Unreal Bird #13: New York Twelve

In this issue, I re-up my recent piece on Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb's attendance at REINDUSTRIALIZE, share a piece on anti-tech extremist violence, and dive into the ramifications of the Democratic primary in NY-12.

As always, scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

Thanks for reading Unreal Birds, a newsletter about how tech, media, and capital undermine democratic accountability. Forwarded this newsletter? Consider subscribing.

What I'm up to

I've picked up some additional editing work for Tech Policy Press, where I'm proud to have helped ship this piece on anti-tech extremism by Jordyn Abrams at GWU's Program on Extremism. Jordyn's argument is important: that violence targeting politicians and industry leaders for their stances on AI are a natural outgrowth of unrepresentative governance and doomsday rhetoric about humanity's future. Give it a read.

Also: last week, I published (with Dakotah Kennedy of Upbeat Nonsense) a special newsletter issue on Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb's attendance at REINDUSTRIALIZE, a manufacturing summit in Detroit sponsored by, among others, JD Vance's venture capital firm. REINDUSTRIALIZE attracts companies in the AI, automated manufacturing, and defense contracting sectors; it has faced previous controversy for the involvement of Palantir and Anduril, in particular over those companies' involvement in the war in Gaza. Bibb was the only elected official announced as a speaker and one of the only Democrats in a sea of Republicans. He was there to pitch the Midline, a new industrial development site in Cleveland and a genuine achievement for the city, which has struggled to encourage investment in that area for years.

Responses to the piece ran from 'Justin Bibb sold out the progressives who got him elected' to 'it's the mayor's job to attract jobs.'

To the latter, I say: have some political imagination. First off, many of these companies proudly advertise that they are AI-first, highly automated manufacturers; this ain't your grandpa's Ford plant. Second, Anduril and Palantir are not your friends. At least, they're not my friends, and if they're your friends you're probably not my friend either. Bibb should be trying to attract employers who reflect the values of Cleveland—a heavily Democratic city with no elected Republican officials—and which will buoy the fortunes of working families, not missile magnates.

New York Twelve

I want to talk about the NY-12 House race, in which State Assemblyman Alex Bores lost to outgoing Congressman Jerry Nadler protégé Micah Lasher, who will succeed his old boss after Nader's retirement.

The race received national attention for several reasons; one of the candidates was a Kennedy scion. But most relevant was that it was expensive: Transformer tracked more than $27 million in AI spending in the Democratic primary, with eight million from industry-linked super PAC Think Big opposing Bores and $19 million from pro-AI-Safety groups supporting him.

What did that money buy? Sour Bores supporters might say he was defeated by money in politics, but his genuinely audacious AI platform and the news of his deep-pocketed industry critics ultimately mobilized more than twice as much money from pro-Safety groups than was spent against him by Big Tech.

Bores's platform, by the way, was about much more than safety; it would have rewritten the relationship between the American public and Silicon Valley. It included provisions for child safety, AI in schools, data privacy and ownership, protections from deepfakes, accountability and transparency for data center development, protections for workers, and an "AI dividend, to ensure every American benefits from AI-driven productivity," among various AI safety proposals. There is a reason my friend Amy Studdart wrote that the NY-12 primary was a "referendum on AI governance":

A local congressional primary in Manhattan has become a proxy fight over whether democratic institutions can meaningfully shape AI before AI companies shape the institutions that govern them... Jerry Nadler’s career belonged to an era of liberal constitutional politics—civil liberties, impeachment, courts, rights, institutions, the slow machinery of law. The race to replace him belongs to AI, platform power, outside money, and a question Nadler’s era never quite had to answer: whether democratic institutions can move fast enough to govern technologies that are already reorganizing the society those institutions are meant to serve.

With those stakes, perhaps you are expecting me to be despondent about Bores's loss. I'm not, for two reasons. First, Lasher himself is no Big Tech darling, declaring in his victory speech that "I have some news for the two big AI companies who’ve taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat: I won’t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs and our environment.”

Second, Bores's candidacy is not the final word on this issue. It's much closer to the first word, and it has set the tone for future conversations within the Democratic party and far beyond New York's twelfth Congressional district.

The good news is that eight million dollars of Big Tech's money couldn't stop that from happening. The bad news is that they have a lot more than eight million dollars left.

Field notes

"AI should not help campaigns send more bad email faster," Jonathan Barnes, AI in Politics.

• Say it again for the people in the back. AI makes it easier to send mass email and text messages, which may give campaigns early fundraising hauls but does nothing to build real relationships with people who might show up on election day.

"If LLMs Have Human-like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II," Adrian de Wynter.

• I don't claim to fully understand this paper, but I love that someone A) showed how you could create an LLM by representing bits as goats moving through gates in the video game Age of Empires II, and then B) used that to argue that any test concluding that Claude is self-aware would have to conclude the same about the AoE II Goat LLM (my new preferred model of choice).

"Revealed: An Anti-left Influence Operation in France Leads to Tel Aviv," Omer Benjakob, Haaretz.

• This investigation details an influence-for-hire campaign, seemingly run out of Israel, that targeted a leftist party which criticized Israel over Gaza. It paired rape accusations and AI-generated nudes, boosted by "a small army of fake accounts on social media," with fake "Muslim voter guide" sites designed to taint the slate as sectarian.

Snoot watch

Humble plea

This newsletter is mostly powered by caffeine. If you've made it this far, consider buying me a coffee at the link below: