the president-elect, a major difference from his first term. Tech billionaire Elon Musk is one of Trump’s closest advisers. Earlier this month, he was there when Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month. Amazon, Meta and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all announced donations of a million dollars each to Trump’s inaugural committee. This comes as Trump chose tech execs Scott Kupor and Sriram Krishnan for key roles this week. They’ll likely work closely with another tech executive, David Sacks, who Trump has picked to be czar of crypto and artificial intelligence. As we reported earlier, Trump on Sunday also tapped billionaire tech investor Ken Howery as U.S. ambassador to Denmark. Howery co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

For more, we’re joined by longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He had a 34-year career in Silicon Valley, was an early investor in Facebook.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Roger. Thanks so much for waking up for this program. If you can start off by talking about what you think it’s most important for people to understand about, what, Elon Musk, what people are calling “President Musk,” being in charge, just last week leading off the crisis of whether the government would shut down, making billions since the election, as he poured millions or a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump’s victory?

ROGER McNAMEE: So, Amy, I think there are two things that stand at the top of the list of all Silicon Valley executives right now. The first thing is they all want tax cuts. These are billionaires. They don’t want to pay taxes on their wealth. The second issue, though, relates to their products.

Tech has undergone a massive transformation culturally. It used to be about empowerment. It used to be about productivity. But for the last 15 years, the industry has been increasingly adversarial of their customers, as they have tried to deploy increasingly authoritarian technologies into the marketplace. And they have put David Sacks in charge of the two that are the leading edge right now, which is to say cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. And the thing that makes me really sad, as someone who spent the last eight years warning about the threat from Silicon Valley, is that we’re going to see a massive, uncontrolled experiment on the American population. And I have absolutely no idea how this is going to turn out.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they are clearly extremely interested in tax cuts and deregulation. Can you talk about the significance of this, what this means for the health of the nation?

ROGER McNAMEE: So, Amy, I think here’s the fundamental challenge, that Americans for too long have trusted Silicon Valley. You know, for 50 years, the products that came out of the valley made us more capable. They made us more productive. That is no longer the case. And we have maintained this increasingly tight relationship with technology products, essentially treating everything new as though it would automatically be better than what came before. That has not been the case since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

And so, the point I would make to everybody is I think we need to change our relationship to technology. You know, what you’re seeing in this space is exactly what the professor just described going on at foreign affairs, which is there are a lot of distractions, a lot of things being thrown out there to grab your attention. But the core things come down to displacing workers with artificial intelligence, displacing the currency with crypto, and getting rid of any kind of taxation on wealth that might come up. And that’s the agenda. It’s really straightforward. And the only power we have as citizens — and I think it’s a huge power — is to sit there and say, “You know what? We’re not going to use your products anymore.” And we have been accepting all kinds of invasions of privacy, all kinds of surveillance, all kinds of manipulation in exchange for convenience. I think it’s time for us to look at that relationship and ask, “Could we do with less convenience for a while in exchange for regaining human autonomy?” That’s a trade I made a number of years ago, and I’ve been encouraged others to do, and I just think it’s really the only option that we have for at least the next four years.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the relationship of these tech billionaires or oligarchs with workers. I mean, you have Amazon workers out all over the country on strike. Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post Of course, Bezos and, what, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, stopped the endorsements of their editorial boards for Kamala Harris. But the significance of how they deal with workers and what this administration will mean?

ROGER McNAMEE: Well, if you go back, the great Meredith Whittaker at Signal wrote an essay, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half ago, about the history of computing and how, even back to the 1850s, the predecessor technologies that led to computing were all about control of labor. And it started on plantations and controlling slaves. And you have seen a steady evolution. It was broken — temporarily, it turns out — by the personal computer, which, in fact, empowered people. And then the internet did the same thing.

These guys have been attempting to revert to centralized control ever since, and so that their goal is really, really simple. If you watch artificial intelligence, for example, the mania for AI began — and I do not think this is a coincidence — when Silicon Valley workers resisted going back into the office after COVID. And the first market they tried to sell it to was Hollywood during the writers’ strike and the Screen Actors Guild strike. And I think it’s really simple. There are ads in San Francisco right now about how you should not employ any more humans. You know, you can employ AI instead of humans. And I sit there and ask a really basic question: Who does that serve? You know, our children are being lured into using ChatGPT for school. And in what way does that benefit them? It doesn’t prepare them for a future in which they’re empowered. It prepares them for a future in which they are disempowered.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger McNamee, how is all this going to be powered? Microsoft wants a nuclear power plant like Three Mile Island. Explain the role of nuclear power, AI and cryptocurrency.

ROGER McNAMEE: Amy, this is such an important question. You know, even if you thought that artificial intelligence was useful — and to be clear, it is not at all obvious that the utility of it is anything like as valuable as the cost, but the starting assumptions are totally flawed. So, the industry starts by stealing all copyrighted information, as well as all the personal information that all of us have in cloud services. So, if you think about things you might have in Google Docs or, you know, that you might have in an email server or in an app that does your productivity apps, you know, all of those things are being absorbed. So that’s a theft.

But the second problem, the really huge one, is what it does to natural resources. If you look at Microsoft and Google in particular, both have made commitments to carbon neutrality by 2030. Both in the past year abandoned those commitments, because their power consumption has gone nonlinear, up 30, 40, 50% over the last few years, simply to power artificial intelligence. The same thing is going on with water. A lot of these processing plants, both for the data and for semiconductors, are located in deserts, and so they’re consuming massive amounts of water.

And the public has had no voice in this. The companies have acted unilaterally. And they’re at the point now where they’re literally talking about restarting Three Mile Island, in Microsoft’s case, or building floating nuclear plants in the Northwest, in the case of Amazon. And I would simply observe that the public really should have a voice in this. And what we decided in this last election is that we were going to forgo that vote and let the industry have control of it. And, you know, I seriously have no idea how this is going to turn out, and I think the only power we have is to say no.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, Roger, but, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk’s worth soared over 70% to $450 billion after the presidential elections. The significance of this?

ROGER McNAMEE: Well, everything about Trump appears to be pay to play, right? All of these executives are giving a million dollars each. These are rounding error numbers. This is money they find between the cushions of the couch in their living room. But, you know, it’s basically a protection payment. And in Musk’s case, the investment he made in Trump, which was a quarter of a billion dollars, or the investment he made in Twitter, which was like $44 billion, those have paid off, obviously, many, many times over.

I believe that Trump and Musk will eventually part ways. I mean, I don’t know Trump at all, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would put up with someone who competes at the level that Musk competes at. But we’ll have to see how that turns out. My point here is that —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will have a further conversation with you on this, Roger McNamee, longtime Silicon Valley investor, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. That does it for the show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.