Americans, this is your chance to slap down the tech broligarchs

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The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve…

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“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things.

Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.

I’ve been a fan of the film Terminator 2 forever, the one where a badass female protagonist leads the action-movie-style spectacular destruction of Skynet, the massive computer system that will otherwise go rogue and pit itself and a plethora of advanced weapons against the human race. We’re not in a film and we’re probably not going to solve the problems big tech creates through spectacular violence, although the guerrilla campaigns to take down, disable or destroy Flock cameras have some action-movie charms (wading through the bureaucratic process of getting cities to reject or take down the surveillance technology is probably more effective.)

A few months ago, I was surprised to find myself using the term “beautiful hatred” to describe the nationwide revolt against datacenters, Flock cameras, AI, and tech corporations and the oligarchs (or broligarchs) they’ve spawned. It is beautiful because behind fierce opposition to a destructive force is something you’re trying to protect from destruction, something you care about, even love.

Behind this revolt against big tech is concern about many things, from the climate to democracy to mental health and humanity itself.

Like the Trump administration, the tech overlords have proceeded on the assumption they can ignore or override the will of the people. The will of the people is in the process of proving them wrong, at least to some extent, and the midterms will be, among other things, a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with predatory tech giants over the public they’re supposed to serve and, arguably, humanity itself.