Tech For Us?
Possibly, maybe
Hey there. Apologies for the radio silence in recent weeks, I was mostly busy getting ready to defend my doctoral dissertation, which I passed, so you are now reading the words of a doctor — and still with no paywall! Lucky you. I hope to get back to regular dispatches into the spring and summer, so please stick around.
If there’s one thing that the actions of Elon Musk and his cronies below the border should tell us, it’s that we need to reconfigure the relationship between the state and the tech industry.
As attention on regulation of the tech sector has increased in recent years, particularly in the US under the Biden administration’s former Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan, conversations have centred on how Silicon Valley is in need of constraint, or even to be broken up. At the same time, these companies have moved to get a seat at the regulatory table, either directly or through lobbying groups.
Musk, alongside other tech despots like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, have cozied up to the new Trump regime precisely under this strategy, only to even greater heights. As we have seen, the state is now synonymous with the whims of the tech industry’s CEO kings, seemingly to a degree even they didn’t necessarily count on actually happening.
As Canada has been pulled into a trade and tariff war, our government ought to carefully consider its relations with the tech industry, both from foreign companies and homegrown initiatives.
The Platform Lab, our research group at Concordia University, has recently published a new report on tech regulation and its many dynamics from around the world. My contribution specifically explores how companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, have sought to have a greater say in the governance process by reframing how regulation is understood.
To put it simply: in the past, tech leaders like Microsoft’s Bill Gates argued that regulation stifles innovation, and the state was positioned as an enemy — leave us alone, we know best. Today, the tech elite instead invite regulatory “scrutiny,” thereby ensuring that it takes shape in their image, weaponizing their technical expertise as a way to convince policymakers that these companies ought to direct the discussion — we (still) know best, let us lead.
What can we do about the outsized power of the tech industry, particularly as Musk has essentially become the American state? Milquetoast calls like Chrystia Freeland’s to put a 100% tariff on Teslas is a flimsy place to start, barely a nudge in the right direction.
Not to be outdone, Mark Carney’s plan to “reskill and retrain workers for the technological revolution creating a labour force for the future so that AI works for all Canadians” is hardly encouraging, as it goes on:
Government must harness AI with a clear focus on serving the public good. We will deploy AI across federal government services to increase productivity, reduce waste and improve delivery. We will catalyse major investments in AI infrastructure to reinforce Canada’s leadership in AI model development. We will incentivise the application of AI across our economy to provide better services and create high paying jobs for Canadians. We will work with provinces and territories to deploy AI in addressing productivity challenges in health care, education, and construction. Canada should lead the world in AI, tech, and digital industries.
This sounds an awful lot not only like fully buying in to AI hype to address long-standing governance problems, but also like DOGE-lite propaganda. Is this really the best we can hope for?
What we need is a proper reckoning with how dependent we have become on these companies and technologies, both as individuals and at the state level. Tech power has always been intermingled with national political power, and it should have been clear before now that this would have severe consequences on the polity.
What does this reckoning look like? Consider Amazon’s recent decision to shut down its Quebec warehouses after they voted to unionize. A strong response from either the provincial or federal governments would have been to penalize Amazon, from hefty fines to legal action. So far, only the union itself is pushing back.
We must go much further, as we contend with how much of our infrastructure is tied up with these private interests. Why have we allowed these companies to impose themselves on us with impunity, to determine how our data and content are used and abused, and to make dangerous inroads into the everyday functioning of the civil state?
The only answer, and it may be a hard one to swallow for some, is much more investment in public tech infrastructure. This isn’t just a matter of national pride or even digital sovereignty, it’s also a crassly smart economic decision — our labour should not be at risk due to the whims of America’s tech titans, and historical relationships of private and public intertwinement ought to be completely thrown out if there’s any hope of recapturing technology as a force for something other than market-based profit and power.
Personally, I believe we need community-based tech solutions completely removed from the profit motive, starting over from scratch — scorch the technological soil and its intrinsic suturing with private enterprise, and design technological applications for specific regional purposes.
But we can start much more practically with public infrastructure initiatives, long-term projects that strengthen localized development so that we are collectively in control of what we see and do online, and how we operate as citizens.
Our governments, as with almost every institution we regularly encounter, have lost the faith of folks across political and ideological aisles, for good reason. Tech empires and their so-called solutions have been more than willing to fill those gaps. The digital is always material, and it’s time for the government, if it can and, more significantly, if we force it to, to take charge over our tech future so that it works for us.
Ephemera
John Herrman on AI agents: “Seen through the lens of AI training and automated research, the web isn’t a human commons to be preserved or even joined with the intent of exploitation. It’s more external than that: a vulnerable resource to be mined and mined again until it’s not needed anymore or there’s nothing of value left, whichever comes first.”
Sam Kriss on the alt-lit scene: “A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity.”
Renée DiResta on the risks of federated social media: “What happens when divergent norms grow so distinct that we can no longer even see or engage with each other’s conversations? The challenge of consensus is no longer simply difficult, it is structurally reinforced.”
Song Rec: “Contrarian” by Marie Davidson