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"content": "\u003cp>More than 50 California labor and nonprofit organizations are asking Attorney General Rob Bonta to make sure OpenAI properly accounts for the public good as it seeks to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Artificial intelligence institution OpenAI, Inc. is a nonprofit entity that has failed to protect its charitable assets, allowing these charitable assets to be diverted for private profit and subverting its charitable mission to advance safe artificial intelligence,” reads the letter, released on Wednesday. “Petitioners request that the Attorney General act now in the instant case to again protect billions of dollars that are under threat as profit-driven hunger for power yields conflicts of interest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OpenAI’s conversion bid was launched to cash in on tens of billions of dollars promised by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/01/openai-raises-up-to-us40bn-in-deal-with-softbank\">SoftBank Group\u003c/a>, contingent on OpenAI transforming itself into a for-profit corporation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As we enter 2025, we will have to become more than a lab and a startup — we have to become an enduring company,” the company wrote in a \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission/?utm_source=chatgpt.com\">blog post\u003c/a> last December. “Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest. The PBC is a \u003ca href=\"https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-xai-incorporates-as-benefit-corporation-with-positive-impact-goal\">structure\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/\">used\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_AI\">by\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/company\">many\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/02/18/converting-to-a-delaware-public-benefit-corporation-lessons-from-experience/\">others\u003c/a> that requires the company to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest in its decision-making. It will enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms like others in this space.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a controversial deal, and the subject of at least one lawsuit, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/elon-musk-openai-profit-lawsuit.html\">from Elon Musk\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, said he just wants OpenAI to follow through on its original promise to benefit humanity. “We are not opposed to any conversion of nonprofit to for-profit. Nor are we wagging our fingers around the good or bad of AI,” said Blackwell, who heads one of the largest community foundations in the country. “We really just want to make sure that the assets are properly accounted for in this conversion. And that it’s an independent entity that comes out the other end.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12034490 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/PadillaMentalHealthCaucus-1020x680.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response to the letter, an Open AI spokesman wrote, “Our Board has been very clear that we intend to strengthen the non-profit so that it can deliver on its mission for the long term. We’re not selling it, we’re doubling down on its work. We look forward to the input and advice from leaders who have experience in community-based organizations on how we can help them achieve their missions, \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/RGZyCJ6PLru1rWp2TVfjcy1U6u?domain=openai.com\">as recently announced\u003c/a> by the creation of our advisory Commission.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AG’s office is already investigating. \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Letter%20to%20OpenAI%20Inc%20.pdf\">In a letter sent to the ChatGPT maker\u003c/a> last December, Deputy Attorney General Christopher Lamerdin cited clauses in OpenAI’s articles of incorporation under which “OpenAI’s assets are irrevocably dedicated to its charitable purpose.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testified during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law oversight hearing on AI in 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Altman urged U.S. senators to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1233024001/as-congress-lags-california-lawmakers-take-on-ai-regulations\">pass laws\u003c/a> to force accountability from the big players like Amazon, Google and OpenAI investor Microsoft. “There needs to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors,” Altman said. More recently, OpenAI has increased spending on \u003ca href=\"https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110260/openai-ups-its-lobbying-efforts-nearly-seven-fold/\">lobbying Congress sevenfold \u003c/a>and, for the \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2024/09/california-ai-safety-regulations-bills/\">first time, hired lobbyists\u003c/a> to oppose bills to regulate AI in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A state bill (\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB501\">AB 501\u003c/a>) that would have blocked the conversion has been amended to focus on aircraft liens instead. “In the process of developing the legislation and doing the due diligence, it was determined that due to the complexity of the policy, additional time and resources to vet it and gather input were necessary,” David Burruto, district director for Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo), wrote KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to smell lobbyists behind the scene trying to cut it down in some way or another,” said Gary Marcus, a leading AI expert, who testified to the Senate sitting next to Altman. He’s also written a blog post \u003ca href=\"https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-bill-that-would-have-blocked?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true\">objecting\u003c/a> to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/california-bill-barring-openai-for-profit-transition-dead/article_27250d39-7577-47cc-a414-a7b13e5f6ce0.html\">gut-and-amend\u003c/a> of AB 501. “He said he was for regulation. And then, OpenAI has been lobbying behind the scenes against many regulations. So there’s a long history of this company making promises that I don’t think really have anything to do with reality. I’m not sure they ever meant them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response to the letter, an Open AI spokesman wrote, “Our Board has been very clear that we intend to strengthen the non-profit so that it can deliver on its mission for the long term. We’re not selling it, we’re doubling down on its work. We look forward to the input and advice from leaders who have experience in community-based organizations on how we can help them achieve their missions, \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/RGZyCJ6PLru1rWp2TVfjcy1U6u?domain=openai.com\">as recently announced\u003c/a> by the creation of our advisory Commission.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AG’s office is already investigating. \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Letter%20to%20OpenAI%20Inc%20.pdf\">In a letter sent to the ChatGPT maker\u003c/a> last December, Deputy Attorney General Christopher Lamerdin cited clauses in OpenAI’s articles of incorporation under which “OpenAI’s assets are irrevocably dedicated to its charitable purpose.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testified during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law oversight hearing on AI in 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Altman urged U.S. senators to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1233024001/as-congress-lags-california-lawmakers-take-on-ai-regulations\">pass laws\u003c/a> to force accountability from the big players like Amazon, Google and OpenAI investor Microsoft. “There needs to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors,” Altman said. More recently, OpenAI has increased spending on \u003ca href=\"https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110260/openai-ups-its-lobbying-efforts-nearly-seven-fold/\">lobbying Congress sevenfold \u003c/a>and, for the \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2024/09/california-ai-safety-regulations-bills/\">first time, hired lobbyists\u003c/a> to oppose bills to regulate AI in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A state bill (\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB501\">AB 501\u003c/a>) that would have blocked the conversion has been amended to focus on aircraft liens instead. “In the process of developing the legislation and doing the due diligence, it was determined that due to the complexity of the policy, additional time and resources to vet it and gather input were necessary,” David Burruto, district director for Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo), wrote KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to smell lobbyists behind the scene trying to cut it down in some way or another,” said Gary Marcus, a leading AI expert, who testified to the Senate sitting next to Altman. He’s also written a blog post \u003ca href=\"https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-bill-that-would-have-blocked?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true\">objecting\u003c/a> to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/california-bill-barring-openai-for-profit-transition-dead/article_27250d39-7577-47cc-a414-a7b13e5f6ce0.html\">gut-and-amend\u003c/a> of AB 501. “He said he was for regulation. And then, OpenAI has been lobbying behind the scenes against many regulations. So there’s a long history of this company making promises that I don’t think really have anything to do with reality. I’m not sure they ever meant them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "save-or-scroll-alpha-bros-luigi-sex-tapes-and-hard-launching",
"title": "Save or Scroll: Manosphere Mornings, Luigi Sex Tape Rumors, and the Art of the Hard Launch",
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"headTitle": "Save or Scroll: Manosphere Mornings, Luigi Sex Tape Rumors, and the Art of the Hard Launch | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We can’t cover every wild post from every corner of the internet — and not everything online warrants a full multi-tab journey. That’s where \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> comes in: our series where we team up with a guest for a rapid-fire roundup. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, Morgan is joined by \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ICYMI\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> co-host Candice Lim to dig into the stories they haven’t been able to stop thinking about. From the viral Hailey Bieber 7-part series to alpha bro “get ready with me” videos, Reddit’s restrictions on Luigi Mangione discourse, and more — they’ve got plenty to scroll through. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC3130867233\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice Lim\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Co-Host of ICYMI from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a64273592/alpha-male-morning-routines/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Should I Be Taking Notes From This Viral Alpha Male Morning Routine?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Annabel Iwegbue, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cosmopolitan \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://thetab.com/2025/03/19/hailey-bieber-is-seeking-legal-action-against-social-media-trolls-heres-what-we-know\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hailey Bieber is seeking legal action against people who slate her\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Claudia Cox, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Tab \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theinformation.com/articles/exclusive-section-230-may-finally-get-changed-lawmakers-prep-new-bill\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Section 230 May Finally Get Changed as Lawmakers Prep New Bill \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">– Paris Martineau, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Information \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newsweek.com/luigi-mangione-sex-tape-viral-online-frenzy-2039810\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luigi Mangione Sex Tapes Report Sends Internet into Meltdown\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Marni Rose McFall, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Newsweek\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/reddit-elon-musk-luigi-mangione-censorship.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Nitish Pahwa, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-blueprint-confidentiality-agreements.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How Blueprint Founder Bryan Johnson Sought Control Via Confidentiality Agreements\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Kirsten Grind, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6215514/2025/03/20/trinity-rodman-ben-shelton-relationships-soccer/\">Trinity Rodman, Ben Shelton and how high-profile relationships affect soccer careers \u003c/a>– Tim Spires, \u003ci>The Athletic\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"list-style-type: none\">\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003c/h2>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey guys, this is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Except today, we aren’t opening any tabs. We’re doing something a little different. Sometimes while scrolling, I come across a truly wild post, but spending an entire episode talking about it just doesn’t work out. Sometimes we don’t have enough time to cover it because we have so many other stories to cover. Sometimes I do a little digging and it turns out that the lore behind it just isn’t compelling enough to justify a deep dive. Sometimes there’s no lore at all. A lot of things online aren’t always a multi-tab journey. It can just be juicy gossip for the group chat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So today we have Candice Lim joining us. Candice is also a journalist who covers the Internet and is a co-host of ICYMI, In Case You Missed It, from Slate. Candice and I have been Internet friends and real-life friends for a while, and she is one of my favorite people to gossip about the Internet with. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hello, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, Candice, we have been internet friends for awhile, but the first time we hung out in person, we couldn’t stop yapping. And because we can’t resist the content mines, why not turn hanging out into content? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Absolutely. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice and I are here to play a game called “Save or Scroll.” Save as in when you see a post on TikTok or Instagram or X and you bookmark it, add it to your saved folders or drop the link in Notes app because you know you’re gonna wanna talk about it later. Scroll as in you keep scrolling. So we each have a handful of posts that we can’t stop thinking about and we’re gonna take turns and see if they’re just for the group chat or if they are actually worth a deep dive. If we decide to scroll… It means we’ve talked about it, we’re moving on. If we decide to save, it means that we may hold onto the idea for a future episode. Ready, Candice? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ll go first. So today I come to you with a truly perplexing trend. This is what I’m calling the alpha male get ready with me videos. Are you familiar with these? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I actually have not seen these until you brought them to my attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this all starts with this fitness influencer who goes by Ashton Hall Official on Instagram and he’s this mega jacked dude who posts videos of his super elaborate morning routines. It starts with him getting up at 3:52 a.m. and he pours his first glass of Saratoga spring water. Yeah. Then he takes it to the balcony and starts doing push-ups. And then at like 4:40 a.m. He records himself journaling, but then he opens his notebook to the first page and it’s clearly never been used before. At 5:46 a.m., he dumps ice into this giant glass bowl and pours more Saratoga Spring Water and like dunks his face in it. Then he goes to the gym, showers and gets dressed, and at 9 a.m., this faceless pair of women’s hands brings him another bowl of ice water for him to dunk his face again. Was there anything that really stood out about this routine for you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I unfortunately saw this, and then I’ve been seeing other videos, which are basically, let’s call them just “Manosphere Day in the Lives, and a l ot of things I’m seeing in common. Number one, all of them wear mouth tape, which they like wear during sleep, they peel it off, and honestly, you should keep it on the whole day. Second, seeing a lot Bibles. I’m seeing a lot people opening Bibles, not really reading them, interesting. And third, all them dunk their face in ice water, which I really do not understand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something thing that also stood out to me was when he makes a show of getting on his computer and being on a meeting and everyone’s like clowning on him for this one part because it sounds so “fake business bro.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ashton Hall: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So looking at it, bro, we got to go ahead and get in at least 10,000. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At least 10,000? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">10,000 of what? Yeah, dollars, views. What I also find very funny is that all of these guys, they usually start their day way too early. I’m thinking 3.52 a.m., 4 a.m. I know exactly where this came from. It’s because Mark Wahlberg once said that he gets up at like 4 a.m. to do his workout. I’m just saying you guys don’t need to wake up that early and guess what? Life doesn’t have to be this hard. That’s my motto for the year. Life doesn’t have to be this hard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly. One thing that stood out to me, women are in this but like they’re always facing away from the camera and they’re always like performing some sort of like subservient domestic duty for these men like steaming their clothes or cooking them breakfast? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, there is a woman present who basically cooks and feeds him food. She’s faceless. Maybe that is her choice. I definitely noticed how he kept in a lot of footage of hospitality workers, of people giving him towels. There’s class commentary there, but I don’t wanna comment on it. on it. Okay, do we save? Do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save,. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay. Yeah. All right, let’s save it. Do you like organize your save folders? Like your saved videos? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do, on TikTok? Yeah, I do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I try to, but then sometimes I get lazy and like overwhelmed by like, but I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s a new category.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s difficult. If you pay me 10K, I’ll do it for you, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t have 10K. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well this guy does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maybe I need 10,000 of that, maybe I need to start making these videos. So we chose save on the alpha male warning routine videos, which means we’re gonna hold onto it for a possible future episode on the manosphere. Okay, so now it’s your turn. What did you bring? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan I am bringing to you the Haley Bieber seven part video. Have you heard about this? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have seen posts about it, but I have limited my intake because I’m like, Candice will just explain it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I got you, and let’s start from the beginning. Okay, in August, 2024, a YouTube channel called Internet Oddities, they posted this like 18 minute long video, it is called Hailey Bieber’s Dangerous Decade Long Obsession. This video is about how Hailey Baldwin, now Bieber, allegedly plotted to date and marry Justin Bieber before, during, and after his relationship with Selena Gomez, and they do call it stalking. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Internet Oddities: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Haley would also appear at Justin’s Toyota Concert Series performance in Rockefeller Plaza before following him to Los Angeles to attend the premiere of his movie, Never Say Never, where she can be seen watching him from the sidelines as he walks the purple carpet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reason we’re talking about this now is this video was posted six months ago. It’s making the rounds again because someone on TikTok, they like broke up the 18 minute video into a seven part series. In terms of why now I do think it’s important to note that this person who broke up the video is a self-professed Selena Gomez stan account. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Selena Gomez just released an album with her fiance, Benny Blanco. And a part of me does wonder if this Selenator like reposted this video because look, if Selena does indeed marry Benny Blanco, there has been this cyclical narrative on the internet that’s like wishful thinking that some people think that Selena and Justin might get back together. And if she indeed marries Benny Blanco, that illusion is a little over. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think what is different now is that Hailey is now, according to TMZ, quote, considering taking legal action against these allegations that she’d stalked Justin. And I would just say that this doesn’t really mean anything until we see a docket, until we some papers filed in court. But I do think this is about celebrities coming for anonymous fans and haters who speak ill of them. I mean, can a celebrity prove that the rumors being put out on something as ethereal as the internet. Are they malicious enough that they deserve to be silenced completely? I don’t think so. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m curious. Would she be going after the person who made the original 20 minute long YouTube video six months ago or would she be going after people who like reposted or like shared the video or like cut it up and then posted it online in seven parts? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a really good question. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who does she go after then? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. And that’s actually the real difficulty and why maybe we haven’t seen a celebrity or an influencer fully come after like successfully legally snark pages or internet criticism. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re out of time. Save or scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gonna say scroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Scroll? Yeah, I would keep tabs on it, but I don’t think it’s worth like a full save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like bookmark it, but don’t keep the tab open. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah, I’m into that. Anyway, the whole idea of snark pages and like who’s held legally liable kind of brings us to our third story that I bring you, which is about the potential repeal of section 230. Are you familiar with section 230 by any chance? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A little bit, but I think this is the first time I’ve thought about it in a complex, analytical way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so basically, section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, and people say it’s the 26 words that created the internet. This is what it says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier this month, the information reported that there’s a bipartisan effort to like repeal it. And what Section 230 does is it basically protects internet platforms and also users from any legal liability for what other people post. So if someone on the snark page was bad-mouthing Hailey Bieber, a platform like Reddit that hosts that snark page wouldn’t be held liable thanks to Section 230. The idea is that only you are responsible for your own speech online and not other people’s even if you like reposted or something. But it also means that tech platforms have less incentive to crack down on hate speech or harassment or misinformation since they aren’t legally required to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A lot of experts worry that repealing section 230 without any other meaningful reform can have massive repercussions for free speech online. And if it’s repealed, it means that platforms like Reddit can be sued for what users say on their site. But it’s also affects individuals too. Without Section 230, you can be held liable for not just what you post, but what you repost. You can be held liable if you write a take on Substack and someone else comments on it. You can be held liable for just forwarding an email. But my question is like, will repealing Section 230 kill snark culture online? Like what does the internet look like without snarking? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, this is very tough because Section 230 has bipartisan repeal efforts because there are some people who think it is not doing enough to protect kids online and there are some people saying it’s doing too much to protect like free speech. I think this is one of those situations where repealing the whole thing is not the best option because we have a start, we just need to make it better. And that’s the other issue. We all know that legislation does not always catch up to modern society. And so I think having something like Section 230 is already a big deal, but it is a bit behind the times. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like this is like a common thing with tech policy and internet policy, where regulators don’t necessarily think about the real use cases of the laws that they’re trying to enact when it comes to the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I just think a genuine thought I always have when we hear stories about this or even stories about censorship in countries like China, India, who have kind of gone this way of they have watered down versions of TikTok. I’m like, you guys keep going after social media, but you’re not going after the dating apps, which is what we really need laws about. I’m so serious. You can’t tell me you’re 36 looking for a long term, maybe short term, open to monogamy relationship. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so with this, do we save? Do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oy. Save. Because this may impact our future of our beat and our jobs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay Candice, what else did you bring? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is so dicey, and it makes me feel icky, but I have to do it for you and for me. Luigi Mangione. A lot of us are aware of this man. He is accused of killing the CEO of United Healthcare. There have been so many headlines about him, but the one that has been stuck in my brain for at least a month is the fact that a source told Radar Online that Luigi Mangione has allegedly made upward of 20 sex tapes. Let’s just sit on that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">20 is a high — that’s pretty high for a what, a 26 year old man? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Quantity over quality. And Morgan, I’m gonna stop you right there because when this came out, someone emailed Luigi’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, and she emailed them back, saying, quote, “hopefully everyone realizes these are fake and not Luigi.” And this came after a sex tape broker claimed to have footage of this nature, and he was selling it for a five. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m sorry, a sex-tape broker? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, he’s not a good guy. He has a very dicey history of doing things like selling Paris Hilton sex tapes as well. And I think off the bat, this is an extremely odd allegation. It’s a weird story to run, but the good news is that TikTok is not taking the bait. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tiktok Video: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you guys found out that Luigi filmed some sex tapes and what I’m asking is that you guys don’t watch them please because I didn’t look good in them. My hair wasn’t done. I mean during that time I wasn’t my best \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But let me stop. Morgan, do you want to jump in with thoughts? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First of all, does a sex tape exist? Have we seen the alleged sex tape? And then second of all is that actually Luigi? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so here’s the difficulty. There is no footage that Luigi’s lawyer is saying is his. What this sex tape broker was trying to peddle was that he claimed that he had footage of someone who looked like Luigi performing acts in a bathroom. And here’s a deal. Even if that tape is Luigi, even if that tape does not exist, let’s say the tape does exist, but it’s someone else. Does this person have the consent to sell footage of that stranger for $500,000?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Knowing that they’re probably not gonna touch that money at all? There’s consent right there, right? The second part of it is that supporters of Luigi are obviously rushing to deny this narrative that the tapes even exist, insisting that this is the media, this is places like Radar Online and Daily Mail trying to smear Luigi’s name, especially when he is being held, especially when cannot defend himself against allegations like these. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I mean, it seems like a really shitty attempt at capitalizing on people thinking that Luigi Mangione is attractive, and it just seems like they’re taking advantage of people wanting to sexually harass him or this poor stranger who might happen to look like him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are definitely having conversations about media literacy, which is not only about considering the source, but also not trusting the source in front of you. I think that’s really pertinent in not falling for headlines like these, which is click bait because the media knows that social media has been riding for Luigi and they have been weaponizing his appearance to draw in both haters and defenders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok let’s wrap it up. So do we save or do we scroll on Luigi’s sex tape? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save. Ok! That brings me to the story that I have brought you today, which is also Luigi related. Are you ready? Yep. Okay, so this is about allegations that Reddit is banning pro Luigi content. People were saying that like they upvoted a Luigi meme and then were banned for just like upvoting it, not even for like posting it, which seems to be part of this bigger crackdown on like people trying to really rally in support of Luigi online. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this seems to have started in early March after a Reddit administrator announced that the site was taking a pretty significant shift in its approach to content moderation. And Mia Sato from The Verge reported that Reddit started flagging content that just mentions the word Luigi. So like Reddit’s auto-mod is flagging posts about Luigi’s Mansion 3, the video game that came out in 2019 that has nothing to do with Luigi Mangione. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh huh. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Reddit told The Verge, there isn’t a site-wide filter. They don’t expect people to stop talking about Luigi. But like, what’s the truth, babe, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This kind of brings up questions about this larger internet-wide crackdown on free speech across all social media platforms. And you had your own experience with some Luigi content that got taken down, right. Do you want to talk about that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so I’ve been personally affected by this, which is that on TikTok, I posted photos of him just from the courtroom on TikTok. I didn’t say I loved him. I didn’t say I hate him. I just said, fave Luigi photos. And I’m not gonna lie to you, I had a hit because within two hours, I did get 9,000 likes. And let me tell you what happened. Hours later, I get a notification from TikTok that says, your post has been removed for violating community guidelines. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But what guidelines? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They wouldn’t tell me. They would not tell me which guidelines, they wouldn’t me how I infringed upon it. I think what’s really funny is like, literally prior to this video going up, I was a completely private account that made no content. And so they kind of swarmed on me immediately, the video was taken down. I got so angry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they didn’t tell you what community guidelines you violated. And that’s kind of similar to Reddit, too, where like, yeah, there are people like, you know, advocating for violence, whatever, Reddit cracked down on that. But then there are also examples like upvoting pictures of Luigi in court in his little sweater and like people getting banned for doing that. And people were like, OK, well, what’s the truth? Are you trying to crack down on free speech? And Reddit is, of course, saying like, “No, no. Of course not.” But I do think that this is just happening online everywhere. Which brings me to my next question. Do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We must save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think we have to save this. Like I think that, oh, we will be doing a Luigi deep dive. Alright, more saving and scrolling with Candice right after this break. I have a fun one for you, and it’s a little bit unhinged. Are you ready? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are you familiar with Bryan Johnson? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sadly, yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for listeners, Bryan Johnson is this millionaire, and he basically was like, “I’m going to use my fortune to stay young forever.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bryan Johnson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a total plasma exchange which means I’m going to remove all the plasma from my body and get new stuff put in. Everything I do is an attempt at discovering what slows down my speed of aging and reverses my aging damage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally, he has a whole, jokingly, what he calls a cult called “Don’t Die”, and it’s this movement dedicated to like anti-aging regiments. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he takes dozens of daily supplements and he went super viral for doing blood transfusions with his teenage son, and he’s obsessed with like optimizing his sperm count and erections. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mmmhmm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyway, he usually posts very tech founder-y things, like his latest biohacking results. But then a couple of weeks ago, he suddenly gets funnier online and starts participating in meme culture. He’s posting like pictures of him in this Ebenezer Scrooge getup and sunglasses and being like, “don’t forget to go to bed.” He’s speaking to a certain audience, right? He’s really endearing himself and like humanizing himself. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, the New York Times did a huge expose on him and they say that he makes everyone in his life sign like confidentiality agreements from his employees to his ex fiance. One of the agreements says that his employees have to like be okay with him walking around basically naked and that they’re okay with hearing about his boners and that his behavior won’t be quote, “unwelcome.” Anyway, it’s a whole mess, but people are still rallying behind him and being like, “Oh dude, you’re so funny. You’re just like some weird guy who loves to post online.” And so it makes me think that this entire rebrand was preparation for this article to drop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know, have you seen this before where like the new crisis PR is meme culture? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So this is super interesting because it’s kind of obvious that Bryan probably has hired a social media consultant to tap into this market that will hopefully find him likable, so likable that they may or may not read the New York Times piece and go, “Ah, like Bryan’s one of us.” And the thing about Bryan Johnson is that I think maybe even going all the way back to those alpha male day in the lives we were talking about earlier — maybe those are the people who find him interesting. I frankly find him boring. And on top of that, I kind of remember when he first kind of like became a news item, especially with the blood transfusions, there was some sentiment of like, he wanted to look as young as his teenage son. Yeah? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The thing is, if you have ever been the daughter of a mother, you’ve been in those trenches. You’re not new, Bryan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would really love to scroll on Bryan Johnson. I never want to hear from him ever again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok. Candice, what’s our last story for today? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s end on a happy note, which is that, breaking news, breaking news! Trinity Rodman and Ben Shelton are dating! Do you know who I’m talking about? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have no clue. I don’t follow sports. What’s happening? Tell me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, ESPN parlayers, clock in. So this story is not really about sports. This story is about the art of the hard launch and how one can take a soft launch and parlay it into a hard launch. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s define some terms. A soft launch: it’s when you are softly, subtly, telling your audience that you are dating someone, but you are not revealing the identity of said person. An example, you post an IG story. You have two drinks in the frame. You see one hand and another, but you don’t tag the hand. You don’t show face, and that is a soft launch! The hard launch is basically when you post your significant other on grid. There’s a tag, there’s a caption. It stays on the profile until you break up with them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this story, is about the soft and hard launch of Trinity Rodman, who is a soccer player, and Ben Shelton, who was a tennis player. Trinity, lovely, lovely girl. She won Olympic gold. She plays for the Washington spirit. Her dad is Dennis Rodman, the basketball player. Ben Shelton, tennis player, up and coming. Slowly been raising his profile, and I think more people actually know Trinity than Ben, and I love that. They are both young. They’re both like 22 years old. They love to troll the audience. They’re known for being kind of funny and having personalities on the field. So we go to March 6th. Ben, jumped on this trend that starts with a GloRilla verse, which contains the lyrics. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>GloRilla: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They say shooters, shoot. Uh, uh-huh, Duke Dennis, what’s up with you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They say, shooters shoot, Duke Dennis, what’s up with you?” And on TikTok, in place of Duke Dennis people will like write out the name of the person they have a crush on. So, Ben does this trend and in place of Duke Denis, he writes the letter T with six asterisks which does line up with Trinity. And at first people are like, “ha ha ha, nice try Ben, you think you can get her.” But then, the same day, Trinity posts a TikTok, same trend. For the name, she puts three underscores and people are like, “oh, B-E-N. And so what’s up with you.” March 17th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like leaving little clues. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’ve been like teasing us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. March 17th, Ben Shelton posts an Instagram carousel on the last pic of the carousal, it’s a photo of Trinity kissing his cheek in an elevator and the world stops. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hard launch, baby. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hard launch. And look, I think this is wild and bananas because my personal theory is that I wonder if Trinity and Ben were already dating or had already connected and instead of like hard launching on the gram first, they decided to play with a TikTok trend to soft launch, to tease, to prime people up to the idea of them shooting their shot at each other. And so by the time that they post the IG, you’re either thinking, “Oh my God, Ben shot his shot and it worked”, or you’re thinking, “Oh my god, they’re so funny. They were playing with us the whole time and they used TikTok to do it.” And either way, I’m here for it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I love a good hard launch. I love like a good soft launch into a hard launch, but I agree. It is an art. It is like you are kind of like teasing people. You are like easing them into the idea of like no longer being single. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now Morgan, not to turn the tables on you, but uh, should we save or scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m saying save. I want to do a whole episode on the art of the hard launch. So Candice, do you have any takeaways about the internet, the state of the internet, based on our stories that we have gossiped about today? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, I think what’s really hard about covering the beat that we do is that like oftentimes the stories that kind of breach surface that are worth an episode that are with headlines are kind of dark and dire and like kind of unhopeful. And so I think it is always important for us to hold space and find joy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, Candice, thank you so much for joining me today on our first Save or Scroll for Close All Tabs. And thank you for adding to our infinite pile of episode ideas. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice, if anyone wants to follow your work, where can they find you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can absolutely find me on the Slate podcast, ICYMI, In Case You Missed It. I’m there twice a week talking about internet culture with my cohost, Kate Lindsay. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Did you hear any topics on this episode that you wanna hear more about? Anything that piqued your interest that you wish we had spent more time talking about or something we scrolled past that you wished we hadn’t? Anything we should cover in our next save or scroll? Let us know. Drop a comment in CloseAllTabs’ Discord channel at discord.gg slash KQED. Follow us on Instagram at CloseAlltabsPod or hit us up at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org. And if you’re interested in learning more about what we talked about in this episode, check out our reading recs in the episode description. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. If you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We can’t cover every wild post from every corner of the internet — and not everything online warrants a full multi-tab journey. That’s where \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> comes in: our series where we team up with a guest for a rapid-fire roundup. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, Morgan is joined by \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ICYMI\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> co-host Candice Lim to dig into the stories they haven’t been able to stop thinking about. From the viral Hailey Bieber 7-part series to alpha bro “get ready with me” videos, Reddit’s restrictions on Luigi Mangione discourse, and more — they’ve got plenty to scroll through. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC3130867233\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice Lim\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Co-Host of ICYMI from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a64273592/alpha-male-morning-routines/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Should I Be Taking Notes From This Viral Alpha Male Morning Routine?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Annabel Iwegbue, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cosmopolitan \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://thetab.com/2025/03/19/hailey-bieber-is-seeking-legal-action-against-social-media-trolls-heres-what-we-know\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hailey Bieber is seeking legal action against people who slate her\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Claudia Cox, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Tab \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theinformation.com/articles/exclusive-section-230-may-finally-get-changed-lawmakers-prep-new-bill\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Section 230 May Finally Get Changed as Lawmakers Prep New Bill \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">– Paris Martineau, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Information \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newsweek.com/luigi-mangione-sex-tape-viral-online-frenzy-2039810\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luigi Mangione Sex Tapes Report Sends Internet into Meltdown\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Marni Rose McFall, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Newsweek\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/reddit-elon-musk-luigi-mangione-censorship.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Nitish Pahwa, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-blueprint-confidentiality-agreements.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How Blueprint Founder Bryan Johnson Sought Control Via Confidentiality Agreements\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Kirsten Grind, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6215514/2025/03/20/trinity-rodman-ben-shelton-relationships-soccer/\">Trinity Rodman, Ben Shelton and how high-profile relationships affect soccer careers \u003c/a>– Tim Spires, \u003ci>The Athletic\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"list-style-type: none\">\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey guys, this is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Except today, we aren’t opening any tabs. We’re doing something a little different. Sometimes while scrolling, I come across a truly wild post, but spending an entire episode talking about it just doesn’t work out. Sometimes we don’t have enough time to cover it because we have so many other stories to cover. Sometimes I do a little digging and it turns out that the lore behind it just isn’t compelling enough to justify a deep dive. Sometimes there’s no lore at all. A lot of things online aren’t always a multi-tab journey. It can just be juicy gossip for the group chat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So today we have Candice Lim joining us. Candice is also a journalist who covers the Internet and is a co-host of ICYMI, In Case You Missed It, from Slate. Candice and I have been Internet friends and real-life friends for a while, and she is one of my favorite people to gossip about the Internet with. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hello, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, Candice, we have been internet friends for awhile, but the first time we hung out in person, we couldn’t stop yapping. And because we can’t resist the content mines, why not turn hanging out into content? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Absolutely. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice and I are here to play a game called “Save or Scroll.” Save as in when you see a post on TikTok or Instagram or X and you bookmark it, add it to your saved folders or drop the link in Notes app because you know you’re gonna wanna talk about it later. Scroll as in you keep scrolling. So we each have a handful of posts that we can’t stop thinking about and we’re gonna take turns and see if they’re just for the group chat or if they are actually worth a deep dive. If we decide to scroll… It means we’ve talked about it, we’re moving on. If we decide to save, it means that we may hold onto the idea for a future episode. Ready, Candice? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ll go first. So today I come to you with a truly perplexing trend. This is what I’m calling the alpha male get ready with me videos. Are you familiar with these? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I actually have not seen these until you brought them to my attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this all starts with this fitness influencer who goes by Ashton Hall Official on Instagram and he’s this mega jacked dude who posts videos of his super elaborate morning routines. It starts with him getting up at 3:52 a.m. and he pours his first glass of Saratoga spring water. Yeah. Then he takes it to the balcony and starts doing push-ups. And then at like 4:40 a.m. He records himself journaling, but then he opens his notebook to the first page and it’s clearly never been used before. At 5:46 a.m., he dumps ice into this giant glass bowl and pours more Saratoga Spring Water and like dunks his face in it. Then he goes to the gym, showers and gets dressed, and at 9 a.m., this faceless pair of women’s hands brings him another bowl of ice water for him to dunk his face again. Was there anything that really stood out about this routine for you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I unfortunately saw this, and then I’ve been seeing other videos, which are basically, let’s call them just “Manosphere Day in the Lives, and a l ot of things I’m seeing in common. Number one, all of them wear mouth tape, which they like wear during sleep, they peel it off, and honestly, you should keep it on the whole day. Second, seeing a lot Bibles. I’m seeing a lot people opening Bibles, not really reading them, interesting. And third, all them dunk their face in ice water, which I really do not understand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something thing that also stood out to me was when he makes a show of getting on his computer and being on a meeting and everyone’s like clowning on him for this one part because it sounds so “fake business bro.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ashton Hall: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So looking at it, bro, we got to go ahead and get in at least 10,000. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At least 10,000? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">10,000 of what? Yeah, dollars, views. What I also find very funny is that all of these guys, they usually start their day way too early. I’m thinking 3.52 a.m., 4 a.m. I know exactly where this came from. It’s because Mark Wahlberg once said that he gets up at like 4 a.m. to do his workout. I’m just saying you guys don’t need to wake up that early and guess what? Life doesn’t have to be this hard. That’s my motto for the year. Life doesn’t have to be this hard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly. One thing that stood out to me, women are in this but like they’re always facing away from the camera and they’re always like performing some sort of like subservient domestic duty for these men like steaming their clothes or cooking them breakfast? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, there is a woman present who basically cooks and feeds him food. She’s faceless. Maybe that is her choice. I definitely noticed how he kept in a lot of footage of hospitality workers, of people giving him towels. There’s class commentary there, but I don’t wanna comment on it. on it. Okay, do we save? Do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save,. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay. Yeah. All right, let’s save it. Do you like organize your save folders? Like your saved videos? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do, on TikTok? Yeah, I do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I try to, but then sometimes I get lazy and like overwhelmed by like, but I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s a new category.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s difficult. If you pay me 10K, I’ll do it for you, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t have 10K. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well this guy does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maybe I need 10,000 of that, maybe I need to start making these videos. So we chose save on the alpha male warning routine videos, which means we’re gonna hold onto it for a possible future episode on the manosphere. Okay, so now it’s your turn. What did you bring? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan I am bringing to you the Haley Bieber seven part video. Have you heard about this? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have seen posts about it, but I have limited my intake because I’m like, Candice will just explain it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I got you, and let’s start from the beginning. Okay, in August, 2024, a YouTube channel called Internet Oddities, they posted this like 18 minute long video, it is called Hailey Bieber’s Dangerous Decade Long Obsession. This video is about how Hailey Baldwin, now Bieber, allegedly plotted to date and marry Justin Bieber before, during, and after his relationship with Selena Gomez, and they do call it stalking. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Internet Oddities: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Haley would also appear at Justin’s Toyota Concert Series performance in Rockefeller Plaza before following him to Los Angeles to attend the premiere of his movie, Never Say Never, where she can be seen watching him from the sidelines as he walks the purple carpet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reason we’re talking about this now is this video was posted six months ago. It’s making the rounds again because someone on TikTok, they like broke up the 18 minute video into a seven part series. In terms of why now I do think it’s important to note that this person who broke up the video is a self-professed Selena Gomez stan account. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Selena Gomez just released an album with her fiance, Benny Blanco. And a part of me does wonder if this Selenator like reposted this video because look, if Selena does indeed marry Benny Blanco, there has been this cyclical narrative on the internet that’s like wishful thinking that some people think that Selena and Justin might get back together. And if she indeed marries Benny Blanco, that illusion is a little over. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think what is different now is that Hailey is now, according to TMZ, quote, considering taking legal action against these allegations that she’d stalked Justin. And I would just say that this doesn’t really mean anything until we see a docket, until we some papers filed in court. But I do think this is about celebrities coming for anonymous fans and haters who speak ill of them. I mean, can a celebrity prove that the rumors being put out on something as ethereal as the internet. Are they malicious enough that they deserve to be silenced completely? I don’t think so. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m curious. Would she be going after the person who made the original 20 minute long YouTube video six months ago or would she be going after people who like reposted or like shared the video or like cut it up and then posted it online in seven parts? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a really good question. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who does she go after then? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. And that’s actually the real difficulty and why maybe we haven’t seen a celebrity or an influencer fully come after like successfully legally snark pages or internet criticism. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re out of time. Save or scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gonna say scroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Scroll? Yeah, I would keep tabs on it, but I don’t think it’s worth like a full save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like bookmark it, but don’t keep the tab open. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah, I’m into that. Anyway, the whole idea of snark pages and like who’s held legally liable kind of brings us to our third story that I bring you, which is about the potential repeal of section 230. Are you familiar with section 230 by any chance? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A little bit, but I think this is the first time I’ve thought about it in a complex, analytical way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so basically, section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, and people say it’s the 26 words that created the internet. This is what it says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier this month, the information reported that there’s a bipartisan effort to like repeal it. And what Section 230 does is it basically protects internet platforms and also users from any legal liability for what other people post. So if someone on the snark page was bad-mouthing Hailey Bieber, a platform like Reddit that hosts that snark page wouldn’t be held liable thanks to Section 230. The idea is that only you are responsible for your own speech online and not other people’s even if you like reposted or something. But it also means that tech platforms have less incentive to crack down on hate speech or harassment or misinformation since they aren’t legally required to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A lot of experts worry that repealing section 230 without any other meaningful reform can have massive repercussions for free speech online. And if it’s repealed, it means that platforms like Reddit can be sued for what users say on their site. But it’s also affects individuals too. Without Section 230, you can be held liable for not just what you post, but what you repost. You can be held liable if you write a take on Substack and someone else comments on it. You can be held liable for just forwarding an email. But my question is like, will repealing Section 230 kill snark culture online? Like what does the internet look like without snarking? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, this is very tough because Section 230 has bipartisan repeal efforts because there are some people who think it is not doing enough to protect kids online and there are some people saying it’s doing too much to protect like free speech. I think this is one of those situations where repealing the whole thing is not the best option because we have a start, we just need to make it better. And that’s the other issue. We all know that legislation does not always catch up to modern society. And so I think having something like Section 230 is already a big deal, but it is a bit behind the times. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like this is like a common thing with tech policy and internet policy, where regulators don’t necessarily think about the real use cases of the laws that they’re trying to enact when it comes to the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I just think a genuine thought I always have when we hear stories about this or even stories about censorship in countries like China, India, who have kind of gone this way of they have watered down versions of TikTok. I’m like, you guys keep going after social media, but you’re not going after the dating apps, which is what we really need laws about. I’m so serious. You can’t tell me you’re 36 looking for a long term, maybe short term, open to monogamy relationship. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so with this, do we save? Do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oy. Save. Because this may impact our future of our beat and our jobs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay Candice, what else did you bring? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is so dicey, and it makes me feel icky, but I have to do it for you and for me. Luigi Mangione. A lot of us are aware of this man. He is accused of killing the CEO of United Healthcare. There have been so many headlines about him, but the one that has been stuck in my brain for at least a month is the fact that a source told Radar Online that Luigi Mangione has allegedly made upward of 20 sex tapes. Let’s just sit on that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">20 is a high — that’s pretty high for a what, a 26 year old man? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Quantity over quality. And Morgan, I’m gonna stop you right there because when this came out, someone emailed Luigi’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, and she emailed them back, saying, quote, “hopefully everyone realizes these are fake and not Luigi.” And this came after a sex tape broker claimed to have footage of this nature, and he was selling it for a five. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m sorry, a sex-tape broker? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, he’s not a good guy. He has a very dicey history of doing things like selling Paris Hilton sex tapes as well. And I think off the bat, this is an extremely odd allegation. It’s a weird story to run, but the good news is that TikTok is not taking the bait. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tiktok Video: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you guys found out that Luigi filmed some sex tapes and what I’m asking is that you guys don’t watch them please because I didn’t look good in them. My hair wasn’t done. I mean during that time I wasn’t my best \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But let me stop. Morgan, do you want to jump in with thoughts? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First of all, does a sex tape exist? Have we seen the alleged sex tape? And then second of all is that actually Luigi? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so here’s the difficulty. There is no footage that Luigi’s lawyer is saying is his. What this sex tape broker was trying to peddle was that he claimed that he had footage of someone who looked like Luigi performing acts in a bathroom. And here’s a deal. Even if that tape is Luigi, even if that tape does not exist, let’s say the tape does exist, but it’s someone else. Does this person have the consent to sell footage of that stranger for $500,000?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Knowing that they’re probably not gonna touch that money at all? There’s consent right there, right? The second part of it is that supporters of Luigi are obviously rushing to deny this narrative that the tapes even exist, insisting that this is the media, this is places like Radar Online and Daily Mail trying to smear Luigi’s name, especially when he is being held, especially when cannot defend himself against allegations like these. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I mean, it seems like a really shitty attempt at capitalizing on people thinking that Luigi Mangione is attractive, and it just seems like they’re taking advantage of people wanting to sexually harass him or this poor stranger who might happen to look like him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are definitely having conversations about media literacy, which is not only about considering the source, but also not trusting the source in front of you. I think that’s really pertinent in not falling for headlines like these, which is click bait because the media knows that social media has been riding for Luigi and they have been weaponizing his appearance to draw in both haters and defenders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok let’s wrap it up. So do we save or do we scroll on Luigi’s sex tape? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save. Ok! That brings me to the story that I have brought you today, which is also Luigi related. Are you ready? Yep. Okay, so this is about allegations that Reddit is banning pro Luigi content. People were saying that like they upvoted a Luigi meme and then were banned for just like upvoting it, not even for like posting it, which seems to be part of this bigger crackdown on like people trying to really rally in support of Luigi online. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this seems to have started in early March after a Reddit administrator announced that the site was taking a pretty significant shift in its approach to content moderation. And Mia Sato from The Verge reported that Reddit started flagging content that just mentions the word Luigi. So like Reddit’s auto-mod is flagging posts about Luigi’s Mansion 3, the video game that came out in 2019 that has nothing to do with Luigi Mangione. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh huh. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Reddit told The Verge, there isn’t a site-wide filter. They don’t expect people to stop talking about Luigi. But like, what’s the truth, babe, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This kind of brings up questions about this larger internet-wide crackdown on free speech across all social media platforms. And you had your own experience with some Luigi content that got taken down, right. Do you want to talk about that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so I’ve been personally affected by this, which is that on TikTok, I posted photos of him just from the courtroom on TikTok. I didn’t say I loved him. I didn’t say I hate him. I just said, fave Luigi photos. And I’m not gonna lie to you, I had a hit because within two hours, I did get 9,000 likes. And let me tell you what happened. Hours later, I get a notification from TikTok that says, your post has been removed for violating community guidelines. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But what guidelines? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They wouldn’t tell me. They would not tell me which guidelines, they wouldn’t me how I infringed upon it. I think what’s really funny is like, literally prior to this video going up, I was a completely private account that made no content. And so they kind of swarmed on me immediately, the video was taken down. I got so angry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they didn’t tell you what community guidelines you violated. And that’s kind of similar to Reddit, too, where like, yeah, there are people like, you know, advocating for violence, whatever, Reddit cracked down on that. But then there are also examples like upvoting pictures of Luigi in court in his little sweater and like people getting banned for doing that. And people were like, OK, well, what’s the truth? Are you trying to crack down on free speech? And Reddit is, of course, saying like, “No, no. Of course not.” But I do think that this is just happening online everywhere. Which brings me to my next question. Do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We must save. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think we have to save this. Like I think that, oh, we will be doing a Luigi deep dive. Alright, more saving and scrolling with Candice right after this break. I have a fun one for you, and it’s a little bit unhinged. Are you ready? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are you familiar with Bryan Johnson? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sadly, yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for listeners, Bryan Johnson is this millionaire, and he basically was like, “I’m going to use my fortune to stay young forever.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bryan Johnson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a total plasma exchange which means I’m going to remove all the plasma from my body and get new stuff put in. Everything I do is an attempt at discovering what slows down my speed of aging and reverses my aging damage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally, he has a whole, jokingly, what he calls a cult called “Don’t Die”, and it’s this movement dedicated to like anti-aging regiments. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he takes dozens of daily supplements and he went super viral for doing blood transfusions with his teenage son, and he’s obsessed with like optimizing his sperm count and erections. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mmmhmm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyway, he usually posts very tech founder-y things, like his latest biohacking results. But then a couple of weeks ago, he suddenly gets funnier online and starts participating in meme culture. He’s posting like pictures of him in this Ebenezer Scrooge getup and sunglasses and being like, “don’t forget to go to bed.” He’s speaking to a certain audience, right? He’s really endearing himself and like humanizing himself. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, the New York Times did a huge expose on him and they say that he makes everyone in his life sign like confidentiality agreements from his employees to his ex fiance. One of the agreements says that his employees have to like be okay with him walking around basically naked and that they’re okay with hearing about his boners and that his behavior won’t be quote, “unwelcome.” Anyway, it’s a whole mess, but people are still rallying behind him and being like, “Oh dude, you’re so funny. You’re just like some weird guy who loves to post online.” And so it makes me think that this entire rebrand was preparation for this article to drop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know, have you seen this before where like the new crisis PR is meme culture? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So this is super interesting because it’s kind of obvious that Bryan probably has hired a social media consultant to tap into this market that will hopefully find him likable, so likable that they may or may not read the New York Times piece and go, “Ah, like Bryan’s one of us.” And the thing about Bryan Johnson is that I think maybe even going all the way back to those alpha male day in the lives we were talking about earlier — maybe those are the people who find him interesting. I frankly find him boring. And on top of that, I kind of remember when he first kind of like became a news item, especially with the blood transfusions, there was some sentiment of like, he wanted to look as young as his teenage son. Yeah? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The thing is, if you have ever been the daughter of a mother, you’ve been in those trenches. You’re not new, Bryan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would really love to scroll on Bryan Johnson. I never want to hear from him ever again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok. Candice, what’s our last story for today? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s end on a happy note, which is that, breaking news, breaking news! Trinity Rodman and Ben Shelton are dating! Do you know who I’m talking about? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have no clue. I don’t follow sports. What’s happening? Tell me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, ESPN parlayers, clock in. So this story is not really about sports. This story is about the art of the hard launch and how one can take a soft launch and parlay it into a hard launch. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s define some terms. A soft launch: it’s when you are softly, subtly, telling your audience that you are dating someone, but you are not revealing the identity of said person. An example, you post an IG story. You have two drinks in the frame. You see one hand and another, but you don’t tag the hand. You don’t show face, and that is a soft launch! The hard launch is basically when you post your significant other on grid. There’s a tag, there’s a caption. It stays on the profile until you break up with them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this story, is about the soft and hard launch of Trinity Rodman, who is a soccer player, and Ben Shelton, who was a tennis player. Trinity, lovely, lovely girl. She won Olympic gold. She plays for the Washington spirit. Her dad is Dennis Rodman, the basketball player. Ben Shelton, tennis player, up and coming. Slowly been raising his profile, and I think more people actually know Trinity than Ben, and I love that. They are both young. They’re both like 22 years old. They love to troll the audience. They’re known for being kind of funny and having personalities on the field. So we go to March 6th. Ben, jumped on this trend that starts with a GloRilla verse, which contains the lyrics. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>GloRilla: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They say shooters, shoot. Uh, uh-huh, Duke Dennis, what’s up with you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They say, shooters shoot, Duke Dennis, what’s up with you?” And on TikTok, in place of Duke Dennis people will like write out the name of the person they have a crush on. So, Ben does this trend and in place of Duke Denis, he writes the letter T with six asterisks which does line up with Trinity. And at first people are like, “ha ha ha, nice try Ben, you think you can get her.” But then, the same day, Trinity posts a TikTok, same trend. For the name, she puts three underscores and people are like, “oh, B-E-N. And so what’s up with you.” March 17th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like leaving little clues. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’ve been like teasing us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. March 17th, Ben Shelton posts an Instagram carousel on the last pic of the carousal, it’s a photo of Trinity kissing his cheek in an elevator and the world stops. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hard launch, baby. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hard launch. And look, I think this is wild and bananas because my personal theory is that I wonder if Trinity and Ben were already dating or had already connected and instead of like hard launching on the gram first, they decided to play with a TikTok trend to soft launch, to tease, to prime people up to the idea of them shooting their shot at each other. And so by the time that they post the IG, you’re either thinking, “Oh my God, Ben shot his shot and it worked”, or you’re thinking, “Oh my god, they’re so funny. They were playing with us the whole time and they used TikTok to do it.” And either way, I’m here for it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I love a good hard launch. I love like a good soft launch into a hard launch, but I agree. It is an art. It is like you are kind of like teasing people. You are like easing them into the idea of like no longer being single. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now Morgan, not to turn the tables on you, but uh, should we save or scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m saying save. I want to do a whole episode on the art of the hard launch. So Candice, do you have any takeaways about the internet, the state of the internet, based on our stories that we have gossiped about today? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, I think what’s really hard about covering the beat that we do is that like oftentimes the stories that kind of breach surface that are worth an episode that are with headlines are kind of dark and dire and like kind of unhopeful. And so I think it is always important for us to hold space and find joy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, Candice, thank you so much for joining me today on our first Save or Scroll for Close All Tabs. And thank you for adding to our infinite pile of episode ideas. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Candice, if anyone wants to follow your work, where can they find you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Candice Lim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can absolutely find me on the Slate podcast, ICYMI, In Case You Missed It. I’m there twice a week talking about internet culture with my cohost, Kate Lindsay. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Did you hear any topics on this episode that you wanna hear more about? Anything that piqued your interest that you wish we had spent more time talking about or something we scrolled past that you wished we hadn’t? Anything we should cover in our next save or scroll? Let us know. Drop a comment in CloseAllTabs’ Discord channel at discord.gg slash KQED. Follow us on Instagram at CloseAlltabsPod or hit us up at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org. And if you’re interested in learning more about what we talked about in this episode, check out our reading recs in the episode description. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. If you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003cp>Silicon Valley companies, especially those that rely heavily on international supply chains, have seen their stocks drop precipitously since President Trump revealed \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/\">his tariff plan\u003c/a> on April 2.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 10% tariff on all imported goods went into effect on April 5 and higher tariffs on specific countries (like China and Mexico) are scheduled to begin on April 9. While it’s unclear whether all the tariffs are here to stay, companies are already acting as if Trump will deliver on his threats in the long term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More of Apple’s iPhones, famously constructed from parts sourced all over the world, may soon be \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-production-china-tariffs-6cc37f40\">assembled in India\u003c/a> to sidestep Chinese tariffs that could raise the hardware cost of the iPhone 16 Pro by $300 each. Nintendo is \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-04/nintendo-delays-pre-orders-for-switch-2-after-trump-tariffs\">delaying pre-orders\u003c/a> for the new Switch 2 in the U.S. while it games out-market conditions. It’s about to become much more expensive for Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft to build the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/16/technology/ai-data-centers.html\">supercomputers to power artificial intelligence\u003c/a>, and while they have the cash reserves to stay in the game, rivals in China and elsewhere will become a graver threat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The global economy has run on international trade for half a century. So, Trump’s decision to upend the status quo is disruptive for global industries like tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Apple and Tesla and other leading firms are selling to people all across the world,” said economics professor Neale Mahoney, who is also director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “We’re going to really feel that in not just the stock price of these firms, but their decisions around investment and expansion, and ultimately, their decisions to pull back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell Hancock, head of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, which studies economic and social trends in the region, says he can’t see any silver lining for tech companies, whether or not they’re involved in manufacturing or consumer retail. Meta, Google and Amazon, for instance, enjoy enormous \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/technology/trump-tariffs-meta.html\">ad revenues that could suffer\u003c/a> from a foreign retreat in spending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11923228\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11923228\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1919\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-2048x1535.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1920x1439.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Brand new Tesla cars sit in a parking lot at a Tesla showroom on June 27, 2022, in Corte Madera, California. \u003ccite>(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Personally, I think [Trump’s new tariff regime] is crazy,” Hancock said. “What I see is instability, retaliation [from other countries], and the upsetting of international systems that have been in place for a very long time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also predicts more layoffs in the Bay Area if Trump doesn’t change course soon. But Hancock isn’t just talking about tariffs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The San Francisco Bay Area has historically enjoyed a proximity to top academic institutions like Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and San José State University, providing a ready talent pool and a steady stream of start-ups. However, those universities are facing uncertainties and enacting job freezes as the Trump administration tries to\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/08/g-s1-47383/nih-announces-new-funding-policy-that-rattles-medical-researchers\"> limit the National Institutes of Health research funding\u003c/a> they rely on, as well as research into emerging technologies like quantum computing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration is also taking on the H1B visa popular in Silicon Valley by \u003ca href=\"https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trump-shuts-down-office-helping-immigrants-with-green-cards-h-1b-visas-8105875\">shutting down\u003c/a> the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which helps applicants who are struggling to get their cases processed. Tech companies are telling immigrant employees on visas \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/31/immigration-h1b-fear-siliconvalley/\">not to leave the U.S.\u003c/a>, for fear they might not be let back in.[aside postID=news_12026185 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/11/TrumpOilGasRegulationsAP-1020x680.jpg']“We’re already seeing that companies are expanding elsewhere, at a faster rate than they are here, in Silicon Valley,” Hancock said. “If you’re a major tech company, you’ve also been adding people in Boston, Miami, London and Asia. [Tariffs] will accelerate that trend.” He also anticipates that companies and individuals from abroad will not be as keen to invest in the Bay Area as\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11738951/something-in-the-silicon-valley-air-why-multinational-firms-send-their-entrepreneurs-here\"> they have been\u003c/a> over the last half century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some Valley watchers are holding out hope that the president is rattling his sabre as a bargaining tactic to wring more concessions from the nation’s trading partners. But venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya, co-host of the mostly libertarian “All-In” podcast, said on the podcast he \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2zvPf0SyHU\">doesn’t believe Trump will back down\u003c/a> because the president has consistently spoken in favor of tariffs as a macroeconomic tool to restore American manufacturing supremacy lost over the last 40 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Missing from the public conversation, in news articles and social media, are the direct voices of tech company leaders. This is in large part due to fears of attracting negative attention from the Trump administration. “CEOs with large global supply chains can’t be outspoken on this topic publicly because they need to cut deals,” Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/levie/status/1908572050261995522\">wrote on social media platform X\u003c/a>. “But this is the tone of the convos happening right now,” he added, reposting pointedly negative comments about the tariffs from tech analyst Dan Ives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If these tariffs (in current form/rates) hold, there is no debate … it would set the US tech world back a decade in our opinion while China is the clear winner,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DivesTech/status/1908545270452732369/photo/1\">Ives wrote\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ives continued, “In one day, this tariff policy, if enacted, will create an upside down supply chain, massive costs … and slow down US tech innovation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Silicon Valley companies, especially those that rely heavily on international supply chains, have seen their stocks drop precipitously since President Trump revealed \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/\">his tariff plan\u003c/a> on April 2.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 10% tariff on all imported goods went into effect on April 5 and higher tariffs on specific countries (like China and Mexico) are scheduled to begin on April 9. While it’s unclear whether all the tariffs are here to stay, companies are already acting as if Trump will deliver on his threats in the long term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More of Apple’s iPhones, famously constructed from parts sourced all over the world, may soon be \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-production-china-tariffs-6cc37f40\">assembled in India\u003c/a> to sidestep Chinese tariffs that could raise the hardware cost of the iPhone 16 Pro by $300 each. Nintendo is \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-04/nintendo-delays-pre-orders-for-switch-2-after-trump-tariffs\">delaying pre-orders\u003c/a> for the new Switch 2 in the U.S. while it games out-market conditions. It’s about to become much more expensive for Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft to build the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/16/technology/ai-data-centers.html\">supercomputers to power artificial intelligence\u003c/a>, and while they have the cash reserves to stay in the game, rivals in China and elsewhere will become a graver threat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The global economy has run on international trade for half a century. So, Trump’s decision to upend the status quo is disruptive for global industries like tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Apple and Tesla and other leading firms are selling to people all across the world,” said economics professor Neale Mahoney, who is also director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “We’re going to really feel that in not just the stock price of these firms, but their decisions around investment and expansion, and ultimately, their decisions to pull back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell Hancock, head of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, which studies economic and social trends in the region, says he can’t see any silver lining for tech companies, whether or not they’re involved in manufacturing or consumer retail. Meta, Google and Amazon, for instance, enjoy enormous \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/technology/trump-tariffs-meta.html\">ad revenues that could suffer\u003c/a> from a foreign retreat in spending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11923228\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11923228\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1919\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-2048x1535.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/08/gettyimages-1405480844-d0869ec2fd9e972fcc6285312c29f78ee1099fd5-1920x1439.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Brand new Tesla cars sit in a parking lot at a Tesla showroom on June 27, 2022, in Corte Madera, California. \u003ccite>(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Personally, I think [Trump’s new tariff regime] is crazy,” Hancock said. “What I see is instability, retaliation [from other countries], and the upsetting of international systems that have been in place for a very long time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also predicts more layoffs in the Bay Area if Trump doesn’t change course soon. But Hancock isn’t just talking about tariffs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The San Francisco Bay Area has historically enjoyed a proximity to top academic institutions like Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and San José State University, providing a ready talent pool and a steady stream of start-ups. However, those universities are facing uncertainties and enacting job freezes as the Trump administration tries to\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/08/g-s1-47383/nih-announces-new-funding-policy-that-rattles-medical-researchers\"> limit the National Institutes of Health research funding\u003c/a> they rely on, as well as research into emerging technologies like quantum computing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration is also taking on the H1B visa popular in Silicon Valley by \u003ca href=\"https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trump-shuts-down-office-helping-immigrants-with-green-cards-h-1b-visas-8105875\">shutting down\u003c/a> the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which helps applicants who are struggling to get their cases processed. Tech companies are telling immigrant employees on visas \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/31/immigration-h1b-fear-siliconvalley/\">not to leave the U.S.\u003c/a>, for fear they might not be let back in.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“We’re already seeing that companies are expanding elsewhere, at a faster rate than they are here, in Silicon Valley,” Hancock said. “If you’re a major tech company, you’ve also been adding people in Boston, Miami, London and Asia. [Tariffs] will accelerate that trend.” He also anticipates that companies and individuals from abroad will not be as keen to invest in the Bay Area as\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11738951/something-in-the-silicon-valley-air-why-multinational-firms-send-their-entrepreneurs-here\"> they have been\u003c/a> over the last half century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some Valley watchers are holding out hope that the president is rattling his sabre as a bargaining tactic to wring more concessions from the nation’s trading partners. But venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya, co-host of the mostly libertarian “All-In” podcast, said on the podcast he \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2zvPf0SyHU\">doesn’t believe Trump will back down\u003c/a> because the president has consistently spoken in favor of tariffs as a macroeconomic tool to restore American manufacturing supremacy lost over the last 40 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Missing from the public conversation, in news articles and social media, are the direct voices of tech company leaders. This is in large part due to fears of attracting negative attention from the Trump administration. “CEOs with large global supply chains can’t be outspoken on this topic publicly because they need to cut deals,” Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/levie/status/1908572050261995522\">wrote on social media platform X\u003c/a>. “But this is the tone of the convos happening right now,” he added, reposting pointedly negative comments about the tariffs from tech analyst Dan Ives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If these tariffs (in current form/rates) hold, there is no debate … it would set the US tech world back a decade in our opinion while China is the clear winner,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DivesTech/status/1908545270452732369/photo/1\">Ives wrote\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ives continued, “In one day, this tariff policy, if enacted, will create an upside down supply chain, massive costs … and slow down US tech innovation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "AI Companions Can Be a Seductive Risk for Teens. Senators Want More Guardrails.",
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"content": "\u003cp>After Megan Garcia’s 14-year-old son died by suicide last year, she said she thought he was spending the bulk of the time on his phone “talking to friends, playing games, looking at sports: the regular things that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000954/smartphone-bans-havent-worked-in-california-schools-but-some-districts-share-advice-on-what-may-work\">teenagers do on their cellphones\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the Florida teen was having conversations with an artificial intelligence chatbot — and growing emotionally connected to it. \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/FCXWgZjybm0?si=khMUy1ByyRr6R9YI\">Speaking to “CBS Mornings”\u003c/a> shortly after suing Bay Area-based \u003ca href=\"http://character.ai\">Character.AI\u003c/a> (C.AI) and Google last fall, Garcia said she was blindsided by the intensity of the interactions her son had with C.AI’s chatbot shortly before his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I didn’t know that he was talking to a very human-like AI chatbot that has the ability to mimic human emotion and human sentiment,” said Garcia, who is a lawyer. “It makes me sad that this was my child’s first experience being in love or romance. That’s saddening to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garcia blames C.AI for her son’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., co-founder of the bipartisan \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/mhc/\">Senate Mental Health Caucus\u003c/a>, and Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., sent letters to the CEOs of the companies behind C.AI and two other leading AI chatbots, Chai and Replika, urging them to do more to ensure their products do not contribute to self-harm or suicide among young users.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although a couple of the companies recently announced new safety features, Padilla and Welch insist the reliability of these systems is unclear. That’s even though surveys show teens are looking to AI for answers about their \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64014/teens-are-looking-to-ai-for-answers-about-their-personal-lives-not-just-homework-help\">personal lives\u003c/a>, not just help with homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The synthetic attention users receive from these chatbots (e.g., streams of expressive messages, sycophantic and agreeable responses, AI-generated selfies, and convincing voice calls) can, and has already, led to dangerous levels of attachment and unearned trust,” the senators wrote in the letters to \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Character-Technologies.pdf\">Character Technologies\u003c/a> of Menlo Park, \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Chai.pdf\">Chai Research\u003c/a> of Palo Alto, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Replika.pdf\">Luka\u003c/a> of San Francisco.[aside postID=science_1996504 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2025/03/IMG_0962-1020x765.jpg']“Policymakers, parents, and their kids deserve to know what your companies are doing to protect users from these known risks,” the senators wrote, “given that young people are accessing your products — where the average user spends approximately 60–90 minutes per day interacting with these AI chatbots.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI companionship apps tend to be more permissive than better-known general apps like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. That’s because companionship app users are often looking to engage with them as sexual and/or romantic partners. On the Character.AI \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/\">subreddit\u003c/a>, it doesn’t take a long search to find questions like: “How many of you here use character.ai for loneliness? I’ve had no friends or social life for about 10 years and rarely leave my house, character.ai has really helped me feel a little bit better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Character.AI, users can create their own chatbots and give them directions about how they should act. They can also select from chatbots created by others that mimic historical figures and celebrities. The Florida teen, for instance, used a bot mimicking the “Game of Thrones” character \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbuBfizSnPk\">Daenerys Targaryen\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AI companions are kind of a sleeper issue for a lot of Americans,” said Danny Weiss, the chief advocacy officer for Common Sense Media. “Many parents don’t even know that their kids might be developing relationships with machines.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chelsea Harrison, head of communications at Character.AI, told KQED that the company welcomes working with regulators and lawmakers and has been in contact with Padilla’s and Welch’s offices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Over the past year, we’ve rolled out many safety features on the platform, including \u003ca href=\"https://blog.character.ai/introducing-parental-insights-enhanced-safety-for-teens/\">Parental Insights\u003c/a>, which provides parents and guardians access to a summary of their teen’s activity on the platform,” Harrison wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harrison added that the company serves a separate experience to teenagers “that is designed to further reduce the likelihood of users encountering, or prompting the model to return, sensitive or suggestive content.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While it’s unlikely Democratic lawmakers will be able to move the Republican-led Congress to regulate AI, Weiss applauded Padilla and Welch for drawing attention to the issue and noted the dozens of AI-related bills introduced in Sacramento have a greater chance of making it into law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Right now, there are no guardrails on artificial intelligence companions,” Weiss said. “That is ridiculous. This technology is amazingly powerful. It’s seductive. It’s exciting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, in partnership with Common Sense, introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1064\">AB 1064\u003c/a>, which would establish a standards board to assess and regulate AI technologies used by children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB243\">Senate Bill 243\u003c/a>, introduced by Sen. Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, will be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee this Tuesday. The measure, which Common Sense also supports, would require chatbot operators to implement critical safeguards to protect users from the addictive, isolating and influential aspects of AI chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the hearing, Padilla will promote the bill with a press conference, where he’ll be joined by the bereft Florida mother, Megan Garcia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>To help a young person who may be struggling with depression or anxiety, dial 988 to reach the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After Megan Garcia’s 14-year-old son died by suicide last year, she said she thought he was spending the bulk of the time on his phone “talking to friends, playing games, looking at sports: the regular things that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000954/smartphone-bans-havent-worked-in-california-schools-but-some-districts-share-advice-on-what-may-work\">teenagers do on their cellphones\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the Florida teen was having conversations with an artificial intelligence chatbot — and growing emotionally connected to it. \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/FCXWgZjybm0?si=khMUy1ByyRr6R9YI\">Speaking to “CBS Mornings”\u003c/a> shortly after suing Bay Area-based \u003ca href=\"http://character.ai\">Character.AI\u003c/a> (C.AI) and Google last fall, Garcia said she was blindsided by the intensity of the interactions her son had with C.AI’s chatbot shortly before his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I didn’t know that he was talking to a very human-like AI chatbot that has the ability to mimic human emotion and human sentiment,” said Garcia, who is a lawyer. “It makes me sad that this was my child’s first experience being in love or romance. That’s saddening to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garcia blames C.AI for her son’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., co-founder of the bipartisan \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/mhc/\">Senate Mental Health Caucus\u003c/a>, and Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., sent letters to the CEOs of the companies behind C.AI and two other leading AI chatbots, Chai and Replika, urging them to do more to ensure their products do not contribute to self-harm or suicide among young users.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although a couple of the companies recently announced new safety features, Padilla and Welch insist the reliability of these systems is unclear. That’s even though surveys show teens are looking to AI for answers about their \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64014/teens-are-looking-to-ai-for-answers-about-their-personal-lives-not-just-homework-help\">personal lives\u003c/a>, not just help with homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The synthetic attention users receive from these chatbots (e.g., streams of expressive messages, sycophantic and agreeable responses, AI-generated selfies, and convincing voice calls) can, and has already, led to dangerous levels of attachment and unearned trust,” the senators wrote in the letters to \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Character-Technologies.pdf\">Character Technologies\u003c/a> of Menlo Park, \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Chai.pdf\">Chai Research\u003c/a> of Palo Alto, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Chatbot-Safety-Replika.pdf\">Luka\u003c/a> of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Policymakers, parents, and their kids deserve to know what your companies are doing to protect users from these known risks,” the senators wrote, “given that young people are accessing your products — where the average user spends approximately 60–90 minutes per day interacting with these AI chatbots.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI companionship apps tend to be more permissive than better-known general apps like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. That’s because companionship app users are often looking to engage with them as sexual and/or romantic partners. On the Character.AI \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/\">subreddit\u003c/a>, it doesn’t take a long search to find questions like: “How many of you here use character.ai for loneliness? I’ve had no friends or social life for about 10 years and rarely leave my house, character.ai has really helped me feel a little bit better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Character.AI, users can create their own chatbots and give them directions about how they should act. They can also select from chatbots created by others that mimic historical figures and celebrities. The Florida teen, for instance, used a bot mimicking the “Game of Thrones” character \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbuBfizSnPk\">Daenerys Targaryen\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AI companions are kind of a sleeper issue for a lot of Americans,” said Danny Weiss, the chief advocacy officer for Common Sense Media. “Many parents don’t even know that their kids might be developing relationships with machines.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chelsea Harrison, head of communications at Character.AI, told KQED that the company welcomes working with regulators and lawmakers and has been in contact with Padilla’s and Welch’s offices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Over the past year, we’ve rolled out many safety features on the platform, including \u003ca href=\"https://blog.character.ai/introducing-parental-insights-enhanced-safety-for-teens/\">Parental Insights\u003c/a>, which provides parents and guardians access to a summary of their teen’s activity on the platform,” Harrison wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harrison added that the company serves a separate experience to teenagers “that is designed to further reduce the likelihood of users encountering, or prompting the model to return, sensitive or suggestive content.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While it’s unlikely Democratic lawmakers will be able to move the Republican-led Congress to regulate AI, Weiss applauded Padilla and Welch for drawing attention to the issue and noted the dozens of AI-related bills introduced in Sacramento have a greater chance of making it into law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Right now, there are no guardrails on artificial intelligence companions,” Weiss said. “That is ridiculous. This technology is amazingly powerful. It’s seductive. It’s exciting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, in partnership with Common Sense, introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1064\">AB 1064\u003c/a>, which would establish a standards board to assess and regulate AI technologies used by children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB243\">Senate Bill 243\u003c/a>, introduced by Sen. Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, will be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee this Tuesday. The measure, which Common Sense also supports, would require chatbot operators to implement critical safeguards to protect users from the addictive, isolating and influential aspects of AI chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the hearing, Padilla will promote the bill with a press conference, where he’ll be joined by the bereft Florida mother, Megan Garcia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>To help a young person who may be struggling with depression or anxiety, dial 988 to reach the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Angel Island Exhibit Aims to Shine Light on Border Surveillance, American Exclusion",
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"headTitle": "Angel Island Exhibit Aims to Shine Light on Border Surveillance, American Exclusion | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>As the Trump administration cracks down on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/immigration\">immigration\u003c/a>, a new exhibit on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay draws attention to the “virtual wall” that already looms over the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/u-s-mexico-border\">U.S.–Mexico border\u003c/a> — and the island’s past as a piece of exclusionary American immigration policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1900s, the Angel Island Immigration Museum was the site of a hospital and processing station for detained asylum seekers, most of them from China or other parts of Asia. Now, posters set out in the airy building display the blimp-like cameras and tall towers that surveil zones on the U.S.’s southern border.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Border communities are keenly aware of the license plate readers that can track their cars and the cameras that can peer into their backyards or at the jungle gyms where their kids play, according to Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which installed the Angel Island State Park exhibit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The exhibit, which opens Wednesday, “provides a kind of border surveillance 101” for others who might not be aware of the privacy-impeding technology already creating a barrier between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, Guariglia told KQED. “How much surveillance infrastructure there really is on the U.S.–Mexico border, what technology there is, and how it’s being used.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the past few years, the EFF has been conducting research along the southern border, identifying where surveillance equipment is and the ways that it can be disguised — like the seismic trail sensors that track movement and often look like rocks or litter scattered throughout the desert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12034023\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12034023\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1331\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1920x1278.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A visitor observes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new exhibit at Angel Island State Park, “Border Surveillance: Places, People and Technology,” the first of its kind in a California State Park. Open through late May, the display examines the U.S. government’s “virtual wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and its impact on civil rights. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Electronic Frontier Foundation)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11821133/the-little-known-history-of-japanese-internment-on-angel-island\">Angel Island\u003c/a> felt like the perfect place to debut the work the team has done so far because, according to Guariglia, it is a past “product of Chinese exclusion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Here we had right in our own backyard a kind of encapsulation of how the government throws its power around on some of the most vulnerable people there are, which are immigrants,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From the time that Angel Island served as an immigration station from 1910 to 1940, where the majority of the immigrants detained and processed there were of Asian immigrant heritage, there have also been concurrent efforts along the southern border,” said Ed Tepporn, the executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.[aside postID=news_12032263 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250320-JAPANESEAMERICANSDENOUNCE-03-BL-KQED-1020x680.jpg']Tepporn said that the museum on the island now serves as an educational site for Americans who don’t know as much as they should about the Chinese Exclusion Act — and subsequent expansion of exclusionary efforts to other Asian and Pacific Islander nations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not just the things that happened to people from a long time ago, but unfortunately, the same detention, exclusion, racism and xenophobia that immigrants who were held and detained at Angel Island experienced over a hundred years ago in many ways is happening to specific immigrant communities today,” he told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The exhibit opens as the Trump administration has promised in its first months to carry out \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12016488/how-trumps-plan-for-mass-deportations-could-play-out\">mass deportations\u003c/a> of illegal immigrants and attempts to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12024082/qa-what-to-know-about-birthright-citizenship\">narrow legal pathways\u003c/a> into the U.S. But the exhibit, and the surveillance it shows, has been in the works for much longer, according to Guariglia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Now, this is more important than ever, but really, it kind of doesn’t matter who’s been in office,” he said. “Administrations from both [U.S. political] parties have really kind of increased spending on government surveillance infrastructure at the U.S.–Mexico border over the last 20 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12034017\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12034017\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The U.S.-Mexico border wall runs west between the eastern outskirts of Tijuana and the Otay Mountain Wilderness on Sept. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Zoë Meyers for KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That spans the terms of Democrats Barack Obama, who was infamously labeled the “deporter in chief” by immigrant rights groups, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11958372/biden-border-policies-face-challenges-from-left-and-right\">Joe Biden\u003c/a>, whose administration attempted to crack down on the southern border during his — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11999721/as-republicans-attack-harris-on-immigration-heres-what-her-california-record-reveals\">Kamala Harris’\u003c/a> — campaigns last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guariglia said that since finalizing the exhibit, the EFF has turned to examining legal and policy strategies to combat the “intense” surveillance happening in border towns. In the meantime, he and Tepporn hope more people become cognizant of the U.S.’s presence there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Visitors have a chance to reflect on how these histories connect to their own families or their own communities’ experiences and perhaps to imagine together a future that is filled with more welcome and more belonging,” Tepporn told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the tenancy at Angel Island, the EFF hopes to display its research across the country, potentially moving to Southern California next.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/emanoukian\">\u003cem>Elize Manoukian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, a new exhibit about the U.S.-Mexico border’s “virtual wall” comes to Angel Island, where detained asylum seekers were processed in the 1900s.",
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"title": "Angel Island Exhibit Aims to Shine Light on Border Surveillance, American Exclusion | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As the Trump administration cracks down on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/immigration\">immigration\u003c/a>, a new exhibit on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay draws attention to the “virtual wall” that already looms over the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/u-s-mexico-border\">U.S.–Mexico border\u003c/a> — and the island’s past as a piece of exclusionary American immigration policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1900s, the Angel Island Immigration Museum was the site of a hospital and processing station for detained asylum seekers, most of them from China or other parts of Asia. Now, posters set out in the airy building display the blimp-like cameras and tall towers that surveil zones on the U.S.’s southern border.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Border communities are keenly aware of the license plate readers that can track their cars and the cameras that can peer into their backyards or at the jungle gyms where their kids play, according to Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which installed the Angel Island State Park exhibit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The exhibit, which opens Wednesday, “provides a kind of border surveillance 101” for others who might not be aware of the privacy-impeding technology already creating a barrier between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, Guariglia told KQED. “How much surveillance infrastructure there really is on the U.S.–Mexico border, what technology there is, and how it’s being used.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the past few years, the EFF has been conducting research along the southern border, identifying where surveillance equipment is and the ways that it can be disguised — like the seismic trail sensors that track movement and often look like rocks or litter scattered throughout the desert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12034023\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12034023\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1331\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/AngelIsland1-1920x1278.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A visitor observes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new exhibit at Angel Island State Park, “Border Surveillance: Places, People and Technology,” the first of its kind in a California State Park. Open through late May, the display examines the U.S. government’s “virtual wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and its impact on civil rights. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Electronic Frontier Foundation)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11821133/the-little-known-history-of-japanese-internment-on-angel-island\">Angel Island\u003c/a> felt like the perfect place to debut the work the team has done so far because, according to Guariglia, it is a past “product of Chinese exclusion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Here we had right in our own backyard a kind of encapsulation of how the government throws its power around on some of the most vulnerable people there are, which are immigrants,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From the time that Angel Island served as an immigration station from 1910 to 1940, where the majority of the immigrants detained and processed there were of Asian immigrant heritage, there have also been concurrent efforts along the southern border,” said Ed Tepporn, the executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Tepporn said that the museum on the island now serves as an educational site for Americans who don’t know as much as they should about the Chinese Exclusion Act — and subsequent expansion of exclusionary efforts to other Asian and Pacific Islander nations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re not just the things that happened to people from a long time ago, but unfortunately, the same detention, exclusion, racism and xenophobia that immigrants who were held and detained at Angel Island experienced over a hundred years ago in many ways is happening to specific immigrant communities today,” he told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The exhibit opens as the Trump administration has promised in its first months to carry out \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12016488/how-trumps-plan-for-mass-deportations-could-play-out\">mass deportations\u003c/a> of illegal immigrants and attempts to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12024082/qa-what-to-know-about-birthright-citizenship\">narrow legal pathways\u003c/a> into the U.S. But the exhibit, and the surveillance it shows, has been in the works for much longer, according to Guariglia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Now, this is more important than ever, but really, it kind of doesn’t matter who’s been in office,” he said. “Administrations from both [U.S. political] parties have really kind of increased spending on government surveillance infrastructure at the U.S.–Mexico border over the last 20 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12034017\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12034017\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/KQED-10_qed-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The U.S.-Mexico border wall runs west between the eastern outskirts of Tijuana and the Otay Mountain Wilderness on Sept. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Zoë Meyers for KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That spans the terms of Democrats Barack Obama, who was infamously labeled the “deporter in chief” by immigrant rights groups, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11958372/biden-border-policies-face-challenges-from-left-and-right\">Joe Biden\u003c/a>, whose administration attempted to crack down on the southern border during his — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11999721/as-republicans-attack-harris-on-immigration-heres-what-her-california-record-reveals\">Kamala Harris’\u003c/a> — campaigns last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guariglia said that since finalizing the exhibit, the EFF has turned to examining legal and policy strategies to combat the “intense” surveillance happening in border towns. In the meantime, he and Tepporn hope more people become cognizant of the U.S.’s presence there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Visitors have a chance to reflect on how these histories connect to their own families or their own communities’ experiences and perhaps to imagine together a future that is filled with more welcome and more belonging,” Tepporn told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the tenancy at Angel Island, the EFF hopes to display its research across the country, potentially moving to Southern California next.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/emanoukian\">\u003cem>Elize Manoukian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "the-broligarchy-pt-2-is-this-techno-fascism",
"title": "The Broligarchy Pt 2: Is this Techno-Fascism?",
"publishDate": 1743588020,
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"headTitle": "The Broligarchy Pt 2: Is this Techno-Fascism? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>The ”broligarchy” didn’t come together in a vacuum — this combination of extreme wealth, right wing leanings, and an anti-establishment point of view has been brewing for decades. There are lots of names for this ideology coming up in the news: techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, tech oligarchy, cyber-populism, authoritarian technocracy. What does it all mean? As tech business leaders align with the president, and Elon Musk leads the dismantling of federal agencies, what is the best way to describe what is going on in our country right now? In the second part of our two-parter on the “broligarchy,” Morgan speaks with historian and University of Washington professor, Margaret O’Mara, to discuss techno-fascism and other terms to see what really fits to describe our current reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC6489378718\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534709/the-code-by-margaret-omara/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Margaret O’Mara\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Historian and Professor at the University of Washington\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/facebook-meta-silicon-valley-politics/677168/#selection-891.0-891.17\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘Techno-Optimism’ is Not Something You Should Believe In”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jag Bhalla & Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘Headed for technofascism’”: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Becca Lewis, The Guardian\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk\">“Techno-Fascism Comes to America”\u003c/a> – Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003c/h2>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there’s this bit in Silicon Valley, the HBO show I mean, where one of the characters, Jared, gets into a self-driving car owned by this billionaire named Peter Gregory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Buckle up, please. Okay. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then, things go off the rails. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Destination override. New destination, 1 Gregory Drive, Arallon. Distance to destination, 4,126 miles. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instead of taking him home, like it’s supposed to, the car ends up getting rerouted to Peter Gregory’s offshore private island. It’s situated in international waters, so it’s basically in the middle of nowhere. And when Jared’s finally able to get out of the car, he faces another horrifying predicament. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jared Dunn: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Excuse me, can you help me? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Obstacle averted. Resuming operations. Please be careful. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The man-made island is run entirely by robots, so there’s no one around to help him. The idea of a sovereign, self-contained tech utopia island sounds like a TV satire exaggeration, but here’s the thing, it’s drawn from real life. Silicon Valley’s Peter Gregory is based on Peter Thiel, the godfather of the PayPal mafia and an actual tech billionaire who funded a similar project to the one parodied in the TV show. Though there’s no public record of anyone actually getting stuck on one. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the late 2000s, he became a huge proponent of what’s now known as seasteading, the dream of establishing these offshore, autonomous ocean communities that would be hubs for innovation. The purpose of seasteading was to put technological progress above everything else, to build them outside the grasp of anything that could limit that progress, especially things like pesky government regulations. Thiel was an early investor in the Seasteading Institute, an organization that originally planned to establish libertarian startup countries off the coast of San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While that never came to pass, and similar VC-funded Tech Island projects in the years since have also faced a slew of issues, this ideology persists: the belief that innovation shouldn’t be hampered by regulation or any kind of social responsibility really, and that tech business leaders should be the ones in charge, not elected officials in a traditional government structure. And with a growing group of broligarchs stepping out from behind their standing desks and into positions of real political power and control, it seems like they’re getting closer to that goal. So, what’s behind this continued mingling of the tech industry and government power? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we’re seeing tech business leaders aligning with the president, Elon Musk leading the dismantling of federal agencies, and the anti-government ideologies fueling things like the seasteading movement. We’ve been calling this the brologarchy, but there are other terms getting thrown around in an effort to describe what’s going on in our country right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me just list them out. I’m gonna grab my whiteboard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we’ve got authoritarian technocracy, cyber-populism, tech oligarchy, techno-feudalism, techno-libertarianism. Oh, and I’ve seen this one a lot lately, techno-fascism. But what do these jargony terms even mean? Are they just hyperbole? Is one more accurate than the others to describe what’s happening right now? I think it’s time for a deep dive. You ready? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, let’s open a new tab. Is this techno-fascism? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you know faskism? It’s coming to get us. Is the broligarchy really driven by “faskism,” sorry, fascism as former bachelorette and TikTok icon Gabby Windey says? To get an expert opinion, I called up Margaret O’Mara. She’s a historian and a professor at the University of Washington where she teaches about the tech economy and American politics. She also wrote a history of the modern tech industry in her book, The Code: Silicon Valley, and the Remaking of America. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First of all, the brologarchy is a delicious term and I’m going to deploy it often. You know, I think for one thing, the tech industry, Silicon Valley, has always contained multitudes, right? But it is novel to, you know, dial back to January of this year and see all of those tech CEOs on the dais at the inauguration. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie did not show up at William McKinley’s inauguration, this is really unusual to kind of just have the front and center display of, these are people who are so proximate to power where the president is kind of showing “I have these close connections with these people.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s go back to our whiteboard. I asked Margaret about a few of our jargony terms. First, technocracy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is that what this is? Well, it’s really interesting because technocracy is a really old term and it goes back more than a century ago. Rather than being anti-institutional or anti-establishment, it’s been, “hey, let’s bring expertise to these big institutions. Let’s use the best knowledge and specialized knowledge we can to inform policymaking or inform whatever we’re doing to, whatever we are governing and however we’re governing it.” This isn’t really technocracy. Technocracy is like bureaucracy kind of slow and kind of deliberate and very much in the institution and using people who are not partisans but just pointy headed experts. And sometimes that’s right now some of these pretty headed experts aren’t really in fashion with the prevailing administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, I’m thinking of during FDR’s administration, that’s kind of when we saw a lot of technocrats establishing these government agencies, which DOGE is currently slashing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s right, the 1930s, the New Deal, the advisors around Franklin Roosevelt were known as The Brains Trust. They were there because of their expertise, not because of who they knew or because of their political acumen, although some of them were very good at politics. But they were technocrats, and they believed in the power of government to steer the economy in a certain direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, crossing out technocracy. How about techno-libertarian? Libertarianism being the idea that the government should generally stay out of people’s lives. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, techno-libertarianism has always been kind of a slippery term because, you know, truly pure libertarianism in any context is a really hard thing to stick to because you really have to be comfortable with, even if it’s something that I don’t agree with, I believe that the government, you know, shouldn’t be doing anything about it to change that status quo or change that from happening. So this is kind of different. You know, this is very specific actions that are directed at specific parts of the government. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like for example, and this is a priority that Elon Musk supports very vocally is kind of getting rid of DEI or kind of quote unquote woke-ism in the government and in sort of a micromanaging way, right? Like banning certain words from government documents and websites, preventing funding of certain programs and not just things that are kind of new from the last several years, but things like the EPA’s environmental justice program, which is designed to address the disproportionately high levels of pollution in poor neighborhoods. And this isn’t libertarianism, this is very much trying to steer U.S. society in a certain way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Got it. So, techno-libertarian doesn’t really describe what’s happening. Cross that off. What about techno-fascism? Historian Janice Mimura wrote about this concept in her book, Planning for Empire, which focuses on Japan’s colonization of Manchuria in the 1930s as a test case for techno-fascism. She defines it as an authoritarian regime driven by technology with technocrats at the helm. Some people also call this technocratic populism. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">n this example of Imperial Japan, the fascist rule wasn’t concentrated behind a single leader. They still had an emperor, but the real power was in the hands of the technocrats. They established huge bureaucracies to force industrial development in Manchuria by exploiting the people that Japan colonized. Essentially, the public and private sphere were fused into one. This is just one example, but Margaret says there is a historic link between technological progress and fascism around the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, you go back to authoritarian regimes of the 20th century of different political systems, whether it be Stalinism, whether the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler, whether it be other authoritarian regimes, communist and non in during the Cold War, and often technology and technological progress plays a really important role. It’s something that that these leaders invest in and technologists are often favored actors in that. You know, you go back to Nazi Germany and the V-2 rocket program of 1930s, 1940s Nazi Germany. That was the technology that was so advanced and so valuable that the U.S. allowed the rocket scientists from the Nazi regime to emigrate to the United States. And they became the people who were building NASA’s own space program. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some argue that aspects of life in the U.S. right now do point to fascism—the scapegoating of minority groups, attacks on education, rising sexism, potentially illegal deportations—and that the broligarchs’ incursion into the government is a sure sign of techno-fascism’s arrival. But Margaret is wary of using that term. She says the current movement is too anti-bureaucratic to be techno- fascism. She says it’s not technocracy, and not quite techno-libertarianism either. So what is it? Maybe there isn’t one fixed term to describe exactly what’s happening, or maybe it’s more of an amalgamation of a bunch of these things. But Margaret did bring up one more term that was not on my whiteboard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think one thing that’s kind of consistent through a through line is techno-optimism or a belief in the power of technology to do good things and that more technology is better, and that I think with that kind of is an adversarial or a suspicion of government bureaucracy, feeling like tech is better than the bureaucrats. This tech is something that… ultimately, will do things better and improve things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Techno-optimism sounds, honestly, kind of positive? But right now we’re also seeing the very real consequences of this ideology play out in government operations, people losing their government jobs, infrastructure crumbling. I mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the episode. What even are the core beliefs here? Who’s pushing it? And that is another tab. Techno-optimism? So Margaret was just telling us about this adversarial relationship between techno-optimists and government bureaucracy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That sentiment ranges from yes, a sort of explicitly anti-government, you know, get the state out of things as much as possible, liberate currency, liberate individuals and groups from the control of state regulations and nation states. And then there’s also a kind of more affirmative, “hey, the government needs our help, let’s improve it and use all of these principles that we’ve used in developing these amazing products in the valley and let’s bring them to the government.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A lot of these beliefs are laid out in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was written in 2023 by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Here he is reading from it on the Startup Archive YouTube channel. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marc Andreessen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. This is a really key point today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mark Andreessen was the co-founder of one of the early internet browsers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Netscape, which was the kind of original kind of gateway drug to the internet. This was the browser that started it all. This was also the company that when it went public 14 months after it was established, it started the dot-com boom. By the time he’s 25 years old, he’s on the cover of Time magazine sitting on a throne. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andreessen went on to co-found the legendary Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital Fund that has, among other things, invested heavily in crypto. And unsurprisingly, investing in crypto, a currency that doesn’t rely on a government or bank to maintain it, is informed by his beliefs. In his 5,000-word techno-optimist manifesto, Andreessen writes this: “Centralized planning is doomed to fail. The system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone. Centralization will starve you to death.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah, that’s such a fascinating document. Andreessen’s framing of techno-optimism and his manifesto really points the finger at not just bureaucracy and government bureaucracy and regulation as something that’s standing in the way, but also programs like DEI programs and the pressure that tech employees have brought on within companies over the last five years to diversify workforce and to create better working conditions for different types of employees. Um, unionization drives, you know, we’ve seen this activism in tech that really was unprecedented in the industry up until the last decade. I mean, not at this scale. So these are things that are, you know, being identified as this is standing in the way of, you know our progress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marc Andreessen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology. Both unnecessary and self-defeating, we are not victims, we’re conquerors. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This manifesto is considered extreme, even in the tech industry. In it, Andreessen names what he calls “enemies.” Bureaucracy, regulation, academia, risk management, tech ethics, sustainability, social responsibility, and trust and safety. His version of techno-optimism sees anything that could hinder technological progress as the enemy. Even things that most people would agree make society better. like user safety or labor rights. In his manifesto, he also makes some very dubious claims that society doesn’t need those things because the free market will only drive innovation that is ultimately good for humanity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andreessen’s manifesto doesn’t speak for everyone in Silicon Valley, but a lot of these broligarchs seem to espouse very similar anti-government, anti-diversity talking points. And this lines up very well with the modern Republican Party. But techno-optimism is an ideology that doesn’t fit neatly into a political box. So how can we make sense of the recent political swings of the tech world? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s dig into this when we come back from this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. Is Silicon Valley right or left? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In recent history, tech industry leaders have aligned with political parties, not necessarily by ideology. They’ve stood by whichever party was better for business. And following the techno-optimist way of thinking, they’ve chosen whichever party wouldn’t stand in the way of innovation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s moved from being Republican to Democrat to back again. Even though in recent years, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area generally has been a pretty blue place, right? It’s associated with Democrats, with national Democratic lawmakers, and for a long time it was the Republican party that was just pro-business, low taxes. There were enough Californians and Northern Californians in Washington during the Reagan years that there were people who could advocate for the special things that, say, the semiconductor industry needed and its competition with Japanese chipmakers, which was a really big deal in the 80s. And then that changes in the 90s. The Republican party, social conservatism becomes more predominant. And the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and Al Gore, kind of presented themselves as business-friendly centrists and especially internet business-friendly centrists and really wooed Silicon Valley very successfully. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this very friendly approach to tech continued throughout Obama’s eight years as president, which meant that regulations were minimal. Very techno-optimist, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is also when everyone’s kind of feeling that social media is basically a net good and awesome and hadn’t realized that bringing humanity online would bring all the great things about humanity online as well as the not great things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the years after Obama was in office, technology has progressed at a breakneck pace. And with that, society has realized that progress at all costs isn’t always what’s best for actual human beings. Remember when whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance programs? Or when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened and news broke that your Facebook data could be mined for political advertising without your consent? And then there’s everything happening now with AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This isn’t what we signed up for. And then there’s increased criticism of privacy or lack thereof. These companies not doing enough to protect user privacy, that’s starting to gather steam. There’s starting to be criticism of the gender imbalance in VC and in companies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Still, the tech industry was doing pretty well by the end of Trump’s first term. Margaret says that tax cuts and other incentives were part of it, but there were outside forces too. Think of the state of the world back then. The COVID pandemic had just started, and online platforms had a huge growth spurt because everyone kind of just had to be online. So, Silicon Valley flourished. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then Biden is elected, and his administration kind of takes a more aggressive stance when it comes to antitrust. It’s kind of going back to the way things were 50 years ago, but that’s after this really long time of very loose enforcement. What happened during the Biden years is this love affair between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley started souring because there were antitrust enforcement actions and there were, you know, support of the unionization drives in some of these tech companies and some pretty tough talk from the Biden White House about “tech is too big and we need to do something about it.” But for this handful of very powerful, very influential, very vocal tech leaders, they really shifted their allegiance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I also am really curious by your thoughts on whether this shift to the right in Silicon Valley is actually purely just about business, just about pro-capitalism, or if it’s actually ideological. I mean, I’m thinking, like you said, Marc Andreessen was once a—well, he keeps flip-flopping. He was a Republican and a Democrat, now Republican again. Elon Musk was a Democrat until a couple years ago. I mean, I’m thinking of a tweet where he was like bragging about LGBTQ equality at Tesla, which seems unfathomable now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was a different world. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk built electric cars. Democrats were and are his constituency. Yeah, it’s very different. I think it is both business and ideology, and it’s all bound up together. That’s the way I read it. I think there is kind of a core, let’s protect the business. But there’s also, yes, I think there’s ideology. I think there is a lot of resentment. There is a lot of, you know, these billionaires are feeling aggrieved. They’re like, all we did was we built these amazing products that you guys love so much that you can’t stop using. You don’t even understand how this stuff works. And you’re trying to regulate us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s this real sort of disdain for Washington policymakers who legitimately have, you now, time and again, there have been many instances in which senators and members of Congress have shown their deep ignorance about technology. That is fair. And there’s also resentment of like, okay, our employees are like rising up against us and they’re not focused on building the next great thing. They’re focused on, you know, other stuff that we don’t think is important to the business. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’ve got this foundation of resentment, ideology, and business interests. What is it building toward? How about another tab? What’s the techno-optimist agenda? At the top of this episode, we have a bit about those self-governed islands funded by tech billionaires. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Distance to destination, 4126 miles. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But it’s not just a bit. These are real-life projects. How does that play into the dream of techno-optimism? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah, the self-funded, it’s all in the name of escaping from the state, escaping from the old ways of doing things. It’s the ultimate disruption, right? And we can see lots of different products and projects and tools, both fantastical utopian ones that haven’t come into being yet, and ones that are very, very real, like, say, the blockchain, spurred by this philosophy that the existing financial institutions, governmental institutions, fiat currency, you name it, that has failed people. It is something where nation states have too much power. And also it’s kind of this populist argument too, that ordinary, the little guy’s been, you know, hasn’t been given a fair shake. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While cryptocurrency hasn’t reached the widespread adoption its advocates predicted, it’s still doing pretty well for itself. But in practice, these techno-optimist, human-built startup islands that operate outside of government oversight have fizzled out. Unfortunately for Peter Thiel’s seasteading dream, the flourishing network of independent tech hub islands off the coast of San Francisco still does not exist. The Seasteading Institute has tried, again and again, to build floating cities in different parts of the world over the years, but those plans have also… sunk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there’s Prospera, another VC-funded libertarian city, this time built on existing land. It’s on an island off the coast of Honduras, backed by familiar names like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Construction started in 2021, but since then, the project has been accused of neocolonialism, weighed down with legal battles and embroiled in political turmoil. So instead of going through all the effort of building whole new tech island nations, it appears that some techno optimists are shifting their focus back home. They’re trying to bring it stateside, like California forever. A couple of years ago, this company started buying up acres of empty farmland in the Northeast Bay Area. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Getting some exclusive renderings tonight of a proposed new city in Solano County, California Forever. The group behind this huge plan says the community will be home eventually to some 400,000 people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re trying to build a utopian walkable city of tech startups and sustainable residential homes from scratch, about 50 miles from San Francisco. They’ve got some pretty big name investors backing the project, like Mark Andreessen and PayPal mafia member and LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman. But this project is also facing a lot of local resistance. Some of these proposed cities go even further than just being startup hubs. According to reporting from Wired, some groups have met with Trump to launch Prospera-like startup nations here in the United States, what they call “freedom cities.” They want to build modern-day company towns on federal land, which would be exempt from any regulatory oversight or taxes. But it begs the question, “whose freedom would be prioritized?” Freedom cities would not be required to be democratically run and wouldn’t be held to workers’ rights laws. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It isn’t about a better government. It isn’t about a better, you know, better delivery of government services. It’s about, “let’s get this government out of the way and let’s build something entirely new and something that we control that’s driven by this engineering thinking, by this tech-forward, techno-libertarian thinking, because we have made amazing things, we have been responsible for amazing progress, and if we are given the power to do it and the smartest people in the room are allowed to build these things independent of government.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s not technocracy. It’s not bringing the experts into government necessarily, although a number of Valley people are now in the government. But I see sort of an end game kind of feeding into this philosophy that seems kind of radical but is something that’s been percolating for a really long time, which is, “where we’re going and where we need to go as a — humanity needs to go is beyond these old bureaucratic governmental structures as they are now.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Techno-optimism says that we don’t need tech ethics or regulatory bodies or any sense of social responsibility because the invisible hand of the free market will guide innovation. But if you look at history, that story that techno-optimists like to tell is complete fiction. Okay, how about one last tab? The real story of Silicon Valley innovation. So despite the origin story that a lot of tech titans like to claim, Margaret says that the legendary innovation of Silicon Valley exists because of government intervention, not in spite of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a really interesting collective amnesia that is part of the secret of Silicon Valley, funnily enough. So the government has played a huge, huge role in the growth of the electronics industry, the computing industry over time here and elsewhere. But it’s done in a way that’s kind of been hard to see. It’s been indirect, right? It’s contracts going to private companies or universities. It’s regulations that are lowering taxes or lowering regulation. I mean, that’s government action. That’s government help, right. because it has been kind of indirect and subtle, a lot of people in the industry kind of say, okay, where our success comes from, government getting out of the way. Like we are so great because government has not been kind of micromanaging us or curbing our growth. And yeah, that is true, but part of this was this industry was only in the last 15 years has become as enormous as it has. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Turns out, that dreaded government regulation that these corporations fear so much has historically been great for the industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anti-trust enforcement has been this really important factor in driving innovation over time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As an example, Margaret talks about the history of the transitor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The invention that started it all, the thing that is the core of every microchip, that this is the digital revolution, the transistor. That was developed in Bell Labs, which was AT&T’s industrial laboratory in New Jersey in 1947. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The transistor was revolutionary in electronics. It basically controls the flow of electric signals. At the time, Bell Labs and AT&T had a monopoly over the telecommunications industry. They manufactured all the parts and operated the service itself. In 1949, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into AT&T. They settled the lawsuit in 1956, and AT&T was required to grant all applicants non-exclusive licenses for all existing and future Bell System patents, including the transistor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the DOJ forced AT&T to allow the transistor to be freely licensed by other companies. And this is how you had chip companies that emerge in the valley in the first place. We would not have silicon in the Valley if not for that Department of Justice condition, you know, putting that restraint on AT&T. This is why this political history is really useful to be aware of because there’s a, it’s legitimate to fear government interference in the innovation machine if you think that this has been a free market miracle and if government’s around, it is going to mess it up. But if you know the history and you realize, “oh, the innovation machine has actually been something that the government’s been part of and entrepreneurialism and government policy have existed side by side the whole time. Like, oh okay. So maybe that isn’t a bad thing.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just the sheer presence of having regulation or having policymakers and politicians in the room, setting the terms of the debate, that’s not going to be an innovation killer. In fact, an innovation killer will be if all the power just resides in the hands of a few companies and a few people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course, there are so many terms that can still apply, but we can’t cover all of political theory in a single deep dive, and no single ideology will explain what’s happening with our government. What we do know is that beyond semantics, we can always look at history to understand why this is happening now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are in uncharted waters in many ways right now in terms of where things will go next, but I do believe that historical knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay. I’m gonna cap these markers, roll away this whiteboard, and close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Catherine Monahan. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink DustSilver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org, follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod, or drop it on Discord. We’re in the Close All Tabs channel at Discord.gg/KQED. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "The Broligarchy Pt 2: Is this Techno-Fascism? | KQED",
"description": "The ”broligarchy” didn’t come together in a vacuum — this combination of extreme wealth, right wing leanings, and an anti-establishment point of view has been brewing for decades. There are lots of names for this ideology coming up in the news: techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, tech oligarchy, cyber-populism, authoritarian technocracy. What does it all mean? As tech business leaders align with the president, and Elon Musk leads the dismantling of federal agencies, what is the best way to describe what is going on in our country right now? In the second part of our two-parter on the “broligarchy,” Morgan speaks with historian and University of Washington professor, Margaret O’Mara, to discuss techno-fascism and other terms to see what really fits to describe our current reality.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The ”broligarchy” didn’t come together in a vacuum — this combination of extreme wealth, right wing leanings, and an anti-establishment point of view has been brewing for decades. There are lots of names for this ideology coming up in the news: techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, tech oligarchy, cyber-populism, authoritarian technocracy. What does it all mean? As tech business leaders align with the president, and Elon Musk leads the dismantling of federal agencies, what is the best way to describe what is going on in our country right now? In the second part of our two-parter on the “broligarchy,” Morgan speaks with historian and University of Washington professor, Margaret O’Mara, to discuss techno-fascism and other terms to see what really fits to describe our current reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC6489378718\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534709/the-code-by-margaret-omara/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Margaret O’Mara\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Historian and Professor at the University of Washington\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/facebook-meta-silicon-valley-politics/677168/#selection-891.0-891.17\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘Techno-Optimism’ is Not Something You Should Believe In”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jag Bhalla & Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘Headed for technofascism’”: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Becca Lewis, The Guardian\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk\">“Techno-Fascism Comes to America”\u003c/a> – Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there’s this bit in Silicon Valley, the HBO show I mean, where one of the characters, Jared, gets into a self-driving car owned by this billionaire named Peter Gregory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Buckle up, please. Okay. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then, things go off the rails. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Destination override. New destination, 1 Gregory Drive, Arallon. Distance to destination, 4,126 miles. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instead of taking him home, like it’s supposed to, the car ends up getting rerouted to Peter Gregory’s offshore private island. It’s situated in international waters, so it’s basically in the middle of nowhere. And when Jared’s finally able to get out of the car, he faces another horrifying predicament. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jared Dunn: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Excuse me, can you help me? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Obstacle averted. Resuming operations. Please be careful. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The man-made island is run entirely by robots, so there’s no one around to help him. The idea of a sovereign, self-contained tech utopia island sounds like a TV satire exaggeration, but here’s the thing, it’s drawn from real life. Silicon Valley’s Peter Gregory is based on Peter Thiel, the godfather of the PayPal mafia and an actual tech billionaire who funded a similar project to the one parodied in the TV show. Though there’s no public record of anyone actually getting stuck on one. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the late 2000s, he became a huge proponent of what’s now known as seasteading, the dream of establishing these offshore, autonomous ocean communities that would be hubs for innovation. The purpose of seasteading was to put technological progress above everything else, to build them outside the grasp of anything that could limit that progress, especially things like pesky government regulations. Thiel was an early investor in the Seasteading Institute, an organization that originally planned to establish libertarian startup countries off the coast of San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While that never came to pass, and similar VC-funded Tech Island projects in the years since have also faced a slew of issues, this ideology persists: the belief that innovation shouldn’t be hampered by regulation or any kind of social responsibility really, and that tech business leaders should be the ones in charge, not elected officials in a traditional government structure. And with a growing group of broligarchs stepping out from behind their standing desks and into positions of real political power and control, it seems like they’re getting closer to that goal. So, what’s behind this continued mingling of the tech industry and government power? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we’re seeing tech business leaders aligning with the president, Elon Musk leading the dismantling of federal agencies, and the anti-government ideologies fueling things like the seasteading movement. We’ve been calling this the brologarchy, but there are other terms getting thrown around in an effort to describe what’s going on in our country right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me just list them out. I’m gonna grab my whiteboard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we’ve got authoritarian technocracy, cyber-populism, tech oligarchy, techno-feudalism, techno-libertarianism. Oh, and I’ve seen this one a lot lately, techno-fascism. But what do these jargony terms even mean? Are they just hyperbole? Is one more accurate than the others to describe what’s happening right now? I think it’s time for a deep dive. You ready? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, let’s open a new tab. Is this techno-fascism? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you know faskism? It’s coming to get us. Is the broligarchy really driven by “faskism,” sorry, fascism as former bachelorette and TikTok icon Gabby Windey says? To get an expert opinion, I called up Margaret O’Mara. She’s a historian and a professor at the University of Washington where she teaches about the tech economy and American politics. She also wrote a history of the modern tech industry in her book, The Code: Silicon Valley, and the Remaking of America. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First of all, the brologarchy is a delicious term and I’m going to deploy it often. You know, I think for one thing, the tech industry, Silicon Valley, has always contained multitudes, right? But it is novel to, you know, dial back to January of this year and see all of those tech CEOs on the dais at the inauguration. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie did not show up at William McKinley’s inauguration, this is really unusual to kind of just have the front and center display of, these are people who are so proximate to power where the president is kind of showing “I have these close connections with these people.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s go back to our whiteboard. I asked Margaret about a few of our jargony terms. First, technocracy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is that what this is? Well, it’s really interesting because technocracy is a really old term and it goes back more than a century ago. Rather than being anti-institutional or anti-establishment, it’s been, “hey, let’s bring expertise to these big institutions. Let’s use the best knowledge and specialized knowledge we can to inform policymaking or inform whatever we’re doing to, whatever we are governing and however we’re governing it.” This isn’t really technocracy. Technocracy is like bureaucracy kind of slow and kind of deliberate and very much in the institution and using people who are not partisans but just pointy headed experts. And sometimes that’s right now some of these pretty headed experts aren’t really in fashion with the prevailing administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, I’m thinking of during FDR’s administration, that’s kind of when we saw a lot of technocrats establishing these government agencies, which DOGE is currently slashing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s right, the 1930s, the New Deal, the advisors around Franklin Roosevelt were known as The Brains Trust. They were there because of their expertise, not because of who they knew or because of their political acumen, although some of them were very good at politics. But they were technocrats, and they believed in the power of government to steer the economy in a certain direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, crossing out technocracy. How about techno-libertarian? Libertarianism being the idea that the government should generally stay out of people’s lives. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, techno-libertarianism has always been kind of a slippery term because, you know, truly pure libertarianism in any context is a really hard thing to stick to because you really have to be comfortable with, even if it’s something that I don’t agree with, I believe that the government, you know, shouldn’t be doing anything about it to change that status quo or change that from happening. So this is kind of different. You know, this is very specific actions that are directed at specific parts of the government. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like for example, and this is a priority that Elon Musk supports very vocally is kind of getting rid of DEI or kind of quote unquote woke-ism in the government and in sort of a micromanaging way, right? Like banning certain words from government documents and websites, preventing funding of certain programs and not just things that are kind of new from the last several years, but things like the EPA’s environmental justice program, which is designed to address the disproportionately high levels of pollution in poor neighborhoods. And this isn’t libertarianism, this is very much trying to steer U.S. society in a certain way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Got it. So, techno-libertarian doesn’t really describe what’s happening. Cross that off. What about techno-fascism? Historian Janice Mimura wrote about this concept in her book, Planning for Empire, which focuses on Japan’s colonization of Manchuria in the 1930s as a test case for techno-fascism. She defines it as an authoritarian regime driven by technology with technocrats at the helm. Some people also call this technocratic populism. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">n this example of Imperial Japan, the fascist rule wasn’t concentrated behind a single leader. They still had an emperor, but the real power was in the hands of the technocrats. They established huge bureaucracies to force industrial development in Manchuria by exploiting the people that Japan colonized. Essentially, the public and private sphere were fused into one. This is just one example, but Margaret says there is a historic link between technological progress and fascism around the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, you go back to authoritarian regimes of the 20th century of different political systems, whether it be Stalinism, whether the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler, whether it be other authoritarian regimes, communist and non in during the Cold War, and often technology and technological progress plays a really important role. It’s something that that these leaders invest in and technologists are often favored actors in that. You know, you go back to Nazi Germany and the V-2 rocket program of 1930s, 1940s Nazi Germany. That was the technology that was so advanced and so valuable that the U.S. allowed the rocket scientists from the Nazi regime to emigrate to the United States. And they became the people who were building NASA’s own space program. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some argue that aspects of life in the U.S. right now do point to fascism—the scapegoating of minority groups, attacks on education, rising sexism, potentially illegal deportations—and that the broligarchs’ incursion into the government is a sure sign of techno-fascism’s arrival. But Margaret is wary of using that term. She says the current movement is too anti-bureaucratic to be techno- fascism. She says it’s not technocracy, and not quite techno-libertarianism either. So what is it? Maybe there isn’t one fixed term to describe exactly what’s happening, or maybe it’s more of an amalgamation of a bunch of these things. But Margaret did bring up one more term that was not on my whiteboard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think one thing that’s kind of consistent through a through line is techno-optimism or a belief in the power of technology to do good things and that more technology is better, and that I think with that kind of is an adversarial or a suspicion of government bureaucracy, feeling like tech is better than the bureaucrats. This tech is something that… ultimately, will do things better and improve things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Techno-optimism sounds, honestly, kind of positive? But right now we’re also seeing the very real consequences of this ideology play out in government operations, people losing their government jobs, infrastructure crumbling. I mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the episode. What even are the core beliefs here? Who’s pushing it? And that is another tab. Techno-optimism? So Margaret was just telling us about this adversarial relationship between techno-optimists and government bureaucracy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That sentiment ranges from yes, a sort of explicitly anti-government, you know, get the state out of things as much as possible, liberate currency, liberate individuals and groups from the control of state regulations and nation states. And then there’s also a kind of more affirmative, “hey, the government needs our help, let’s improve it and use all of these principles that we’ve used in developing these amazing products in the valley and let’s bring them to the government.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A lot of these beliefs are laid out in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was written in 2023 by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Here he is reading from it on the Startup Archive YouTube channel. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marc Andreessen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. This is a really key point today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mark Andreessen was the co-founder of one of the early internet browsers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Netscape, which was the kind of original kind of gateway drug to the internet. This was the browser that started it all. This was also the company that when it went public 14 months after it was established, it started the dot-com boom. By the time he’s 25 years old, he’s on the cover of Time magazine sitting on a throne. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andreessen went on to co-found the legendary Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital Fund that has, among other things, invested heavily in crypto. And unsurprisingly, investing in crypto, a currency that doesn’t rely on a government or bank to maintain it, is informed by his beliefs. In his 5,000-word techno-optimist manifesto, Andreessen writes this: “Centralized planning is doomed to fail. The system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone. Centralization will starve you to death.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah, that’s such a fascinating document. Andreessen’s framing of techno-optimism and his manifesto really points the finger at not just bureaucracy and government bureaucracy and regulation as something that’s standing in the way, but also programs like DEI programs and the pressure that tech employees have brought on within companies over the last five years to diversify workforce and to create better working conditions for different types of employees. Um, unionization drives, you know, we’ve seen this activism in tech that really was unprecedented in the industry up until the last decade. I mean, not at this scale. So these are things that are, you know, being identified as this is standing in the way of, you know our progress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marc Andreessen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology. Both unnecessary and self-defeating, we are not victims, we’re conquerors. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This manifesto is considered extreme, even in the tech industry. In it, Andreessen names what he calls “enemies.” Bureaucracy, regulation, academia, risk management, tech ethics, sustainability, social responsibility, and trust and safety. His version of techno-optimism sees anything that could hinder technological progress as the enemy. Even things that most people would agree make society better. like user safety or labor rights. In his manifesto, he also makes some very dubious claims that society doesn’t need those things because the free market will only drive innovation that is ultimately good for humanity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andreessen’s manifesto doesn’t speak for everyone in Silicon Valley, but a lot of these broligarchs seem to espouse very similar anti-government, anti-diversity talking points. And this lines up very well with the modern Republican Party. But techno-optimism is an ideology that doesn’t fit neatly into a political box. So how can we make sense of the recent political swings of the tech world? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s dig into this when we come back from this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. Is Silicon Valley right or left? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In recent history, tech industry leaders have aligned with political parties, not necessarily by ideology. They’ve stood by whichever party was better for business. And following the techno-optimist way of thinking, they’ve chosen whichever party wouldn’t stand in the way of innovation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s moved from being Republican to Democrat to back again. Even though in recent years, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area generally has been a pretty blue place, right? It’s associated with Democrats, with national Democratic lawmakers, and for a long time it was the Republican party that was just pro-business, low taxes. There were enough Californians and Northern Californians in Washington during the Reagan years that there were people who could advocate for the special things that, say, the semiconductor industry needed and its competition with Japanese chipmakers, which was a really big deal in the 80s. And then that changes in the 90s. The Republican party, social conservatism becomes more predominant. And the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and Al Gore, kind of presented themselves as business-friendly centrists and especially internet business-friendly centrists and really wooed Silicon Valley very successfully. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this very friendly approach to tech continued throughout Obama’s eight years as president, which meant that regulations were minimal. Very techno-optimist, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is also when everyone’s kind of feeling that social media is basically a net good and awesome and hadn’t realized that bringing humanity online would bring all the great things about humanity online as well as the not great things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the years after Obama was in office, technology has progressed at a breakneck pace. And with that, society has realized that progress at all costs isn’t always what’s best for actual human beings. Remember when whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance programs? Or when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened and news broke that your Facebook data could be mined for political advertising without your consent? And then there’s everything happening now with AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This isn’t what we signed up for. And then there’s increased criticism of privacy or lack thereof. These companies not doing enough to protect user privacy, that’s starting to gather steam. There’s starting to be criticism of the gender imbalance in VC and in companies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Still, the tech industry was doing pretty well by the end of Trump’s first term. Margaret says that tax cuts and other incentives were part of it, but there were outside forces too. Think of the state of the world back then. The COVID pandemic had just started, and online platforms had a huge growth spurt because everyone kind of just had to be online. So, Silicon Valley flourished. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then Biden is elected, and his administration kind of takes a more aggressive stance when it comes to antitrust. It’s kind of going back to the way things were 50 years ago, but that’s after this really long time of very loose enforcement. What happened during the Biden years is this love affair between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley started souring because there were antitrust enforcement actions and there were, you know, support of the unionization drives in some of these tech companies and some pretty tough talk from the Biden White House about “tech is too big and we need to do something about it.” But for this handful of very powerful, very influential, very vocal tech leaders, they really shifted their allegiance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I also am really curious by your thoughts on whether this shift to the right in Silicon Valley is actually purely just about business, just about pro-capitalism, or if it’s actually ideological. I mean, I’m thinking, like you said, Marc Andreessen was once a—well, he keeps flip-flopping. He was a Republican and a Democrat, now Republican again. Elon Musk was a Democrat until a couple years ago. I mean, I’m thinking of a tweet where he was like bragging about LGBTQ equality at Tesla, which seems unfathomable now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was a different world. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk built electric cars. Democrats were and are his constituency. Yeah, it’s very different. I think it is both business and ideology, and it’s all bound up together. That’s the way I read it. I think there is kind of a core, let’s protect the business. But there’s also, yes, I think there’s ideology. I think there is a lot of resentment. There is a lot of, you know, these billionaires are feeling aggrieved. They’re like, all we did was we built these amazing products that you guys love so much that you can’t stop using. You don’t even understand how this stuff works. And you’re trying to regulate us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s this real sort of disdain for Washington policymakers who legitimately have, you now, time and again, there have been many instances in which senators and members of Congress have shown their deep ignorance about technology. That is fair. And there’s also resentment of like, okay, our employees are like rising up against us and they’re not focused on building the next great thing. They’re focused on, you know, other stuff that we don’t think is important to the business. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’ve got this foundation of resentment, ideology, and business interests. What is it building toward? How about another tab? What’s the techno-optimist agenda? At the top of this episode, we have a bit about those self-governed islands funded by tech billionaires. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Automated Voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Distance to destination, 4126 miles. Enjoy your ride. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But it’s not just a bit. These are real-life projects. How does that play into the dream of techno-optimism? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah, the self-funded, it’s all in the name of escaping from the state, escaping from the old ways of doing things. It’s the ultimate disruption, right? And we can see lots of different products and projects and tools, both fantastical utopian ones that haven’t come into being yet, and ones that are very, very real, like, say, the blockchain, spurred by this philosophy that the existing financial institutions, governmental institutions, fiat currency, you name it, that has failed people. It is something where nation states have too much power. And also it’s kind of this populist argument too, that ordinary, the little guy’s been, you know, hasn’t been given a fair shake. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While cryptocurrency hasn’t reached the widespread adoption its advocates predicted, it’s still doing pretty well for itself. But in practice, these techno-optimist, human-built startup islands that operate outside of government oversight have fizzled out. Unfortunately for Peter Thiel’s seasteading dream, the flourishing network of independent tech hub islands off the coast of San Francisco still does not exist. The Seasteading Institute has tried, again and again, to build floating cities in different parts of the world over the years, but those plans have also… sunk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there’s Prospera, another VC-funded libertarian city, this time built on existing land. It’s on an island off the coast of Honduras, backed by familiar names like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Construction started in 2021, but since then, the project has been accused of neocolonialism, weighed down with legal battles and embroiled in political turmoil. So instead of going through all the effort of building whole new tech island nations, it appears that some techno optimists are shifting their focus back home. They’re trying to bring it stateside, like California forever. A couple of years ago, this company started buying up acres of empty farmland in the Northeast Bay Area. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Getting some exclusive renderings tonight of a proposed new city in Solano County, California Forever. The group behind this huge plan says the community will be home eventually to some 400,000 people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re trying to build a utopian walkable city of tech startups and sustainable residential homes from scratch, about 50 miles from San Francisco. They’ve got some pretty big name investors backing the project, like Mark Andreessen and PayPal mafia member and LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman. But this project is also facing a lot of local resistance. Some of these proposed cities go even further than just being startup hubs. According to reporting from Wired, some groups have met with Trump to launch Prospera-like startup nations here in the United States, what they call “freedom cities.” They want to build modern-day company towns on federal land, which would be exempt from any regulatory oversight or taxes. But it begs the question, “whose freedom would be prioritized?” Freedom cities would not be required to be democratically run and wouldn’t be held to workers’ rights laws. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It isn’t about a better government. It isn’t about a better, you know, better delivery of government services. It’s about, “let’s get this government out of the way and let’s build something entirely new and something that we control that’s driven by this engineering thinking, by this tech-forward, techno-libertarian thinking, because we have made amazing things, we have been responsible for amazing progress, and if we are given the power to do it and the smartest people in the room are allowed to build these things independent of government.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s not technocracy. It’s not bringing the experts into government necessarily, although a number of Valley people are now in the government. But I see sort of an end game kind of feeding into this philosophy that seems kind of radical but is something that’s been percolating for a really long time, which is, “where we’re going and where we need to go as a — humanity needs to go is beyond these old bureaucratic governmental structures as they are now.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Techno-optimism says that we don’t need tech ethics or regulatory bodies or any sense of social responsibility because the invisible hand of the free market will guide innovation. But if you look at history, that story that techno-optimists like to tell is complete fiction. Okay, how about one last tab? The real story of Silicon Valley innovation. So despite the origin story that a lot of tech titans like to claim, Margaret says that the legendary innovation of Silicon Valley exists because of government intervention, not in spite of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a really interesting collective amnesia that is part of the secret of Silicon Valley, funnily enough. So the government has played a huge, huge role in the growth of the electronics industry, the computing industry over time here and elsewhere. But it’s done in a way that’s kind of been hard to see. It’s been indirect, right? It’s contracts going to private companies or universities. It’s regulations that are lowering taxes or lowering regulation. I mean, that’s government action. That’s government help, right. because it has been kind of indirect and subtle, a lot of people in the industry kind of say, okay, where our success comes from, government getting out of the way. Like we are so great because government has not been kind of micromanaging us or curbing our growth. And yeah, that is true, but part of this was this industry was only in the last 15 years has become as enormous as it has. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Turns out, that dreaded government regulation that these corporations fear so much has historically been great for the industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anti-trust enforcement has been this really important factor in driving innovation over time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As an example, Margaret talks about the history of the transitor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The invention that started it all, the thing that is the core of every microchip, that this is the digital revolution, the transistor. That was developed in Bell Labs, which was AT&T’s industrial laboratory in New Jersey in 1947. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The transistor was revolutionary in electronics. It basically controls the flow of electric signals. At the time, Bell Labs and AT&T had a monopoly over the telecommunications industry. They manufactured all the parts and operated the service itself. In 1949, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into AT&T. They settled the lawsuit in 1956, and AT&T was required to grant all applicants non-exclusive licenses for all existing and future Bell System patents, including the transistor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the DOJ forced AT&T to allow the transistor to be freely licensed by other companies. And this is how you had chip companies that emerge in the valley in the first place. We would not have silicon in the Valley if not for that Department of Justice condition, you know, putting that restraint on AT&T. This is why this political history is really useful to be aware of because there’s a, it’s legitimate to fear government interference in the innovation machine if you think that this has been a free market miracle and if government’s around, it is going to mess it up. But if you know the history and you realize, “oh, the innovation machine has actually been something that the government’s been part of and entrepreneurialism and government policy have existed side by side the whole time. Like, oh okay. So maybe that isn’t a bad thing.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just the sheer presence of having regulation or having policymakers and politicians in the room, setting the terms of the debate, that’s not going to be an innovation killer. In fact, an innovation killer will be if all the power just resides in the hands of a few companies and a few people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course, there are so many terms that can still apply, but we can’t cover all of political theory in a single deep dive, and no single ideology will explain what’s happening with our government. What we do know is that beyond semantics, we can always look at history to understand why this is happening now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Margaret O’Mara: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are in uncharted waters in many ways right now in terms of where things will go next, but I do believe that historical knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay. I’m gonna cap these markers, roll away this whiteboard, and close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Catherine Monahan. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink DustSilver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org, follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod, or drop it on Discord. We’re in the Close All Tabs channel at Discord.gg/KQED. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003cp>The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how students and teachers spend their time in the classroom. Now, instead of writing with paper and pencil, students use computers for most assignments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers lecture less and spend more time on individualized instruction, social-emotional learning and relationship building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2025/covids-long-shadow-in-california-chronic-absences-student-depression-and-the-limits-of-money/728640\">The last five years\u003c/a> have not been easy. Students returned to campuses in the spring of 2021, after spending more than a year learning alone from home on computers. They had knowledge gaps, and many felt isolated and unsure, often resulting in chronic absenteeism and bad behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2022/covid-challenges-bad-student-behavior-push-teachers-to-the-limit-and-out-the-door/673124\">Thousands of California teachers\u003c/a>, discouraged by disciplinary problems, quit the profession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others doubled down on individualized instruction and social-emotional support, spending a good portion of class time reacquainting their students with how to behave in the classroom and encouraging them to socialize with their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, five years after COVID closed schools, student scores on the state’s standardized \u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2024/state-test-scores-inch-up-but-still-lag-pre-covid-numbers/720392\">Smarter Balanced\u003c/a> tests have improved slightly, although achievement is still not back to pre-COVID levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California teachers interviewed by EdSource are optimistic, reporting that interventions are working and that student discipline is improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They don’t miss their houses,” said Erika Cedeno, who teaches Spanish at Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita. “They don’t miss anything related to COVID. They want to be at school, and they are enjoying sports. They are playing tennis and swimming. It’s very different. I think we are probably getting to the point that we were before COVID.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">More personalized learning\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers report placing a greater emphasis on small-group instruction and personalized learning to accommodate students who returned from school closures with diverse learning needs, according to “\u003ca class=\"external\" href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rewiring-the-classroom-how-the-covid-19-pandemic-transformed-k-12-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rewiring the classroom\u003c/a>: How the COVID-19 pandemic transformed K–12 education,” released in August by the Brookings Institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12028948 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/02/20250206_OUSDChromebooks_GC-33-1020x680.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The spring 2023 survey of 1,000 K–12 teachers and administrators across the country revealed that students now spend less time in lectures and more time working on educational software tailored to their needs. The increased use of technology by students, teachers and parents is the biggest change in the classroom since COVID-19 closures, said Brian Jacob, who co-authored the Brookings report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After months of working on educational software during pandemic school closures, teachers are now more likely to incorporate it into their classrooms, according to the report. In early 2023, 70% of all students and 80% of all middle and high school students in the United States had a personal computing device.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I use technology more freely in the classroom now, and it’s an expected part of the day,” Todd Shadbourne, a sixth grade teacher at Foulks Ranch Elementary School in Elk Grove, told EdSource.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We used to do a research project and everybody had to go to the library and get a book, and hope they could get a book,” Shadbourne said. “And we couldn’t study biographies when my neighboring class was doing biographies because there’s only so many books. … Now you have other resources because you have a computer in front of you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Too much technology isn’t good\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There are some drawbacks to the increased use of technology in schools, however. \u003ca class=\"external\" href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/ZWGEZIZQHS3RHNPCJDVD/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Research shows\u003c/a> that reading comprehension is better when students read printed texts instead of online materials, Jacob said. Students also struggle with writing and spelling because all their school work is done on computers equipped with programs that correct spelling and grammar, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“School officials and researchers really need to look at that carefully and determine how much time students are spending on devices, and how is that going?” Jacob said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some California teachers try to limit their students’ screen time and require them to spend more time reading text, writing with pencil and paper and collaborating with their classmates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego special education teacher Carly Bresee says the use of technology by students outside the classroom has also increased, prompting her to use less technology in class than before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that general ed teachers are kind of facing that question,” Bresee said. “How much computer use is healthy and positive for the students? They are having difficulty with that balance, knowing what the best formula is for learning.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Back to classroom carts at some schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>School officials at James Lick Middle School have decided to go back to classroom computer carts because the school, in financially strapped San Francisco Unified, could no longer afford to maintain and replace student computers that are broken, lost or outdated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kids have broken them on purpose,” said Keith Carames, who teaches theater arts and English at the school. “Kids have lost them. Kids have dropped them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That move away from technology is a big disappointment to Carames, who became a convert after spending three months learning how to use Zoom, Google Classroom and other online education programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I saw the light,” Carames said. “I can edit stuff online with them (the students). I can post videos. I have resources that are accessible. If they are absent, they can get work. There are letters that you can send to the family and newsletters and interactive things. It changed my practice as an educator. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carames calls the transition back to paper and pen “a nightmare.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some kids who don’t even know how to spell their own first name,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Changing views on school attendance\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The biggest change for Elk Grove’s Shadbourne since COVID is the perception among some students and parents that attending school is optional. Students go on vacation during the school year or decide to work from home on a given day because they think they can get assignments on Google Classroom and email them to the teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And the social benefits of school, and the problem-solving that we do as a group, and the common culture we hope to create, it’s hard to do that when people are gone,” Shadbourne said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The impact of absences is amplified in special education, where a student might make progress one day, miss a day of school, and lose that progress, Bresee said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Students need social-emotional support\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since schools reopened in 2020, California teachers have been spending more time greeting their students at the door, sending them notes and planning activities that encourage communication and help build relationships. Making these connections helps students develop social-emotional skills and encourages them to come to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In special education, we saw a huge increase in maladaptive behaviors, and that was really difficult both for the students, the support staff and for teachers,” said Bresee, a TK–1 special education teacher at Perkins K-8 School. “… It was hard to maintain a regular routine because it felt like we were more frequently in crisis mode.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students, especially younger ones, had to learn how to play and communicate effectively with others. That meant more time was set aside for adult-facilitated playtime than before the pandemic, Bresee said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It became, in my eyes, an even more important part of the day, right up there with our literacy and math lessons,” Breese said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effort seems to be paying off. This year, student behavior has improved, and the class routine is back on track, according to Bresee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Social-emotional support and building connections between students and their teachers and classmates are equally important for older students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cedeno greets her Spanish students at the door every day and then spends roughly seven minutes at the beginning of each class asking questions to draw students into conversations meant to help them connect with her and their classmates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cuál es tu color favorito (What is your favorite color)?” she asks one day. “Cuál es tu dulce favorito (What is your favorite candy)?” she asks on another day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cedeno also invites students to have lunch in her classroom if they need a safe space to relax and a microwave to heat their food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are trying to rebuild this step by step,” Cedeno said. “We are not there yet. But I think we are going to get there if we put in a lot of effort, a lot of compassion and empathy, because these kids, they need this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2025/how-covid-changed-teaching-fewer-pencils-more-technology/729158\">\u003cem>This story originally appeared in EdSource.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how students and teachers spend their time in the classroom. Now, instead of writing with paper and pencil, students use computers for most assignments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers lecture less and spend more time on individualized instruction, social-emotional learning and relationship building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2025/covids-long-shadow-in-california-chronic-absences-student-depression-and-the-limits-of-money/728640\">The last five years\u003c/a> have not been easy. Students returned to campuses in the spring of 2021, after spending more than a year learning alone from home on computers. They had knowledge gaps, and many felt isolated and unsure, often resulting in chronic absenteeism and bad behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2022/covid-challenges-bad-student-behavior-push-teachers-to-the-limit-and-out-the-door/673124\">Thousands of California teachers\u003c/a>, discouraged by disciplinary problems, quit the profession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others doubled down on individualized instruction and social-emotional support, spending a good portion of class time reacquainting their students with how to behave in the classroom and encouraging them to socialize with their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, five years after COVID closed schools, student scores on the state’s standardized \u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2024/state-test-scores-inch-up-but-still-lag-pre-covid-numbers/720392\">Smarter Balanced\u003c/a> tests have improved slightly, although achievement is still not back to pre-COVID levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California teachers interviewed by EdSource are optimistic, reporting that interventions are working and that student discipline is improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They don’t miss their houses,” said Erika Cedeno, who teaches Spanish at Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita. “They don’t miss anything related to COVID. They want to be at school, and they are enjoying sports. They are playing tennis and swimming. It’s very different. I think we are probably getting to the point that we were before COVID.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">More personalized learning\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers report placing a greater emphasis on small-group instruction and personalized learning to accommodate students who returned from school closures with diverse learning needs, according to “\u003ca class=\"external\" href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rewiring-the-classroom-how-the-covid-19-pandemic-transformed-k-12-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rewiring the classroom\u003c/a>: How the COVID-19 pandemic transformed K–12 education,” released in August by the Brookings Institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The spring 2023 survey of 1,000 K–12 teachers and administrators across the country revealed that students now spend less time in lectures and more time working on educational software tailored to their needs. The increased use of technology by students, teachers and parents is the biggest change in the classroom since COVID-19 closures, said Brian Jacob, who co-authored the Brookings report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After months of working on educational software during pandemic school closures, teachers are now more likely to incorporate it into their classrooms, according to the report. In early 2023, 70% of all students and 80% of all middle and high school students in the United States had a personal computing device.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I use technology more freely in the classroom now, and it’s an expected part of the day,” Todd Shadbourne, a sixth grade teacher at Foulks Ranch Elementary School in Elk Grove, told EdSource.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We used to do a research project and everybody had to go to the library and get a book, and hope they could get a book,” Shadbourne said. “And we couldn’t study biographies when my neighboring class was doing biographies because there’s only so many books. … Now you have other resources because you have a computer in front of you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Too much technology isn’t good\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There are some drawbacks to the increased use of technology in schools, however. \u003ca class=\"external\" href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/ZWGEZIZQHS3RHNPCJDVD/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Research shows\u003c/a> that reading comprehension is better when students read printed texts instead of online materials, Jacob said. Students also struggle with writing and spelling because all their school work is done on computers equipped with programs that correct spelling and grammar, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“School officials and researchers really need to look at that carefully and determine how much time students are spending on devices, and how is that going?” Jacob said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some California teachers try to limit their students’ screen time and require them to spend more time reading text, writing with pencil and paper and collaborating with their classmates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Diego special education teacher Carly Bresee says the use of technology by students outside the classroom has also increased, prompting her to use less technology in class than before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that general ed teachers are kind of facing that question,” Bresee said. “How much computer use is healthy and positive for the students? They are having difficulty with that balance, knowing what the best formula is for learning.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Back to classroom carts at some schools\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>School officials at James Lick Middle School have decided to go back to classroom computer carts because the school, in financially strapped San Francisco Unified, could no longer afford to maintain and replace student computers that are broken, lost or outdated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kids have broken them on purpose,” said Keith Carames, who teaches theater arts and English at the school. “Kids have lost them. Kids have dropped them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That move away from technology is a big disappointment to Carames, who became a convert after spending three months learning how to use Zoom, Google Classroom and other online education programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I saw the light,” Carames said. “I can edit stuff online with them (the students). I can post videos. I have resources that are accessible. If they are absent, they can get work. There are letters that you can send to the family and newsletters and interactive things. It changed my practice as an educator. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carames calls the transition back to paper and pen “a nightmare.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some kids who don’t even know how to spell their own first name,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Changing views on school attendance\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The biggest change for Elk Grove’s Shadbourne since COVID is the perception among some students and parents that attending school is optional. Students go on vacation during the school year or decide to work from home on a given day because they think they can get assignments on Google Classroom and email them to the teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And the social benefits of school, and the problem-solving that we do as a group, and the common culture we hope to create, it’s hard to do that when people are gone,” Shadbourne said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The impact of absences is amplified in special education, where a student might make progress one day, miss a day of school, and lose that progress, Bresee said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Students need social-emotional support\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since schools reopened in 2020, California teachers have been spending more time greeting their students at the door, sending them notes and planning activities that encourage communication and help build relationships. Making these connections helps students develop social-emotional skills and encourages them to come to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In special education, we saw a huge increase in maladaptive behaviors, and that was really difficult both for the students, the support staff and for teachers,” said Bresee, a TK–1 special education teacher at Perkins K-8 School. “… It was hard to maintain a regular routine because it felt like we were more frequently in crisis mode.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students, especially younger ones, had to learn how to play and communicate effectively with others. That meant more time was set aside for adult-facilitated playtime than before the pandemic, Bresee said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It became, in my eyes, an even more important part of the day, right up there with our literacy and math lessons,” Breese said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effort seems to be paying off. This year, student behavior has improved, and the class routine is back on track, according to Bresee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Social-emotional support and building connections between students and their teachers and classmates are equally important for older students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cedeno greets her Spanish students at the door every day and then spends roughly seven minutes at the beginning of each class asking questions to draw students into conversations meant to help them connect with her and their classmates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cuál es tu color favorito (What is your favorite color)?” she asks one day. “Cuál es tu dulce favorito (What is your favorite candy)?” she asks on another day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cedeno also invites students to have lunch in her classroom if they need a safe space to relax and a microwave to heat their food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are trying to rebuild this step by step,” Cedeno said. “We are not there yet. But I think we are going to get there if we put in a lot of effort, a lot of compassion and empathy, because these kids, they need this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2025/how-covid-changed-teaching-fewer-pencils-more-technology/729158\">\u003cem>This story originally appeared in EdSource.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "billionaire-influence-deepens-divisions-among-san-francisco-democrats",
"title": "Billionaire Influence Deepens Divisions Among San Francisco Democrats",
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"headTitle": "Billionaire Influence Deepens Divisions Among San Francisco Democrats | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Silicon Valley billionaires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12017551/is-san-francisco-a-bellwether-for-cryptocurrency-influence-on-local-elections\">poured millions of dollars\u003c/a> into San Francisco elections in November to increase policing, consolidate mayoral power and shift the city to the center politically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bets paid off — for some.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/daniel-lurie\">Mayor Daniel Lurie\u003c/a> tapped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, cryptocurrency CEO Chris Larsen and other business leaders to help lure major companies and their employees back to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The move is a boon for private sector leaders, who now have a direct line to City Hall, and comes as San Francisco’s economy struggles to rebound from the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, several billionaires shaping San Francisco are also working with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/donald-trump\">President Donald Trump\u003c/a>. The money flowing into local politics has deepened fractures among San Francisco Democratic leaders, mirroring the national Democratic Party’s struggle to unite behind a single strategy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Francisco should be leading the resistance and opposition to Donald Trump, but we’re seeing how big money in San Francisco has kind of neutered the city. It has neutralized us on issues,” said Peter Gallotta, a member of San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee. “We’re struggling now with an identity crisis of ‘who are we?’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12030646\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12030646\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaks at the opening of the new OpenAI headquarters in Mission Bay in San Francisco on March 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The identity crisis was palpable shortly after Trump’s inauguration when Gallotta proposed a \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/143yCoEPWOXYbmCVtUrH7K2GSLncG_ebm/view\">resolution condemning tech titans\u003c/a> who supported Democrats in San Francisco while cozying up to Republicans in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gallotta, a DCCC member since 2017, sought to spotlight figures like Larsen, who contributed more than $1 million to moderate Democratic candidates in San Francisco’s November election, campaign finance records show. Ripple, the cryptocurrency company Larsen co-founded and chairs, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting Lurie for mayor and $5.1 million to Trump’s campaign. Venture capitalist William Oberndorf, co-founder of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a moderate organizing group, spent over $1 million on San Francisco elections in 2024, primarily backing mayoral candidate Mark Farrell. Oberndorf also contributed $100,000 to Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, according to Federal Election Commission data.[aside postID=news_12023569 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240108-LurieInaugurationDay-34_qed-1020x680.jpg']Altman, who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12014714/san-francisco-mayor-elect-daniel-lurie-taps-openai-founder-transition-team\">a key advisor\u003c/a> on Lurie’s City Hall transition team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Democrats really need to point to how this money is already influencing the policies of the Trump administration, and also just how big money continues to influence our political system here in California and in San Francisco,” Gallotta, one of the remaining progressives on the DCCC after moderates took over the majority in 2024, told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gallotta’s resolution passed, but several members pushed back against language that called out leaders in tech, one of the city’s biggest industries for tax revenue. Nancy Tung, chair of the DCCC, voted against the resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it was an indictment on the amount of money that gets spent in our political elections in San Francisco, then it was really one-sided,” Tung told KQED, pointing to money spent by organized labor on local races.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Silicon Valley’s spending power often outweighs that of organized labor, said Jane Kim, a member of the DCCC and director of the California Working Families Party.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Billionaire wealth will vastly outpower labor’s ability to give,” she said. “What we see is an unfortunate imbalance of who gets influence in government today.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11656798\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11656798\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim at a mayoral debate on March 19, 2018. Kim is a member of the DCCC and director of the California Working Families Party. \u003ccite>(Samantha Shanahan/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Others wanted to dilute Galotta’s resolution to rebuke Trump rather than his donors who are influencing San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we need to perpetuate is a united voice opposing Donald Trump, not having the same old tired fights,” DCCC member Trevor Chandler said during January’s meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DCCC later voted to create a \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PuX1yWyVLI10gegryZPmnNZ_kzd6DN13/view\">separate resolution\u003c/a> based on Chandler’s proposal to denounce Trump’s agenda targeting the city’s sanctuary status, transgender rights and other issues. It passed in February after additional infighting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The resistance against Trump this time around is really going to be in the courts again,” Tung said. “I understand that people are very frustrated, and they want to be demonstrating in the streets, but it’s exhausting to do that.”[aside postID=news_12017551 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GettyImages-2162428471-1020x680.jpg']Democrats in Washington are struggling to find a strategy for countering Trump. Their disagreements came to a head this month when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was one of 10 Democrats to vote for a Republican spending bill aimed at delaying a government shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told reporters in a dig at Schumer after the bill passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As representatives in Washington splinter over government funding, San Francisco faces its own nearly $1 billion budget deficit. Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor, compared agitation among San Francisco Democrats to intraparty fights at the national level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We see a lot of the same advisors and donors for both Lurie’s administration and the Trump administration, and the fact that he hasn’t spoken for that is disappointing,” Kim said. “Clearly, they’re very different in terms of the goals that they have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But they have a similar approach to government — that you don’t need any government experience in order to lead and that hiring the wealthiest people with private sector experience is going to fix the government.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lurie, who had no prior elected experience before becoming mayor, broke the city’s record for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12013464/daniel-lurie-clinches-victory-become-sfs-next-mayor-unseating-london-breed\">most expensive mayoral campaign in history\u003c/a>, the majority coming from his own wealth as an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12020970\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12020970\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Audience members attend Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s inauguration ceremony at Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gina Castro/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Since taking office, Lurie has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12015128/sfs-next-mayor-wants-city-lean-into-ai-stay-out-regulating\">boosted the city as an artificial intelligence hub\u003c/a>. Accompanied by a live pianist, Lurie recently promised tech workers at the new Mission Bay headquarters of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and maker of ChatGPT, that San Francisco’s reputation as the tech capital of the world would soon rise again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OpenAI is leading our city’s latest tech resurgence,” he said. “My administration will ensure that our city is a place where companies can succeed and a place where your employees are proud to live.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lurie has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023569/lurie-tiptoes-around-trump-as-sf-leaders-challenge-executive-orders\">remained quiet on Trump\u003c/a> and his relationship with Altman, Elon Musk, David Sachs and other Silicon Valley billionaires. Instead, City Attorney David Chiu and city supervisors have led resistance to Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants and public funding as \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-democrats-constituents-resistance-20207038.php\">Bay Area residents\u003c/a> increasingly demand Democratic representatives in Washington press harder against executive orders from the White House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Daniel Lurie is the poster child of our politics becoming an oligarchy. But he didn’t pass Citizens United — he exploited it. And we need to give him a chance,” said political consultant Eric Jaye, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in \u003cem>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission\u003c/em>, which allowed wealthy people and corporations to spend unlimited money on elections. “This country has been sliding away from a vigorous democracy. You can buy elections now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without campaign finance reform, private interests will continue to wield and consolidate power locally and nationally, Jaye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The richest people in the world want to control the San Francisco government, and they are spending virtually unlimited amounts of money in an attempt to do so,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Silicon Valley billionaires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12017551/is-san-francisco-a-bellwether-for-cryptocurrency-influence-on-local-elections\">poured millions of dollars\u003c/a> into San Francisco elections in November to increase policing, consolidate mayoral power and shift the city to the center politically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bets paid off — for some.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/daniel-lurie\">Mayor Daniel Lurie\u003c/a> tapped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, cryptocurrency CEO Chris Larsen and other business leaders to help lure major companies and their employees back to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The move is a boon for private sector leaders, who now have a direct line to City Hall, and comes as San Francisco’s economy struggles to rebound from the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, several billionaires shaping San Francisco are also working with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/donald-trump\">President Donald Trump\u003c/a>. The money flowing into local politics has deepened fractures among San Francisco Democratic leaders, mirroring the national Democratic Party’s struggle to unite behind a single strategy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Francisco should be leading the resistance and opposition to Donald Trump, but we’re seeing how big money in San Francisco has kind of neutered the city. It has neutralized us on issues,” said Peter Gallotta, a member of San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee. “We’re struggling now with an identity crisis of ‘who are we?’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12030646\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12030646\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250310-TRUMP-SF-MD-06-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaks at the opening of the new OpenAI headquarters in Mission Bay in San Francisco on March 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The identity crisis was palpable shortly after Trump’s inauguration when Gallotta proposed a \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/143yCoEPWOXYbmCVtUrH7K2GSLncG_ebm/view\">resolution condemning tech titans\u003c/a> who supported Democrats in San Francisco while cozying up to Republicans in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gallotta, a DCCC member since 2017, sought to spotlight figures like Larsen, who contributed more than $1 million to moderate Democratic candidates in San Francisco’s November election, campaign finance records show. Ripple, the cryptocurrency company Larsen co-founded and chairs, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting Lurie for mayor and $5.1 million to Trump’s campaign. Venture capitalist William Oberndorf, co-founder of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a moderate organizing group, spent over $1 million on San Francisco elections in 2024, primarily backing mayoral candidate Mark Farrell. Oberndorf also contributed $100,000 to Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, according to Federal Election Commission data.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Altman, who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12014714/san-francisco-mayor-elect-daniel-lurie-taps-openai-founder-transition-team\">a key advisor\u003c/a> on Lurie’s City Hall transition team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Democrats really need to point to how this money is already influencing the policies of the Trump administration, and also just how big money continues to influence our political system here in California and in San Francisco,” Gallotta, one of the remaining progressives on the DCCC after moderates took over the majority in 2024, told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gallotta’s resolution passed, but several members pushed back against language that called out leaders in tech, one of the city’s biggest industries for tax revenue. Nancy Tung, chair of the DCCC, voted against the resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it was an indictment on the amount of money that gets spent in our political elections in San Francisco, then it was really one-sided,” Tung told KQED, pointing to money spent by organized labor on local races.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Silicon Valley’s spending power often outweighs that of organized labor, said Jane Kim, a member of the DCCC and director of the California Working Families Party.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Billionaire wealth will vastly outpower labor’s ability to give,” she said. “What we see is an unfortunate imbalance of who gets influence in government today.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11656798\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11656798\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/03/kim-20180319-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim at a mayoral debate on March 19, 2018. Kim is a member of the DCCC and director of the California Working Families Party. \u003ccite>(Samantha Shanahan/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Others wanted to dilute Galotta’s resolution to rebuke Trump rather than his donors who are influencing San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we need to perpetuate is a united voice opposing Donald Trump, not having the same old tired fights,” DCCC member Trevor Chandler said during January’s meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DCCC later voted to create a \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PuX1yWyVLI10gegryZPmnNZ_kzd6DN13/view\">separate resolution\u003c/a> based on Chandler’s proposal to denounce Trump’s agenda targeting the city’s sanctuary status, transgender rights and other issues. It passed in February after additional infighting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The resistance against Trump this time around is really going to be in the courts again,” Tung said. “I understand that people are very frustrated, and they want to be demonstrating in the streets, but it’s exhausting to do that.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Democrats in Washington are struggling to find a strategy for countering Trump. Their disagreements came to a head this month when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was one of 10 Democrats to vote for a Republican spending bill aimed at delaying a government shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told reporters in a dig at Schumer after the bill passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As representatives in Washington splinter over government funding, San Francisco faces its own nearly $1 billion budget deficit. Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor, compared agitation among San Francisco Democrats to intraparty fights at the national level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We see a lot of the same advisors and donors for both Lurie’s administration and the Trump administration, and the fact that he hasn’t spoken for that is disappointing,” Kim said. “Clearly, they’re very different in terms of the goals that they have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But they have a similar approach to government — that you don’t need any government experience in order to lead and that hiring the wealthiest people with private sector experience is going to fix the government.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lurie, who had no prior elected experience before becoming mayor, broke the city’s record for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12013464/daniel-lurie-clinches-victory-become-sfs-next-mayor-unseating-london-breed\">most expensive mayoral campaign in history\u003c/a>, the majority coming from his own wealth as an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12020970\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12020970\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/20250108_LurieInauguration_GC-13-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Audience members attend Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s inauguration ceremony at Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gina Castro/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Since taking office, Lurie has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12015128/sfs-next-mayor-wants-city-lean-into-ai-stay-out-regulating\">boosted the city as an artificial intelligence hub\u003c/a>. Accompanied by a live pianist, Lurie recently promised tech workers at the new Mission Bay headquarters of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and maker of ChatGPT, that San Francisco’s reputation as the tech capital of the world would soon rise again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OpenAI is leading our city’s latest tech resurgence,” he said. “My administration will ensure that our city is a place where companies can succeed and a place where your employees are proud to live.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lurie has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023569/lurie-tiptoes-around-trump-as-sf-leaders-challenge-executive-orders\">remained quiet on Trump\u003c/a> and his relationship with Altman, Elon Musk, David Sachs and other Silicon Valley billionaires. Instead, City Attorney David Chiu and city supervisors have led resistance to Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants and public funding as \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-democrats-constituents-resistance-20207038.php\">Bay Area residents\u003c/a> increasingly demand Democratic representatives in Washington press harder against executive orders from the White House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Daniel Lurie is the poster child of our politics becoming an oligarchy. But he didn’t pass Citizens United — he exploited it. And we need to give him a chance,” said political consultant Eric Jaye, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in \u003cem>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission\u003c/em>, which allowed wealthy people and corporations to spend unlimited money on elections. “This country has been sliding away from a vigorous democracy. You can buy elections now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without campaign finance reform, private interests will continue to wield and consolidate power locally and nationally, Jaye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The richest people in the world want to control the San Francisco government, and they are spending virtually unlimited amounts of money in an attempt to do so,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "the-broligarchy-pt-1-chronicles-of-the-paypal-mafia",
"title": "The Broligarchy Pt 1: Chronicles of the PayPal Mafia",
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"content": "\u003cp>The term “broligarchy” refers to the Silicon Valley elite tech leaders who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth, power, and now, political control over the last quarter century. In the first of a two-part series, Morgan dives deep into one highly influential subset of this “broligarchy,” the so-called PayPal Mafia. Joined by The Guardian reporter Chris McGreal, we explore this group’s rise to political prominence, and look at some of its members’ roots in an oppressive political regime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4594835433\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/profile/chrismcgreal\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris McGreal\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Reporter for \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Guardian\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Chris McGreal, \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/trump-musk-south-africa-afriforum\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘White supremacists in suits and ties’: the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump’s ear”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Chris McGreal, \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/5/is-south-africa-confiscating-land-targeting-some-groups-as-trump-claims\">“Is South Africa ‘confiscating land’, targeting some groups as Trump claims?”\u003c/a> — Qaanitah Hunter, \u003cem>Al Jazeera\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003c/h2>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guys, I think we need to talk about the broligarchy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 1 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re seeing a rise in what I guess we’ll call the broligarchy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 2 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The broligarchs really have an explicit political agenda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 3 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How do you survive the broligarchy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You may have heard this word more and more often in the past few months as rich, well-connected tech bros gain power and influence in the current presidential administration. Think of the tech CEOs at inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, all lined up and ready to get cozy with the White House. They may be some of the most public-facing broligarchs, but there are a lot of highly influential tech dudes working behind the scenes. And today, we’re gonna look into a specific subset of these guys who are all deeply embedded or invested in the federal government. And they all seem to know each other. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So imagine a cork board with a bunch of photos on it, and I’ve got some red string in my hands. Let’s see how they’re all connected. Ready? So at the top of the board, there’s Elon Musk. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s the billionaire Tesla CEO who bought Twitter and turned it into X. He’s also leading the charge at the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, the organization slashing government agencies left and right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s connect that to this guy on the right. There’s David Sachs, venture capitalist, famed angel investor, and recently appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar. And then a little lower, there’s Ken Howery, another billionaire VC and the former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term. He’s the current pick for ambassador to Denmark. So if Trump actually tries to colonize Greenland, Ken Howery will be involved. Keeping track of those strings? Good, because here’s another one on the other side of the board, Jacob Helberg, a tech advisor married to tech investor, Keith Rabois. Jacob Helberg is a nominee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the center of all of this is Peter Thiel, the elusive billionaire, tech titan, and big time Republican donor. He’s the one who introduced JD Vance to Trump in 2021. And through his Silicon Valley connections, he brought a whole bunch of other people into the White House orbit. So what do all of the guys in this web we’ve created have in common? And how are they using their proximity to the president to shape US policy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This group’s ties to Silicon Valley are widely known, but what’s less public is that some of them have roots in an especially oppressive political regime. That’s what we’re getting into on the show today. Let’s dive in. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so let’s get back to this cork board. Musk, Sacks, Howery, Helberg, Thiel, what’s the red thread connecting all of them? Well, they were involved in PayPal during its earliest years before the company went public and made everyone very rich. Or in Jacob Helberg’s case, married to a former PayPal executive who became very rich. This group is so well connected and so influential within Silicon Valley, that they’re known by this one nickname. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 4: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the PayPal Mafia \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 5: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who are the PayPal Mafia? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 6: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The PayPal Mafia has laid the foundation for a new era of power. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me get my big red Sharpie out. Within the PayPal mafia, there’s another subset of this group that we’re gonna draw a circle around today. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But first, you know how this goes. We start with a new tab. What is the PayPal Mafia? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Countdown Announcer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Three, two, one, happy 2000! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the year 2000. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>AOL: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got mail. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">X.com, the online bank service, not the shell of Twitter, has just merged with a software company, Confinity. Elon Musk co-founded X.Com, and Peter Thiel co-founded Confinity. This merged company is rebranded as PayPal. It’s a game changer, and the company’s secure online payment system becomes a massive success. Two years later, PayPal goes public. Then, eBay buys the company for $1.5 billion, giving everyone with a stake in PayPal a pretty hefty chunk of money. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, a lot of PayPal’s co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employees leave the company very quickly after eBay’s acquisition, but they keep in touch. They stay close. And in the years following, PayPal alumni, those co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employers, they go off and start other companies — YouTube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, and so many more. They also start investing in each other’s companies, attending each others’ parties, advising each other, sitting on each others’ boards, and co-founding more companies with each other. They become super influential within Silicon Valley. If you wanted to get your foot in the door in the tech industry, you needed to get good with the PayPal mafia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The name comes from a 2007 Fortune magazine feature that literally called them the PayPal Mafia in the headline. The cover photo features 13 of them, all men, of course, cosplaying as seedy New Jersey mobsters. They’re dressed in track suits, leather jackets, or big boxy sports coats with the shoulder pads. They’ve got the chunky gold chains, of course, and their hair is slicked back, and they’re surrounded by poker chips and glasses of whiskey. A few of them are puffing on cigars. It’s a scene straight out of \u003cem>The Sopranos\u003c/em>. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tony Soprano: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a stereotype, and it’s offensive. There is no mafia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, this photo shoot might be considered an offensive caricature of Italian-American gangsters, but it’s 2007. It was a direct reference to the biggest show on TV at the time. And the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, front and center of the photo shoot is Peter Thiel. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After PayPal, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, a big data company that has major contracts with the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies. And then he co-founded Founders Fund, this massive venture capital fund that was a super early investor in SpaceX and Facebook. He’s known as the godfather because he’s so well connected within both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. And because he’s used his network to invest in companies and in people. Remember, he’s the one who put JD Vance on the map. He funded Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign and then orchestrated his first meeting with Trump. Thiel has been such a prominent figure within the tech industry that there’s a whole character, Peter Gregory, based off of him in the HBO show, Silicon Valley. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Richard Hendricks: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that is before I just give up and go back to college. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Gregory: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do not do that. Go work at Burger King. Go into the woods and forage for nuts and berries. Do not go back to college. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, Thiel’s actual beliefs are all over the place. Like his TV counterpart, he has said that university education holds back innovation. In the ’90s, he and David Sacks co-authored a book about how multiculturalism and political correctness were ruining academia. And he’s also been really into building offshore, independent, libertarian islands where tech innovation can happen outside of any government oversight. But he’s got influence and some of his ideology seems to be spreading among the power players of the tech industry. Politically speaking, he’s endorsed and funded Republican candidates since the early 2000s and has been described as techno-libertarian, but his comments and writing veer toward what a lot of critics say is just fascist. His biographer, Max Chafkin, said that Thiel is, quote, “hostile to the idea of democracy.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyway, Thiel has been one of Trump’s earliest political supporters. He backed Trump in 2016, and although he declined to fund the 2024 campaign, he also hosted an inauguration party back in January with a ton of Silicon Valley insiders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many other members of the PayPal mafia up on my corkboard either haven’t been visibly involved in politics or have supported Democrats. Reid Hoffman, who was PayPal’s chief operating officer before he co-founded LinkedIn, was a major Democratic donor in 2024. And Elon Musk and David Sacks both endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But today, Musk and Sacks are both known to be very conservative, bordering on extremist. They’re also core members of the PayPal Mafia in this red circle we’ve drawn. But why are these three guys grouped together like this? There’s a lesser-known commonality linking them together. They have roots in apartheid-era South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that’s a new tab. PayPal Mafia and apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a speech on President Trump’s second inauguration day, Elon Musk did a gesture that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Elon Musk: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you. My heart goes out to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then he turned around and did it again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Elon Musk: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is what victory feels like. Yeah!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was that Inauguration Day incident that piqued journalist Chris McGreal’s curiosity about Elon Musk and his upbringing. It turns out that Musk, along with several other members of the PayPal mafia, spent at least some of their formative years in South Africa, a place Chris knew well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">South Africa’s apartheid system had, you know, roots, close links to fascism in Europe. So people started to ask, well, is there a connection? And that’s what we went to look at. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Chris has been a foreign correspondent for \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em> for decades, covering Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. And a little over 30 years ago, he was actually based in Johannesburg, covering the last years of South African apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So apartheid was a system that essentially came to being in 1948. There’d always been racial discrimination, but the system that’s introduced in 1948 is a very rigid system of segregation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Under the system, all South Africans were registered and assigned to one of four racial groups — white, Asian, Native, which meant Black, or Colored, which lumped everyone who was mixed race into one group. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were only allowed to marry or have sex with people of their same race. And they introduced legislation. It was called job reservation, which meant that the best jobs and the best land and the best everything were reserved for white people. This was a very rigid system of segregation that went far beyond what had existed, say, in the southern United States. And in some ways, it had its roots in fascism in 1930s Europe. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, the Prime Minister of South Africa was a man named John Vorster. In the 1930s, Vorster had been part of a South African fascist militia that was wildly anti-Semitic and openly pro-Nazi. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Vorster famously said that the system that they were promoting in South Africa was called Christian nationalism. And he said, in Germany, they call it Nazism, in Italy, they called it fascism. We call it Christian nationalism, but it’s essentially all the same thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that sets the stage for the kind of political environment that these core members of the PayPal mafia grew up in. Let’s take a closer look. There’s David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he was born in Cape Town, but at a relatively young age, five years old, I think, his family moves to Tennessee where he grows up. So he’s less directly affected by apartheid on the frontline at the coalface of apartheid. But you know he grew up in a white diaspora, white South African diaspora family, and remained very closely tied to South Africa. So you would have had those influences, but they wouldn’t have been quite so direct. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then Peter Thiel, PayPal Mafia godfather and kingmaker of Silicon Valley. And Chris noted that the area where Thiel spent his adolescence was openly supportive of the Nazis. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Thiel’s father was in the mining business. They initially moved to Johannesburg. The white population was mostly of German descent. And even in the 1970s and ’80s, there was still open support for the Nazis. They still celebrated Hitler’s birthday every May. You could go into gift shops and buy swastika flags. I found a \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> article from 1975 where the reporter describes driving into a gas station and being met by an attendant who gives a Nazi salute and says Hitler died. That’s in the ’70s when Thiel’s at school in that city. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And lastly, Elon Musk. We know who he is by now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk’s father was a mine owner. He grew up in incredible wealth, even by the standards of white South Africa, which would have meant that he was surrounded by black servants and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted for anything that he needed. Musk, again, is perhaps the most interesting case. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris says that because Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was actually deeply involved in a movement in Canada called Technocracy Incorporated. They pushed for abolishing democracy in favor of letting technical and scientific experts run the government. Under Haldeman’s leadership, the organization became increasingly fascist. And during World War II, the Canadian government banned the organization and arrested Haldemen for his opposition to the country’s fight against Hitler. Yes, you heard that correctly. Haldeman opposed the country’s fight against Hitler. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We get apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and Joshua Haldeman likes the look of that. He thinks that that’s a … that looks like a good system. So in 1950, he moves to South Africa where he can go on essentially living the fascist dream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Haldeman, Musk’s grandfather, moves to South Africa. Not because he has any ties to the country, but because he likes the idea of apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, the grandfather dies when Musk himself is very young, but the ideas live on inside that branch of the family. And Musk’s father, Errol, has described his kind of parents-in-law as openly neo-Nazi. So one of the things you’ll notice Musk ends up going to a high school called Pretoria Boys High, which under South Africa’s laws is racially segregated. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the complications of South Africa is that the white population isn’t homogenous. You’ve got the Afrikaners and they’re the people who were descended from the Dutch, and they are the people, who essentially ran the country politically. They were the people behind the National Party and apartheid. The other half of the population, white population, was English speakers, descendants of British colonists. These two white groups are actually in conflict quite a lot. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretoria of Boys High was mostly English speakers. So inside that school, there were actually quite a lot of people who were resistant to apartheid and the Afrikaners and the National Party. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those classmates who went on to resist apartheid include Edwin Cameron, who became a Supreme Court Justice under the post-apartheid system, and Peter Hain, who led the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So those kinds of people were in that school with Musk. But we don’t see any evidence, or we’ve never heard any evidence that he took a stand on apartheid. One of the things you can safely say about South Africa at that time, it’s no matter what your background and education, if you were white, you were growing up in immense privilege, surrounded by people who were treated as second, third and fourth class citizens compared to you by law. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the end, you still imbue some of that system, some of the racism, some with that privilege, even if you don’t recognize it at the time. I think that that’s probably true of Musk in particular. Perhaps some of the other men we’ve talked about less because they left South Africa at a younger age, but it’s hard to imagine that Musk wasn’t influenced by that in this way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like Chris said, others who grew up in the same environment, in the same place of privilege during apartheid, actually went on to espouse very different ideas and actively work against racism. So there isn’t always a direct line between someone’s upbringing and their politics as an adult. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, there are some connections here between these men’s backgrounds, their current anti-DEI stances, and the policies that they’re trying to influence both in the U.S. and abroad. And President Trump seems to be on that same wavelength, especially around U.S. policy toward South Africa. But that is a new tab after a quick break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we just learned about how some core members of the PayPal mafia were all born in South Africa during this horrifically oppressive time called apartheid. So what does all this have to do with Trump’s fixation on South Africa? And that is a new tab. Trump, South Africa, and Elon Musk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 7: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s an escalating dispute between President Trump and South Africa over a new land policy that he says discriminates against the country’s white minority. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since getting back into the Oval Office, Trump has been paying a lot of attention to South Africa. First, he signed an executive order stopping all aid to South African and offering refugee status to white South Africans. And then he’s been posting about it over and over again on Truth Social, the right-leaning Twitter clone that he owns. So what’s this all about? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s about several things. One has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is that South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice over what has been described as the genocide in Gaza. And there are a lot of people who have been very angered in the U.S. and in Washington by that and have been pressing Trump to punish South Africa for that. So that’s one part of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But a second part is, what’s happening in South Africa fits the narrative that you hear on the right in this country, particularly amongst white supremacists, about white genocide, about the Great Replacement Theory, all of those things which suggest that the white population of the United States and the white populations around the world is somehow under some kind threat from other races. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 8: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We begin with the latest on U.S.-South African tensions. Pretoria has pushed back as it continues to face strong allegations of racism from U. S. President Donald Trump and his South African-born ally Elon Musk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can see Trump first become aware of it in 2018, during his first presidency, when a group of Afrikaners who run an organization called AfriForum, and they’re pressing the idea that in South Africa, white farmers are being murdered for their land. What they’re portraying is that South Africa in the years after apartheid has essentially become a new kind of racist country, that now it’s black people persecuting white and instead of white people persecuting black people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This, of course, fits very much with a lot of the kind of stuff we hear from Trump and the people around him. And so it paints whites as victims. But AfriForum turned up in America in 2018, pushing this idea that there was this essentially white genocide going on. One of their number appears on Tucker Carlson on Fox News and starts talking about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tucker Carlson \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>AfriForum Member \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Trump is watching and Trump tweets to his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 3 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a late night tweet, Trump said he’d asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South Africa’s land and farm seizures in addition to expropriations and large-scale killing of farmers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Trump comes back to power in January, it happens to coincide with a new law in South Africa, which is about redistribution of land. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 9 \u003c/b>F\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">rustration over the slow pace of land reform in South Africa has been mounting and the new expropriation act aims to accelerate the redistribution of land in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Seventy percent of the land in South Africa, the agricultural land, is still in the hands of white people who only account for 7% of population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Remember, during apartheid, black South Africans were subjected to extremely rigid segregation. The 1913 Natives Land Act designated the majority of South Africa as white and forbade the black indigenous population from owning land beyond a tiny amount that was set aside in special reserves. Black South Africans who were already living in those white areas were evicted en masse and had to relocate to poor townships or work as farm laborers. Either way, they were forced into poverty. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Expropriation Act, signed into South African law this year, sets up a legal framework to redistribute land and address ownership imbalance within the country. The government isn’t just seizing land left and right. There’s a whole process involved that also includes paying landowners a fair price. A lot of the backlash to the new law is over one clause that allows the South African government to take land without compensation, but only in very specific circumstances. Like if the land was abandoned or if the owner isn’t actually using it and is just holding onto it until the property value goes up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was leapt on by the white right as evidence of essentially a new form of racism that white people were going to lose their land, including Musk. Musk for a while had been pressing the idea that affirmative action laws, that black empowerment laws in South Africa, were somehow a new formal apartheid. The idea of uplifting people who had been persecuted and discriminated against was actually a new form of apartheid. He was trying to turn the system on its head and say that whites are now the victims, which is plainly not the case. They remain economically dominant in South Africa and very much in a place of privilege. But that was the line that Musk was pushing. And it’s clear that Trump has been steered towards a direct confrontation with South Africa. I doubt he would have paid much attention on his own. I doubt he’s got into office this time and suddenly thought, I must go and deal with the South Africa situation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 9: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now in a social media post directly offering South African farmers and their families safe refuge in the U.S. and an expedited pathway to citizenship, erroneously stating that their land and farms were being confiscated. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there’s another link here between Trump’s renewed crusade against South African reparations for black citizens, the actual victims of apartheid, and Musk’s business interests. Specifically, his satellite internet service company, Starlink. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk has been in dispute with South Africa and government over affirmative action, over black empowerment for a couple of years now, and it seems to be rooted in part in his desire to get Starlink into South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Under South Africa’s Black empowerment initiatives, the country mandates that foreign investors in the telecoms industry have to have at least 30% black ownership in any local operations. Musk has been pushing back on this requirement, claiming that he’s standing up for white people against discrimination. And he has AfriForum lobbying on his behalf within South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think essentially what we’re seeing here, at least in part, because there are other forces of work at this as well, but in terms of Musk’s thing, I think, you know, he’s trying to pile on the pressure and Trump’s executive order is part of this on South Africa to back down on affirmative action laws on Black empowerment requirements for his businesses. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk has been on a similar crusade here in the U.S. He’s been openly critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and has said that DEI is just another word for racism. And although he isn’t technically a federal employee, he has been the public face of DOGE, which has slashed DEI programs and gutted federal agencies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In just a few months, they’ve canceled millions of dollars of federal grants for affordable housing programs, health research in marginalized communities, and education programs to help low-income students. DOGE also fired all employees in DEI positions who are disproportionately black, indigenous, or people of color. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Big picture here. I mean, the situation with Elon Musk in South Africa is just one example of how an unelected billionaire can sway policy. How else can you see this group of technocrats, as you said, how else do you see them influence U.S. politics going forward? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I think, you know, what we should look at very closely is they want to strip back regulation. They want to step back accountability. They essentially want a totally free market in which they can do what they want. And I think that’s actually where the real influence will lie. Now, as we know, in American politics, since the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, money talks a lot and they’ve got money. So I would imagine that they will be ensuring that the people who get elected to Congress are people sympathetic to that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’ve been looking at the PayPal mafia in South Africa, but let’s zoom out a bit and open one last tab. The rise of the broligarchy. Now, the PayPal mafia is not the only tech power group to exist. The broligarchy — and the power that they have — runs deep within American politics beyond the tech industry. Just look at the Citizens United ruling that Chris pointed out. This 2010 Supreme Court case redefined American elections by overhauling campaign finance laws. It struck down the limit on how much a corporation can directly spend on a political campaign, and set the stage for the creation of super PACs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This ruling is what allowed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican turned Democrat, to donate nearly $100 million to various super PACS funding the 2024 Democratic presidential campaign. It’s also directly linked to Elon Musk launching his own super PAC and spending over a quarter of a billion dollars funding Donald Trump’s campaign. The concept of the American oligarchy is not new. It’s just that now the tech bros are at the forefront. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We kind of get hung up on these guys because they’re obviously of the moment, and that’s important. But, you know, it’s worth looking at what’s been happening in the United States over the past 40 years. And it’s an oligarchy that has been developing. I mean, we’ve seen some very powerful interests in this country essentially taking control of politics, and I think these guys have moved to the fore over recent years because of the role that technology has come to play, and then they may be pushing it in new directions. But, you know, it’s not like they are the original oligarchs in this country; these are guys who’ve emerged at the most kind of fundamental time with Trump in power. They are, in many ways, you know, like oligarchs everywhere, right? They’re serving their own interests and they are hijacking politics to do it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve been living at the whims of billionaires throughout American history. It’s just that in the past it wasn’t as obvious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve seen the results of 40 years of deregulation, 40 years of being told that government is bad and big business is good. I mean, it’s clear in the United States that people’s lives are, you know, really quite directly controlled in lots of ways by corporations. American lives have been greatly influenced by this kind of control. The difference I think with, as you say, the broligarchy is that they’re more visible. They’re hungry. In the past, they’ve been hungry for money, and I think now they’re hungry for power. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s not just that the PayPal mafia and other members of the broligarchy are rich and powerful. A lot of them have also expressed some pretty fascist white supremacist views. So what does it mean for democracy if this group of broligarchs has this much power? Is there any historic precedent for this dystopia that we’re currently living through? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, that is a separate deep dive. So you’ll have to come back next week when we dig further into the broligarchy. We’re gonna figure out if the rumors are true. Are we really slouching toward techno-fascism? Or are we already in it? And what does techno-fascism even mean? For now, let’s close these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 Wired Mechanical Keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs at kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The term “broligarchy” refers to the Silicon Valley elite tech leaders who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth, power, and now, political control over the last quarter century. In the first of a two-part series, Morgan dives deep into one highly influential subset of this “broligarchy,” the so-called PayPal Mafia. Joined by The Guardian reporter Chris McGreal, we explore this group’s rise to political prominence, and look at some of its members’ roots in an oppressive political regime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4594835433\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/profile/chrismcgreal\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris McGreal\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Reporter for \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Guardian\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Chris McGreal, \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/trump-musk-south-africa-afriforum\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“‘White supremacists in suits and ties’: the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump’s ear”\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Chris McGreal, \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/5/is-south-africa-confiscating-land-targeting-some-groups-as-trump-claims\">“Is South Africa ‘confiscating land’, targeting some groups as Trump claims?”\u003c/a> — Qaanitah Hunter, \u003cem>Al Jazeera\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guys, I think we need to talk about the broligarchy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 1 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re seeing a rise in what I guess we’ll call the broligarchy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 2 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The broligarchs really have an explicit political agenda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 3 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How do you survive the broligarchy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You may have heard this word more and more often in the past few months as rich, well-connected tech bros gain power and influence in the current presidential administration. Think of the tech CEOs at inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, all lined up and ready to get cozy with the White House. They may be some of the most public-facing broligarchs, but there are a lot of highly influential tech dudes working behind the scenes. And today, we’re gonna look into a specific subset of these guys who are all deeply embedded or invested in the federal government. And they all seem to know each other. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So imagine a cork board with a bunch of photos on it, and I’ve got some red string in my hands. Let’s see how they’re all connected. Ready? So at the top of the board, there’s Elon Musk. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s the billionaire Tesla CEO who bought Twitter and turned it into X. He’s also leading the charge at the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, the organization slashing government agencies left and right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s connect that to this guy on the right. There’s David Sachs, venture capitalist, famed angel investor, and recently appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar. And then a little lower, there’s Ken Howery, another billionaire VC and the former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term. He’s the current pick for ambassador to Denmark. So if Trump actually tries to colonize Greenland, Ken Howery will be involved. Keeping track of those strings? Good, because here’s another one on the other side of the board, Jacob Helberg, a tech advisor married to tech investor, Keith Rabois. Jacob Helberg is a nominee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the center of all of this is Peter Thiel, the elusive billionaire, tech titan, and big time Republican donor. He’s the one who introduced JD Vance to Trump in 2021. And through his Silicon Valley connections, he brought a whole bunch of other people into the White House orbit. So what do all of the guys in this web we’ve created have in common? And how are they using their proximity to the president to shape US policy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This group’s ties to Silicon Valley are widely known, but what’s less public is that some of them have roots in an especially oppressive political regime. That’s what we’re getting into on the show today. Let’s dive in. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so let’s get back to this cork board. Musk, Sacks, Howery, Helberg, Thiel, what’s the red thread connecting all of them? Well, they were involved in PayPal during its earliest years before the company went public and made everyone very rich. Or in Jacob Helberg’s case, married to a former PayPal executive who became very rich. This group is so well connected and so influential within Silicon Valley, that they’re known by this one nickname. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 4: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the PayPal Mafia \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 5: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who are the PayPal Mafia? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 6: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The PayPal Mafia has laid the foundation for a new era of power. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me get my big red Sharpie out. Within the PayPal mafia, there’s another subset of this group that we’re gonna draw a circle around today. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But first, you know how this goes. We start with a new tab. What is the PayPal Mafia? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Countdown Announcer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Three, two, one, happy 2000! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the year 2000. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>AOL: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got mail. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">X.com, the online bank service, not the shell of Twitter, has just merged with a software company, Confinity. Elon Musk co-founded X.Com, and Peter Thiel co-founded Confinity. This merged company is rebranded as PayPal. It’s a game changer, and the company’s secure online payment system becomes a massive success. Two years later, PayPal goes public. Then, eBay buys the company for $1.5 billion, giving everyone with a stake in PayPal a pretty hefty chunk of money. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, a lot of PayPal’s co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employees leave the company very quickly after eBay’s acquisition, but they keep in touch. They stay close. And in the years following, PayPal alumni, those co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employers, they go off and start other companies — YouTube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, and so many more. They also start investing in each other’s companies, attending each others’ parties, advising each other, sitting on each others’ boards, and co-founding more companies with each other. They become super influential within Silicon Valley. If you wanted to get your foot in the door in the tech industry, you needed to get good with the PayPal mafia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The name comes from a 2007 Fortune magazine feature that literally called them the PayPal Mafia in the headline. The cover photo features 13 of them, all men, of course, cosplaying as seedy New Jersey mobsters. They’re dressed in track suits, leather jackets, or big boxy sports coats with the shoulder pads. They’ve got the chunky gold chains, of course, and their hair is slicked back, and they’re surrounded by poker chips and glasses of whiskey. A few of them are puffing on cigars. It’s a scene straight out of \u003cem>The Sopranos\u003c/em>. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tony Soprano: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a stereotype, and it’s offensive. There is no mafia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, this photo shoot might be considered an offensive caricature of Italian-American gangsters, but it’s 2007. It was a direct reference to the biggest show on TV at the time. And the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, front and center of the photo shoot is Peter Thiel. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After PayPal, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, a big data company that has major contracts with the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies. And then he co-founded Founders Fund, this massive venture capital fund that was a super early investor in SpaceX and Facebook. He’s known as the godfather because he’s so well connected within both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. And because he’s used his network to invest in companies and in people. Remember, he’s the one who put JD Vance on the map. He funded Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign and then orchestrated his first meeting with Trump. Thiel has been such a prominent figure within the tech industry that there’s a whole character, Peter Gregory, based off of him in the HBO show, Silicon Valley. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Richard Hendricks: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that is before I just give up and go back to college. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Gregory: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do not do that. Go work at Burger King. Go into the woods and forage for nuts and berries. Do not go back to college. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, Thiel’s actual beliefs are all over the place. Like his TV counterpart, he has said that university education holds back innovation. In the ’90s, he and David Sacks co-authored a book about how multiculturalism and political correctness were ruining academia. And he’s also been really into building offshore, independent, libertarian islands where tech innovation can happen outside of any government oversight. But he’s got influence and some of his ideology seems to be spreading among the power players of the tech industry. Politically speaking, he’s endorsed and funded Republican candidates since the early 2000s and has been described as techno-libertarian, but his comments and writing veer toward what a lot of critics say is just fascist. His biographer, Max Chafkin, said that Thiel is, quote, “hostile to the idea of democracy.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyway, Thiel has been one of Trump’s earliest political supporters. He backed Trump in 2016, and although he declined to fund the 2024 campaign, he also hosted an inauguration party back in January with a ton of Silicon Valley insiders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many other members of the PayPal mafia up on my corkboard either haven’t been visibly involved in politics or have supported Democrats. Reid Hoffman, who was PayPal’s chief operating officer before he co-founded LinkedIn, was a major Democratic donor in 2024. And Elon Musk and David Sacks both endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But today, Musk and Sacks are both known to be very conservative, bordering on extremist. They’re also core members of the PayPal Mafia in this red circle we’ve drawn. But why are these three guys grouped together like this? There’s a lesser-known commonality linking them together. They have roots in apartheid-era South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that’s a new tab. PayPal Mafia and apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a speech on President Trump’s second inauguration day, Elon Musk did a gesture that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Elon Musk: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you. My heart goes out to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then he turned around and did it again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Elon Musk: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is what victory feels like. Yeah!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was that Inauguration Day incident that piqued journalist Chris McGreal’s curiosity about Elon Musk and his upbringing. It turns out that Musk, along with several other members of the PayPal mafia, spent at least some of their formative years in South Africa, a place Chris knew well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">South Africa’s apartheid system had, you know, roots, close links to fascism in Europe. So people started to ask, well, is there a connection? And that’s what we went to look at. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Chris has been a foreign correspondent for \u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em> for decades, covering Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. And a little over 30 years ago, he was actually based in Johannesburg, covering the last years of South African apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So apartheid was a system that essentially came to being in 1948. There’d always been racial discrimination, but the system that’s introduced in 1948 is a very rigid system of segregation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Under the system, all South Africans were registered and assigned to one of four racial groups — white, Asian, Native, which meant Black, or Colored, which lumped everyone who was mixed race into one group. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were only allowed to marry or have sex with people of their same race. And they introduced legislation. It was called job reservation, which meant that the best jobs and the best land and the best everything were reserved for white people. This was a very rigid system of segregation that went far beyond what had existed, say, in the southern United States. And in some ways, it had its roots in fascism in 1930s Europe. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, the Prime Minister of South Africa was a man named John Vorster. In the 1930s, Vorster had been part of a South African fascist militia that was wildly anti-Semitic and openly pro-Nazi. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Vorster famously said that the system that they were promoting in South Africa was called Christian nationalism. And he said, in Germany, they call it Nazism, in Italy, they called it fascism. We call it Christian nationalism, but it’s essentially all the same thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that sets the stage for the kind of political environment that these core members of the PayPal mafia grew up in. Let’s take a closer look. There’s David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he was born in Cape Town, but at a relatively young age, five years old, I think, his family moves to Tennessee where he grows up. So he’s less directly affected by apartheid on the frontline at the coalface of apartheid. But you know he grew up in a white diaspora, white South African diaspora family, and remained very closely tied to South Africa. So you would have had those influences, but they wouldn’t have been quite so direct. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then Peter Thiel, PayPal Mafia godfather and kingmaker of Silicon Valley. And Chris noted that the area where Thiel spent his adolescence was openly supportive of the Nazis. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Thiel’s father was in the mining business. They initially moved to Johannesburg. The white population was mostly of German descent. And even in the 1970s and ’80s, there was still open support for the Nazis. They still celebrated Hitler’s birthday every May. You could go into gift shops and buy swastika flags. I found a \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> article from 1975 where the reporter describes driving into a gas station and being met by an attendant who gives a Nazi salute and says Hitler died. That’s in the ’70s when Thiel’s at school in that city. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And lastly, Elon Musk. We know who he is by now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk’s father was a mine owner. He grew up in incredible wealth, even by the standards of white South Africa, which would have meant that he was surrounded by black servants and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted for anything that he needed. Musk, again, is perhaps the most interesting case. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris says that because Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was actually deeply involved in a movement in Canada called Technocracy Incorporated. They pushed for abolishing democracy in favor of letting technical and scientific experts run the government. Under Haldeman’s leadership, the organization became increasingly fascist. And during World War II, the Canadian government banned the organization and arrested Haldemen for his opposition to the country’s fight against Hitler. Yes, you heard that correctly. Haldeman opposed the country’s fight against Hitler. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We get apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and Joshua Haldeman likes the look of that. He thinks that that’s a … that looks like a good system. So in 1950, he moves to South Africa where he can go on essentially living the fascist dream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Haldeman, Musk’s grandfather, moves to South Africa. Not because he has any ties to the country, but because he likes the idea of apartheid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, the grandfather dies when Musk himself is very young, but the ideas live on inside that branch of the family. And Musk’s father, Errol, has described his kind of parents-in-law as openly neo-Nazi. So one of the things you’ll notice Musk ends up going to a high school called Pretoria Boys High, which under South Africa’s laws is racially segregated. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the complications of South Africa is that the white population isn’t homogenous. You’ve got the Afrikaners and they’re the people who were descended from the Dutch, and they are the people, who essentially ran the country politically. They were the people behind the National Party and apartheid. The other half of the population, white population, was English speakers, descendants of British colonists. These two white groups are actually in conflict quite a lot. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretoria of Boys High was mostly English speakers. So inside that school, there were actually quite a lot of people who were resistant to apartheid and the Afrikaners and the National Party. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those classmates who went on to resist apartheid include Edwin Cameron, who became a Supreme Court Justice under the post-apartheid system, and Peter Hain, who led the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So those kinds of people were in that school with Musk. But we don’t see any evidence, or we’ve never heard any evidence that he took a stand on apartheid. One of the things you can safely say about South Africa at that time, it’s no matter what your background and education, if you were white, you were growing up in immense privilege, surrounded by people who were treated as second, third and fourth class citizens compared to you by law. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the end, you still imbue some of that system, some of the racism, some with that privilege, even if you don’t recognize it at the time. I think that that’s probably true of Musk in particular. Perhaps some of the other men we’ve talked about less because they left South Africa at a younger age, but it’s hard to imagine that Musk wasn’t influenced by that in this way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like Chris said, others who grew up in the same environment, in the same place of privilege during apartheid, actually went on to espouse very different ideas and actively work against racism. So there isn’t always a direct line between someone’s upbringing and their politics as an adult. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, there are some connections here between these men’s backgrounds, their current anti-DEI stances, and the policies that they’re trying to influence both in the U.S. and abroad. And President Trump seems to be on that same wavelength, especially around U.S. policy toward South Africa. But that is a new tab after a quick break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we just learned about how some core members of the PayPal mafia were all born in South Africa during this horrifically oppressive time called apartheid. So what does all this have to do with Trump’s fixation on South Africa? And that is a new tab. Trump, South Africa, and Elon Musk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 7: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s an escalating dispute between President Trump and South Africa over a new land policy that he says discriminates against the country’s white minority. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since getting back into the Oval Office, Trump has been paying a lot of attention to South Africa. First, he signed an executive order stopping all aid to South African and offering refugee status to white South Africans. And then he’s been posting about it over and over again on Truth Social, the right-leaning Twitter clone that he owns. So what’s this all about? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s about several things. One has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is that South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice over what has been described as the genocide in Gaza. And there are a lot of people who have been very angered in the U.S. and in Washington by that and have been pressing Trump to punish South Africa for that. So that’s one part of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But a second part is, what’s happening in South Africa fits the narrative that you hear on the right in this country, particularly amongst white supremacists, about white genocide, about the Great Replacement Theory, all of those things which suggest that the white population of the United States and the white populations around the world is somehow under some kind threat from other races. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 8: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We begin with the latest on U.S.-South African tensions. Pretoria has pushed back as it continues to face strong allegations of racism from U. S. President Donald Trump and his South African-born ally Elon Musk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can see Trump first become aware of it in 2018, during his first presidency, when a group of Afrikaners who run an organization called AfriForum, and they’re pressing the idea that in South Africa, white farmers are being murdered for their land. What they’re portraying is that South Africa in the years after apartheid has essentially become a new kind of racist country, that now it’s black people persecuting white and instead of white people persecuting black people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This, of course, fits very much with a lot of the kind of stuff we hear from Trump and the people around him. And so it paints whites as victims. But AfriForum turned up in America in 2018, pushing this idea that there was this essentially white genocide going on. One of their number appears on Tucker Carlson on Fox News and starts talking about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tucker Carlson \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>AfriForum Member \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Trump is watching and Trump tweets to his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 3 \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a late night tweet, Trump said he’d asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South Africa’s land and farm seizures in addition to expropriations and large-scale killing of farmers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Trump comes back to power in January, it happens to coincide with a new law in South Africa, which is about redistribution of land. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 9 \u003c/b>F\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">rustration over the slow pace of land reform in South Africa has been mounting and the new expropriation act aims to accelerate the redistribution of land in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Seventy percent of the land in South Africa, the agricultural land, is still in the hands of white people who only account for 7% of population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Remember, during apartheid, black South Africans were subjected to extremely rigid segregation. The 1913 Natives Land Act designated the majority of South Africa as white and forbade the black indigenous population from owning land beyond a tiny amount that was set aside in special reserves. Black South Africans who were already living in those white areas were evicted en masse and had to relocate to poor townships or work as farm laborers. Either way, they were forced into poverty. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Expropriation Act, signed into South African law this year, sets up a legal framework to redistribute land and address ownership imbalance within the country. The government isn’t just seizing land left and right. There’s a whole process involved that also includes paying landowners a fair price. A lot of the backlash to the new law is over one clause that allows the South African government to take land without compensation, but only in very specific circumstances. Like if the land was abandoned or if the owner isn’t actually using it and is just holding onto it until the property value goes up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was leapt on by the white right as evidence of essentially a new form of racism that white people were going to lose their land, including Musk. Musk for a while had been pressing the idea that affirmative action laws, that black empowerment laws in South Africa, were somehow a new formal apartheid. The idea of uplifting people who had been persecuted and discriminated against was actually a new form of apartheid. He was trying to turn the system on its head and say that whites are now the victims, which is plainly not the case. They remain economically dominant in South Africa and very much in a place of privilege. But that was the line that Musk was pushing. And it’s clear that Trump has been steered towards a direct confrontation with South Africa. I doubt he would have paid much attention on his own. I doubt he’s got into office this time and suddenly thought, I must go and deal with the South Africa situation. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor 9: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now in a social media post directly offering South African farmers and their families safe refuge in the U.S. and an expedited pathway to citizenship, erroneously stating that their land and farms were being confiscated. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there’s another link here between Trump’s renewed crusade against South African reparations for black citizens, the actual victims of apartheid, and Musk’s business interests. Specifically, his satellite internet service company, Starlink. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk has been in dispute with South Africa and government over affirmative action, over black empowerment for a couple of years now, and it seems to be rooted in part in his desire to get Starlink into South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Under South Africa’s Black empowerment initiatives, the country mandates that foreign investors in the telecoms industry have to have at least 30% black ownership in any local operations. Musk has been pushing back on this requirement, claiming that he’s standing up for white people against discrimination. And he has AfriForum lobbying on his behalf within South Africa. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think essentially what we’re seeing here, at least in part, because there are other forces of work at this as well, but in terms of Musk’s thing, I think, you know, he’s trying to pile on the pressure and Trump’s executive order is part of this on South Africa to back down on affirmative action laws on Black empowerment requirements for his businesses. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Musk has been on a similar crusade here in the U.S. He’s been openly critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and has said that DEI is just another word for racism. And although he isn’t technically a federal employee, he has been the public face of DOGE, which has slashed DEI programs and gutted federal agencies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In just a few months, they’ve canceled millions of dollars of federal grants for affordable housing programs, health research in marginalized communities, and education programs to help low-income students. DOGE also fired all employees in DEI positions who are disproportionately black, indigenous, or people of color. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Big picture here. I mean, the situation with Elon Musk in South Africa is just one example of how an unelected billionaire can sway policy. How else can you see this group of technocrats, as you said, how else do you see them influence U.S. politics going forward? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I think, you know, what we should look at very closely is they want to strip back regulation. They want to step back accountability. They essentially want a totally free market in which they can do what they want. And I think that’s actually where the real influence will lie. Now, as we know, in American politics, since the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, money talks a lot and they’ve got money. So I would imagine that they will be ensuring that the people who get elected to Congress are people sympathetic to that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’ve been looking at the PayPal mafia in South Africa, but let’s zoom out a bit and open one last tab. The rise of the broligarchy. Now, the PayPal mafia is not the only tech power group to exist. The broligarchy — and the power that they have — runs deep within American politics beyond the tech industry. Just look at the Citizens United ruling that Chris pointed out. This 2010 Supreme Court case redefined American elections by overhauling campaign finance laws. It struck down the limit on how much a corporation can directly spend on a political campaign, and set the stage for the creation of super PACs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This ruling is what allowed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican turned Democrat, to donate nearly $100 million to various super PACS funding the 2024 Democratic presidential campaign. It’s also directly linked to Elon Musk launching his own super PAC and spending over a quarter of a billion dollars funding Donald Trump’s campaign. The concept of the American oligarchy is not new. It’s just that now the tech bros are at the forefront. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We kind of get hung up on these guys because they’re obviously of the moment, and that’s important. But, you know, it’s worth looking at what’s been happening in the United States over the past 40 years. And it’s an oligarchy that has been developing. I mean, we’ve seen some very powerful interests in this country essentially taking control of politics, and I think these guys have moved to the fore over recent years because of the role that technology has come to play, and then they may be pushing it in new directions. But, you know, it’s not like they are the original oligarchs in this country; these are guys who’ve emerged at the most kind of fundamental time with Trump in power. They are, in many ways, you know, like oligarchs everywhere, right? They’re serving their own interests and they are hijacking politics to do it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve been living at the whims of billionaires throughout American history. It’s just that in the past it wasn’t as obvious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris McGreal: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve seen the results of 40 years of deregulation, 40 years of being told that government is bad and big business is good. I mean, it’s clear in the United States that people’s lives are, you know, really quite directly controlled in lots of ways by corporations. American lives have been greatly influenced by this kind of control. The difference I think with, as you say, the broligarchy is that they’re more visible. They’re hungry. In the past, they’ve been hungry for money, and I think now they’re hungry for power. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s not just that the PayPal mafia and other members of the broligarchy are rich and powerful. A lot of them have also expressed some pretty fascist white supremacist views. So what does it mean for democracy if this group of broligarchs has this much power? Is there any historic precedent for this dystopia that we’re currently living through? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, that is a separate deep dive. So you’ll have to come back next week when we dig further into the broligarchy. We’re gonna figure out if the rumors are true. Are we really slouching toward techno-fascism? Or are we already in it? And what does techno-fascism even mean? For now, let’s close these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 Wired Mechanical Keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs at kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "whats-next-23andme-bankruptcy-filing-raises-questions-data-security",
"title": "What’s Next for 23andMe? Bankruptcy Filing Raises Questions About Data Security",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/104710/how-dna-tests-like-23andme-are-exposing-family-secrets\">23andMe\u003c/a>, the South San Francisco-based biotech giant that pioneered at-home genetic testing, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stoking privacy concerns for many of its more than 15 million customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company \u003ca href=\"https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/24/3047517/0/en/23andMe-Initiates-Voluntary-Chapter-11-Process-to-Maximize-Stakeholder-Value-Through-Court-Supervised-Sale-Process.html\">announced\u003c/a> Sunday that it plans to sell “substantially all of its assets” through a court-approved reorganization plan and said its CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who co-founded the company nearly two decades ago, is stepping down effective immediately but will remain on the company’s board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the company’s bankruptcy filing appeared imminent last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers\">issued a consumer alert\u003c/a> informing the company’s roughly 1.7 million customers in California of their right to delete the trove of genetic information collected about them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to remind people of their rights given this moment,” Bonta told KQED on Monday, a day after the company submitted its filing in a Missouri bankruptcy court. “They may not have the same guardrails and protections in place for privacy … as they do now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bonta said he’s not going as far as telling customers to delete their data but that, as a 23andMe customer himself, he’s already begun the process of deleting his own data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11959336\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11959336\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"California's Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks into a microphone.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta fields questions during a press conference on Monday, Aug. 28, 2023, in Los Angeles. \u003ccite>(Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s totally their decision about how they value their private data, what kind of risk they want to take on and are willing to absorb,” he said. “So that’s up to them, but I’m just reminding them of their unique rights here in California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bankruptcy filing marks a striking reversal of fortune for the company, which just four years ago had a \u003ca href=\"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/23andmes-journey-dna-testing-pioneer-171858532.html\">market value of $6 billion\u003c/a> but has since struggled to contain mounting financial and operational challenges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"#Todeletegeneticdatafrom23andMe\">Skip to a step-by-step guide on how to delete your 23andMe data\u003c/a> \u003c/strong>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Since it went public in 2021, 23andMe has struggled to find a profitable business model, which was made more challenging after a massive data breach in 2023 that spooked investors and customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m concerned because of the past conduct of 23andMe,” Bonta said. “Even when they were operating at full capacity, having a massive data breach that affected half of their customers — seven million customers, 850,000 Californians — that’s a red flag, that’s a concern.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond the “inherent injury” in someone’s privacy being violated, breached data could be used by scammers in nefarious ways, including identity theft, someone posing as a relative and asking for money or targeting individuals based on their race or ethnicity.[aside postID=pop_104710 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2018/07/dna-kit-23andme-ancestry-family-secret-1180x664.jpg']Founded in 2006, the company is best known for its saliva-based DNA mail-in testing kits that quickly drew millions of customers eager to learn more about their ancestry. More recently, the company delved further into health research and drug development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But amid ongoing financial woes, the company announced in November that it was laying off more than 200 employees — about 40% of its workforce — and would discontinue its therapeutics division.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shares of the company have shed nearly all their value since last spring and plunged even farther after Sunday’s bankruptcy filing, trading at less than $1 as of midday Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent securities filings, 23andMe continued to warn about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” In its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the company reported total debts of nearly $215 million as of the end of last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement on Sunday, Board Chair Mark Jensen said the court-supervised bankruptcy process was “the best path forward to maximize the value of the business.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11676897\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11676897 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1066\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1180x786.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-520x346.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">23andMe, the South San Francisco-based company that pioneered at-home genetic testing, holds a trove of sensitive genetic data on its 15 million customers. \u003ccite>(Hong Chang Bum/Flickr)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The company said it expects to continue regular business operations during the bankruptcy process but is also seeking court approval to reject lease contracts, including for properties in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, in an effort to reduce expenses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company assured customers that its bankruptcy filing will not change the way it stores or protects data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>23andMe “is committed to continuing to safeguard customer data and being transparent about the management of user data going forward,” Jensen added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Bringardner of Debtwire notes that a prospective buyer of 23andMe will have to comply with regulatory approvals that ensure “customer data won’t end up in unscrupulous hands.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personal data collected by 23andme has always been at risk,” Bringardner wrote in an email on Monday, referencing the 2023 data breach.[aside postID=news_12030969 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/Honda-1020x765.jpg']Litigation spanning from the aftermath of the breach helped drive up liabilities, eventually contributing to the bankruptcy, he said. Last year, 23andMe agreed to pay $30 million in cash to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing it of failing to protect customers whose personal information was exposed in this breach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Sunday, the company said it plans to use the bankruptcy proceedings to “resolve all outstanding legal liabilities” stemming from the 2023 incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said it’s quite likely that customer data will be compromised as the company goes through bankruptcy and ultimately sells its assets. But in most cases, he doesn’t think the consequences will be all that significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is the non-concrete side of privacy violations. Even though it might not hurt me in any way, if somebody posted on the internet a photo of me sitting on the toilet, I would be more than annoyed,” he said. “There’s a violation of the privacy side to this. But the actual concrete applications, I think, of having the kind of genetic information that 23andMe has … are likely to be relatively small.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greely said there are few privacy protections in place when customer data is sold from one company to another, as is expected to happen during a bankruptcy proceeding. The privacy agreement between 23andMe and its customers, he said, only holds weight if the company continues to own the data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “if their assets get sold to a different company, the different company doesn’t necessarily have to follow the agreement,” he said, adding, in this case, the asset could be worth more if there are few privacy protections in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And the asset being worth more is something bankruptcy courts are supposed to try to achieve,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca id=\"Todeletegeneticdatafrom23andMe\">\u003c/a>To delete genetic data from 23andMe\u003c/h2>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Log into your 23andMe account on their website.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Go to the “Settings” section of your profile.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Scroll to a section labeled “23andMe Data” at the bottom of the page.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Click “View” next to “23andMe Data.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Download your data: If you want a copy of your genetic data for personal storage, choose the option to download it to your device before proceeding.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Scroll to the “Delete Data” section.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Click “Permanently Delete Data.”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>Confirm your request: You’ll receive an email from 23andMe; follow the link in the email to confirm your deletion request.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>To destroy your 23andMe test sample:\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you previously opted to have your saliva sample and DNA stored by 23andMe but want to change that preference, you can do so from your account settings page under “Preferences.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>To revoke permission for your genetic data to be used for research:\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you previously consented to 23andMe and third-party researchers to use your genetic data and sample for research, you may withdraw consent from the account settings page under “Research and Product Consents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB41\">Genetic Information Privacy Act\u003c/a>, California consumers can delete their account and genetic data and have their biological sample destroyed. In addition, GIPA permits California consumers to revoke consent that they provided a genetic testing company to collect, use and disclose genetic data, as well as to store biological samples after the initial testing has been completed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa\">Consumer Protection Act\u003c/a> also vests California consumers with the right to delete personal information, including genetic data, from businesses that collect personal information from the consumer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story includes reporting from the Associated Press\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/104710/how-dna-tests-like-23andme-are-exposing-family-secrets\">23andMe\u003c/a>, the South San Francisco-based biotech giant that pioneered at-home genetic testing, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stoking privacy concerns for many of its more than 15 million customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company \u003ca href=\"https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/24/3047517/0/en/23andMe-Initiates-Voluntary-Chapter-11-Process-to-Maximize-Stakeholder-Value-Through-Court-Supervised-Sale-Process.html\">announced\u003c/a> Sunday that it plans to sell “substantially all of its assets” through a court-approved reorganization plan and said its CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who co-founded the company nearly two decades ago, is stepping down effective immediately but will remain on the company’s board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the company’s bankruptcy filing appeared imminent last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers\">issued a consumer alert\u003c/a> informing the company’s roughly 1.7 million customers in California of their right to delete the trove of genetic information collected about them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to remind people of their rights given this moment,” Bonta told KQED on Monday, a day after the company submitted its filing in a Missouri bankruptcy court. “They may not have the same guardrails and protections in place for privacy … as they do now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bonta said he’s not going as far as telling customers to delete their data but that, as a 23andMe customer himself, he’s already begun the process of deleting his own data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11959336\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11959336\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"California's Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks into a microphone.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/230828-ROB-BONTA-AP-MJS-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta fields questions during a press conference on Monday, Aug. 28, 2023, in Los Angeles. \u003ccite>(Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s totally their decision about how they value their private data, what kind of risk they want to take on and are willing to absorb,” he said. “So that’s up to them, but I’m just reminding them of their unique rights here in California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bankruptcy filing marks a striking reversal of fortune for the company, which just four years ago had a \u003ca href=\"https://finance.yahoo.com/news/23andmes-journey-dna-testing-pioneer-171858532.html\">market value of $6 billion\u003c/a> but has since struggled to contain mounting financial and operational challenges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"#Todeletegeneticdatafrom23andMe\">Skip to a step-by-step guide on how to delete your 23andMe data\u003c/a> \u003c/strong>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Since it went public in 2021, 23andMe has struggled to find a profitable business model, which was made more challenging after a massive data breach in 2023 that spooked investors and customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m concerned because of the past conduct of 23andMe,” Bonta said. “Even when they were operating at full capacity, having a massive data breach that affected half of their customers — seven million customers, 850,000 Californians — that’s a red flag, that’s a concern.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond the “inherent injury” in someone’s privacy being violated, breached data could be used by scammers in nefarious ways, including identity theft, someone posing as a relative and asking for money or targeting individuals based on their race or ethnicity.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Founded in 2006, the company is best known for its saliva-based DNA mail-in testing kits that quickly drew millions of customers eager to learn more about their ancestry. More recently, the company delved further into health research and drug development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But amid ongoing financial woes, the company announced in November that it was laying off more than 200 employees — about 40% of its workforce — and would discontinue its therapeutics division.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shares of the company have shed nearly all their value since last spring and plunged even farther after Sunday’s bankruptcy filing, trading at less than $1 as of midday Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent securities filings, 23andMe continued to warn about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” In its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the company reported total debts of nearly $215 million as of the end of last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement on Sunday, Board Chair Mark Jensen said the court-supervised bankruptcy process was “the best path forward to maximize the value of the business.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11676897\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11676897 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1066\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-1180x786.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/06/RS10205_3129766406_3f62c12d6a_o-520x346.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">23andMe, the South San Francisco-based company that pioneered at-home genetic testing, holds a trove of sensitive genetic data on its 15 million customers. \u003ccite>(Hong Chang Bum/Flickr)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The company said it expects to continue regular business operations during the bankruptcy process but is also seeking court approval to reject lease contracts, including for properties in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, in an effort to reduce expenses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company assured customers that its bankruptcy filing will not change the way it stores or protects data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>23andMe “is committed to continuing to safeguard customer data and being transparent about the management of user data going forward,” Jensen added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Bringardner of Debtwire notes that a prospective buyer of 23andMe will have to comply with regulatory approvals that ensure “customer data won’t end up in unscrupulous hands.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personal data collected by 23andme has always been at risk,” Bringardner wrote in an email on Monday, referencing the 2023 data breach.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Litigation spanning from the aftermath of the breach helped drive up liabilities, eventually contributing to the bankruptcy, he said. Last year, 23andMe agreed to pay $30 million in cash to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing it of failing to protect customers whose personal information was exposed in this breach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Sunday, the company said it plans to use the bankruptcy proceedings to “resolve all outstanding legal liabilities” stemming from the 2023 incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said it’s quite likely that customer data will be compromised as the company goes through bankruptcy and ultimately sells its assets. But in most cases, he doesn’t think the consequences will be all that significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is the non-concrete side of privacy violations. Even though it might not hurt me in any way, if somebody posted on the internet a photo of me sitting on the toilet, I would be more than annoyed,” he said. “There’s a violation of the privacy side to this. But the actual concrete applications, I think, of having the kind of genetic information that 23andMe has … are likely to be relatively small.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greely said there are few privacy protections in place when customer data is sold from one company to another, as is expected to happen during a bankruptcy proceeding. The privacy agreement between 23andMe and its customers, he said, only holds weight if the company continues to own the data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “if their assets get sold to a different company, the different company doesn’t necessarily have to follow the agreement,” he said, adding, in this case, the asset could be worth more if there are few privacy protections in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And the asset being worth more is something bankruptcy courts are supposed to try to achieve,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca id=\"Todeletegeneticdatafrom23andMe\">\u003c/a>To delete genetic data from 23andMe\u003c/h2>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Log into your 23andMe account on their website.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Go to the “Settings” section of your profile.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Scroll to a section labeled “23andMe Data” at the bottom of the page.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Click “View” next to “23andMe Data.”\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Download your data: If you want a copy of your genetic data for personal storage, choose the option to download it to your device before proceeding.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Scroll to the “Delete Data” section.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Click “Permanently Delete Data.”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>Confirm your request: You’ll receive an email from 23andMe; follow the link in the email to confirm your deletion request.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>To destroy your 23andMe test sample:\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you previously opted to have your saliva sample and DNA stored by 23andMe but want to change that preference, you can do so from your account settings page under “Preferences.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>To revoke permission for your genetic data to be used for research:\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you previously consented to 23andMe and third-party researchers to use your genetic data and sample for research, you may withdraw consent from the account settings page under “Research and Product Consents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB41\">Genetic Information Privacy Act\u003c/a>, California consumers can delete their account and genetic data and have their biological sample destroyed. In addition, GIPA permits California consumers to revoke consent that they provided a genetic testing company to collect, use and disclose genetic data, as well as to store biological samples after the initial testing has been completed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa\">Consumer Protection Act\u003c/a> also vests California consumers with the right to delete personal information, including genetic data, from businesses that collect personal information from the consumer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story includes reporting from the Associated Press\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It’s no secret that artificial intelligence developers train their models on books, music, movies and other copyrighted materials without obtaining consent or \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11958785/how-silicon-valley-ate-hollywood\">providing credit and compensation\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just last week,\u003ca href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/openai-urges-trump-either-settle-ai-copyright-debate-or-lose-ai-race-to-china/\"> OpenAI\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/google-us-ai-action-plan-comments/\"> Google\u003c/a> publicly argued copyright protections should not apply to AI development because the software uses existing works to create something new and different. Both companies were seen to be signaling to the Trump administration that they wanted disruptive changes to copyright law, some form of which existed since\u003ca href=\"https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/beginnings/#:~:text=Congress%20implemented%20the%20intellectual%20property,law%20on%20May%2031,%201790.\"> 1790\u003c/a> when it was signed into law by President George Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll need the right policy frameworks to secure America’s position as an AI powerhouse and support a new era of opportunity,” wrote Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google and its parent company, Alphabet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Bay Area lawmaker, backed by the union that represents Hollywood actors, is wading into the fight over copyright.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AI Copyright Transparency Act,\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB412\"> AB 412\u003c/a>, introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), doesn’t promise to address the fundamental disagreement over what constitutes fair use, which is still working its way\u003ca href=\"https://www.bakerlaw.com/services/artificial-intelligence-ai/case-tracker-artificial-intelligence-copyrights-and-class-actions/\"> through the courts\u003c/a> in multiple lawsuits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The legislation would require AI developers to disclose when copyrighted materials are used to train generative artificial intelligence models.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AB 412 “merely provides the copyright holder with notice,” Bauer-Kahan said in the measure’s first legislative hearing before the Privacy And Consumer Protection committee she chairs in the California Assembly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When Scarlett Johansson’s voice is coming out of an AI model, the people that own the copyrights to the movies and the works she was in have a right to know, ‘Is that why it sounds like Scarlett Johansson?’” Bauer-Kahan said, referring to the widely publicized battle between the\u003ca href=\"https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johansson-ai-legal-threat-1235905899/\"> actor and OpenAI\u003c/a> for allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill is sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and co-sponsored by the Creative Artists Agency and the National Association of Voice Actors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_11958785 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/08/GettyImages-1558852156-1020x699.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joely Fisher, SAG-AFTRA Secretary-Treasurer and chair of its government affairs and public policy committee, said the fight over AI was at the heart of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11956178/its-now-or-never-writers-and-actors-see-conflict-with-big-tech-as-existential\">the union’s strike\u003c/a> against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that ran 118 days in 2023. The language about AI in the contract wasn’t approved until the 11th hour, she said, “always knowing that we needed legislation to enforce some of the things that we talked about and our studio partners agreed to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The technology is advancing rapidly, she added. Just a few years ago, it was remarkable that her half-sister Carrie Fisher appeared posthumously in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker with a composite of unused footage from The Force Awakens and archival footage from the original trilogy. In that case, there was consent and compensation for the family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were able to use a synthetic performer, which is, like, terrible to even have that come out of my mouth,” Fisher said. But now, she continued, the more likely threat to creative artists is a synthesis of their work and others’ work. “We could all be put into one of the blenders, and they could spit out a character that is a little bit of all of us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Electronic Frontier Foundation and the California Chamber of Commerce oppose the legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AB 412 imposes an impossible new regulatory regime that would cause devastating collateral damage for research and innovation,” said Becca Kramer of Kaiser Advocacy, testifying on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She also warned the bill could unintentionally advantage Silicon Valley’s reigning giants. “Big Tech can afford the content licensing and legal teams to handle litigation over whether they made the reasonable efforts required by, but not defined, in the bill.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee approved AB 412, passing it to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As chair of the consumer privacy and protection committee, Bauer-Kahan is in a pole position to push her bill and others regulating AI through to the governor’s desk. She and other California lawmakers, like state senate budget chair Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), have fired off a\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/03/ai-regulation-after-trump-election/\"> salvo of 30 bills\u003c/a> since the start of the legislative session.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a follow-up to last year when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 AI laws but vetoed others, including the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007087/california-blinks-governor-newsom-vetoes-ai-bill-aimed-at-catastrophic-harms\"> most high-profile bill by Wiener\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Newsom convened the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, which has just released an\u003ca href=\"https://www.cafrontieraigov.org\"> interim report\u003c/a> presenting a framework for the governance of AI models in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This report affirms with cutting-edge research that the rapid pace of technological advancement in AI means policymakers must act with haste to impose reasonable guardrails to mitigate foreseeable risks,” Sen. Wiener wrote in response, indicating another fight is underway between two of California’s most successful homegrown industries, with state lawmakers in the middle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED reporters and producers are represented by SAG-AFTRA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s no secret that artificial intelligence developers train their models on books, music, movies and other copyrighted materials without obtaining consent or \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11958785/how-silicon-valley-ate-hollywood\">providing credit and compensation\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just last week,\u003ca href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/openai-urges-trump-either-settle-ai-copyright-debate-or-lose-ai-race-to-china/\"> OpenAI\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/google-us-ai-action-plan-comments/\"> Google\u003c/a> publicly argued copyright protections should not apply to AI development because the software uses existing works to create something new and different. Both companies were seen to be signaling to the Trump administration that they wanted disruptive changes to copyright law, some form of which existed since\u003ca href=\"https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/beginnings/#:~:text=Congress%20implemented%20the%20intellectual%20property,law%20on%20May%2031,%201790.\"> 1790\u003c/a> when it was signed into law by President George Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll need the right policy frameworks to secure America’s position as an AI powerhouse and support a new era of opportunity,” wrote Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google and its parent company, Alphabet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Bay Area lawmaker, backed by the union that represents Hollywood actors, is wading into the fight over copyright.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AI Copyright Transparency Act,\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB412\"> AB 412\u003c/a>, introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), doesn’t promise to address the fundamental disagreement over what constitutes fair use, which is still working its way\u003ca href=\"https://www.bakerlaw.com/services/artificial-intelligence-ai/case-tracker-artificial-intelligence-copyrights-and-class-actions/\"> through the courts\u003c/a> in multiple lawsuits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The legislation would require AI developers to disclose when copyrighted materials are used to train generative artificial intelligence models.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AB 412 “merely provides the copyright holder with notice,” Bauer-Kahan said in the measure’s first legislative hearing before the Privacy And Consumer Protection committee she chairs in the California Assembly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When Scarlett Johansson’s voice is coming out of an AI model, the people that own the copyrights to the movies and the works she was in have a right to know, ‘Is that why it sounds like Scarlett Johansson?’” Bauer-Kahan said, referring to the widely publicized battle between the\u003ca href=\"https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johansson-ai-legal-threat-1235905899/\"> actor and OpenAI\u003c/a> for allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill is sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and co-sponsored by the Creative Artists Agency and the National Association of Voice Actors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joely Fisher, SAG-AFTRA Secretary-Treasurer and chair of its government affairs and public policy committee, said the fight over AI was at the heart of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11956178/its-now-or-never-writers-and-actors-see-conflict-with-big-tech-as-existential\">the union’s strike\u003c/a> against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that ran 118 days in 2023. The language about AI in the contract wasn’t approved until the 11th hour, she said, “always knowing that we needed legislation to enforce some of the things that we talked about and our studio partners agreed to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The technology is advancing rapidly, she added. Just a few years ago, it was remarkable that her half-sister Carrie Fisher appeared posthumously in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker with a composite of unused footage from The Force Awakens and archival footage from the original trilogy. In that case, there was consent and compensation for the family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were able to use a synthetic performer, which is, like, terrible to even have that come out of my mouth,” Fisher said. But now, she continued, the more likely threat to creative artists is a synthesis of their work and others’ work. “We could all be put into one of the blenders, and they could spit out a character that is a little bit of all of us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Electronic Frontier Foundation and the California Chamber of Commerce oppose the legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“AB 412 imposes an impossible new regulatory regime that would cause devastating collateral damage for research and innovation,” said Becca Kramer of Kaiser Advocacy, testifying on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She also warned the bill could unintentionally advantage Silicon Valley’s reigning giants. “Big Tech can afford the content licensing and legal teams to handle litigation over whether they made the reasonable efforts required by, but not defined, in the bill.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee approved AB 412, passing it to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As chair of the consumer privacy and protection committee, Bauer-Kahan is in a pole position to push her bill and others regulating AI through to the governor’s desk. She and other California lawmakers, like state senate budget chair Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), have fired off a\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/03/ai-regulation-after-trump-election/\"> salvo of 30 bills\u003c/a> since the start of the legislative session.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a follow-up to last year when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 AI laws but vetoed others, including the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007087/california-blinks-governor-newsom-vetoes-ai-bill-aimed-at-catastrophic-harms\"> most high-profile bill by Wiener\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Newsom convened the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, which has just released an\u003ca href=\"https://www.cafrontieraigov.org\"> interim report\u003c/a> presenting a framework for the governance of AI models in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This report affirms with cutting-edge research that the rapid pace of technological advancement in AI means policymakers must act with haste to impose reasonable guardrails to mitigate foreseeable risks,” Sen. Wiener wrote in response, indicating another fight is underway between two of California’s most successful homegrown industries, with state lawmakers in the middle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED reporters and producers are represented by SAG-AFTRA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "what-happens-if-the-internet-archive-goes-dark",
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"content": "\u003cp>For decades, the Internet Archive has preserved our digital history. Lately, journalists and ordinary citizens have been turning to it more than ever, as the Trump administration undertakes an ideologically-driven purge of government websites. But the Archive itself faces an existential threat. In this episode, Close All Tabs Senior Editor Chris Egusa joins Morgan to discuss his visit to the Internet Archive and its colorful founder Brewster Kahle, the legal battles that could shut it down permanently — and what losing it might mean for accountability and the preservation of history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4918161208\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guests:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://brewster.kahle.org/\">Brewster Kahle\u003c/a>, Founder of the Internet Archive\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Further reading:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/internet-archive-major-label-music-lawsuit-1235105273/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Jon Blistein, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rolling Stone\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.techradar.com/pro/open-internet-web-scraping-and-ai-the-unbreakable-link\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Open Internet, web scraping, and AI: the unbreakable link\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julius Cerniauskas, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TechRadar\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/musicians-demand-music-labels-drop-their-internet-archive-lawsuit-214139644.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAK2IFY7PAMZw0BT91Rg2Pvhx66osGJFtnuFHxCEEx9slXFq6Lu1c6VJvuUZm0sVSQBFj11ViHZ6hZN6a_JMUEDU_hhjxeh_HxVHNP47DDOj9w5pnFaUWg81zH_miG2pKzGHH68STu0eXU_K2zFYpaJcNSunaSm1U71VVfyL2DIlF\">Musicians demand music labels drop their Internet Archive lawsuit\u003c/a> — Ian Carlos Campbell, \u003ci>Engadget\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is The Purge… Of government websites. Since President Trump’s inauguration, federal agency and military websites have been wiped. Some are gone completely, while others have been overhauled to remove any references to so-called woke terminology, all in this effort to comply with an executive order to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it seems like in the rush to remove all of these woke words, there were maybe some unintentional cuts, like when the Department of Defense took down a 1940s photo. It was a picture of a pilot, posing in front of one of the planes that dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what does this photo have to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion? Well, the plane was named the Enola Gay. It was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbitts. There are still other photos of the Enola Gay available on government websites, but in the past few months, countless pages with crucial information have been wiped from the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, for journalists, historians, and anyone who cares about keeping track of facts, there’s a tool that lets us go back and see exactly how those websites have changed. Unfortunately, that very tool is under threat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cem>Close All Tabs\u003c/em> Senior Editor \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is gonna walk us through this magical tool called the Wayback Machine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I already have a tab open. It’s the current version of the State Department’s safety tips for queer people traveling abroad. And you have your own tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s the same web page, same URL, but I have gone back in time, kind of. That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in. It’s part of this organization called the Internet Archive. And for the past 30 years, it’s basically scraped the internet page by page and archived it. So if you have a URL or link to a website, you can go back and see all the ways that that website has changed. I used the Wayback Machine to look at the page from January 5th, before this executive order. At the top of the page, it’s addressed to LGBTQI plus travelers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Unlike the one I’m seeing, the one that’s currently live, which just says, L-G-B Travelers. What else does your version have? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it has a lot of resources. It has instructions for changing your passport’s gender marker, warnings about conversion therapy practices in other countries, and also links to the National Center for Transgender Equality and other organizations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, this current one I have on my screen doesn’t have any of that, just no warnings about conversion therapy and definitely none of those resources for trans people. There’s actually no mention of trans people at all. They kept a link to the Trevor Project, but they made a point to say that it’s an organization for LGB youth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which is wild, because the Trevor Project is very involved in advocating for trans youth and gender-affirming care. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, and again, this is just one page out of who knows how many that have been altered to take the T out of LGBT. How panicked should we be about the scale of erasure of public information? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, this has happened before. During Trump’s first term, pages about climate change and the environment were altered to soften the language, or they were just wiped entirely. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But that purge wasn’t nearly as expansive or haphazard as the one we’re currently living through, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No, but I think it has prepared a lot of us for a situation like this. This time around, a lot more people are relying on the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, and in all of this mess, the existence of the internet archive itself is under threat, which could spell trouble for the future of all online libraries. So to get a better understanding of it all, Chris, you went to the archive in person a few weeks ago. Let’s start there. Let’s make that our first tab. What is the Internet Archive? You know, when I think of the Internet Archive, I’m thinking of like the Matrix, Cyberchase, when they’re like running through this kind of like cloud and there are just binary numbers everywhere. But the Internet Archive is a real physical location. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, no, it’s a real place. It is not in the Matrix. It is in San Francisco in the Richmond district. It’s in this very grand building and out front it has these huge Greek columns that kind of line the entrance of it. They actually chose the building in part because it resembles the archive’s logo, which is the columns of the Library of Alexandria. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Library of Alexandria. I mean, that is like the Greek idea of a universal library. That’s a pretty lofty idea to aspire to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is. And the organization isn’t shy about their ambitions. Their stated mission is to provide, quote, universal access to all knowledge. According to their website, the archive currently contains, and I’m just gonna reel off a bunch of numbers here, 835 billion webpages. I think last I checked, that number’s actually close to a trillion. 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, and on and on. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a lot, like, I can’t even quite conceptualize what a trillion web pages even looks like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Chris, tell me, what was the archive actually like? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was actually really cool. Brewster Kahle is the founder of the archive and he was really excited to give me a tour and introduce me to all kinds of old media devices they’d collected over the years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Edison invented these cylinders in 1880. Mostly, you know, things that you’ve never heard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So yeah, right when we got there, we go up some stairs and he shows me this very vintage, beautiful old gramophone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a Victor Talking Machine 5 from 1927. So it’s a old 78 RPM player, no electricity, it’s a crank, has a horn, so spinning up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Song: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey / A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know if you recognize that song, but it immediately made me think of Twin Peaks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes! Yes, it does. I am right in the middle of my rewatch right now, so… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I need to do a re-watch in David Lynch’s honor, for sure. Yeah, and then when he started playing this, he then started dancing around the room, which is just like-. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Audrey Horne. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Song: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A little bit jumbled and jivey \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So after visiting this little museum area, Brewster takes me into this huge room and it has this beautiful domed ceiling. It used to be a Christian Science Church. The whole building did. There are all these lines of pews that are facing where the pulpit used to be. And in place of that pulpit, there’s this huge projector screen. And so they use this place for like movie screenings, for local community events and things. But there is one thing that draws your eye more than anything else in the room. That is the statues. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Statues? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they are these hundreds of terracotta figures. They are about waist high, and each one of them has distinct features in clothing. And they’re all kind of facing forward, like they’re congregants in this hall of worship. Haunting. So it’s a bit of an eerie scene, but according to Brewster… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you work for the archive for three years, then we make a little statue. Basically tributes to the people that made the organization happen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So not like framed photos, just a three foot statue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, exactly. And they’re really detailed. Another employee was with us on the tour. His name is Chris Freeland. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Freeland: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s weird to be standing here in front of a terracotta statue of yourself, but here we are. It does look like me, and that’s also uncanny. Everyone says they got the beard right, which is making me sad, since it is covered in gray and no longer brown, or red-brown, like it was when I was, you know, 20 years younger, but here we are. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all these statues are standing in the pews and around the outside of the room, facing the front, sort of at attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know what this reminds me of? It’s that terracotta army that’s like protecting the tomb of like the first emperor of China. And they’re meant to like protect the emperor in the afterlife. And I guess it’s fitting because these statues look like they’re, I don’t know, protecting the internet ephemera long after it’s gone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s actually very appropriate because behind all of these statues in the very back of the room is where the servers live. Um, he tells me that they hold 145 petabytes of data, which I don’t deal in petabytes, it’s the one after terabyte. Um, so it’s a lot. And yeah, these are the servers where all of the billions of web pages, videos, and audio, where all of it lives. There’s a cool moment actually, like when you stare at these devices, you see all of these twinkling blue lights flashing and flickering across them, um, like hundreds a second. And here is what Brewster told me about that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every time a light blinks is somebody uploading or downloading something from the Internet Archive. I think that the technology reflects the people that make it, so let’s make it beautiful. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That sounds almost magical. I mean, I get how this could be like a religious experience. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, and I almost compare it to the way that old cathedrals were meant to evoke that sense of awe. It was hard not to feel a little awestruck being in that place. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These servers hold some non-trivial percentage of all of the published works of humankind. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so tell me about Brewster, the guy who founded this whole thing, started this statue army and this cathedral of servers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, as you can already tell, Brewster is pretty eccentric and he kind of comes from that old school vision of the internet where he thinks it should be free and open. He really feels that now power is way too concentrated in a few big companies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Companies often don’t sell anything anymore. They just license it. Now, if you use Netflix or Spotify, you don’t even have a video library like you used to with DVDs or you don’t have MP3s on your device or records in your collections. So there’s been this shift by the large-scale publishers towards ongoing control of materials and surveillance of what it is being viewed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They believe that most things should be open and available to the public, and especially that old things should be preserved, even old webpages. And so that’s where you get the Wayback Machine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have the World Wide Web on Archive.org, available back to 1996, so you can go and find your old webpages, your old GeoCity sites, or whatever it is that you’ve done in the past. But it also is relevant to people currently. Journalists are using it a lot to find, well, what did that person say? And they’re saying something kind of different. um… and they said they never said that well no we don’t know we found that in the television news archive and you can search and find this on television transcripts uh… back to 2009.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you can tell that Brewster is old school because he uses the phrase worldwide web, which I love. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So vintage of him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it is kind of miraculous. I do feel that you can go back and look at a website like that and see exactly what it looked like, but there’s no other place that that exists. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so clearly the Internet Archive is this incredible resource. Is it true that it might shut down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, let’s talk about it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, let’s open a new tab on that, but right after this break. Okay, new tab, Internet Archive Lawsuits. So let’s talk about these lawsuits that the Internet Archive is facing. They’re not about the Wayback Machine or the webpage archiving, right? They’re about a totally different part of the archive’s operations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Internet Archive also has these huge operations where they preserve old physical media. In some cases, the stuff they’re preserving is very clearly public material that is for public access. Like they have this program called Democracy’s Library, where they go and digitize all the print records for all kinds of government agencies. But they also digitize things like books and music, and sometimes that includes copyrighted material. So there are two specific lawsuits at the center of this. The first was a case called Hachette v. Internet Archive, and that was brought against the Internet Archive by book publishers. They objected to the Archive’s practice of digitizing books and lending them out digitally, even though many of them were out of print. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but that sounds like a normal library thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it kind of is, though there is a wrinkle to it because of this program they did in 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns. So before, the archive operated kind of how libraries normally do. They have a certain number of licenses, you can check each book out, but during this time it became unlimited access for anyone. Though I will say that Brewster and his team strongly dispute the idea that the case was about this pandemic era program at all. They say the lawsuit had been planned before that program ever started. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Either way, after a lengthy appeals process, the judge did rule against them, and the judgment required the Internet Archive to pay publishers an undisclosed amount. And even though the lawsuit was about like these specific 127 copyrighted works, the Archive ended up removing over 500,000 books from their digital collection, which free speech and pro-access people were very upset about because a lot of these books aren’t available anywhere else. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that brings us to this next lawsuit. This was brought on by the music industry, two major record labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. What can you tell us about this case? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this suit was brought against them in 2023 and it centers around another one of the Internet Archive’s programs. This one is called the Great 78 Project. And 78 stands for 78 RPM records. It’s a format that was super popular from the 1890s to like the late 1950s. And this program was this massive communal undertaking to digitize and preserve these very old 78s. They digitized and cataloged more than 400,000 of these recordings since starting the project in 2017. And they made those recordings available to the public to stream on their website. And the key here is how they thought about this project. They felt like they were undertaking the preservation of a defunct technology and the sound of American culture in a bygone era. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those older materials that were sort of foundational of what did America sound like are so obsolete that we went and we circulated in the industry conferences to say, “okay, there’s going to be this project, the Great 78 Project,” and libraries and archives, a hundred different ones came together to go inform this. The industry knew about it. They were all supportive that when we talked to them, it was all great. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the record labels saw things differently. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They definitely did. In their lawsuit, the labels called the Great 78 Project quote, “wholesale theft of generations of music.” And they claim that by making the records available to stream for free, that the Internet Archive was displacing streams that generate royalties on platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, royalties that could have gone to either the platforms themselves or the copyright holders like the artists. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, do they have a point? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So obviously I’m not a legal expert, but here’s what the record labels say. In the suit, they’re focusing on 4,000 specific recordings that do have copyright protections. They are commercially available and many of them are still very popular, including Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, which is the best-selling single of all time. So I think it’s gonna be tough. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we know what the actual amount that they’re suing for is, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s $621 million. And just to put it in perspective, the Internet Archive’s operating budget is a tiny fraction of that, just around $30 million. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If we’re found guilty of being a library and then that will cost us, yes, it would snuff the Internet Archive. And that may be the point. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s pretty bleak. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah it is. I will also add that regardless of where you land on, okay, was this copyright infringement or not, the details of the case strike me as kind of strange. First thing is there were a notably small number of streams per audio file in question. Um, like hundreds, or, you know, in some cases a few thousand. But not like hundreds of thousands or millions. And so, if you actually convert the number of streams to a dollar amount based on how much Spotify royalties pay, you’re generally looking at a couple of dollars per audio file. A bit more in a few cases. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So clearly publishers are not experiencing, you know, dramatic monetary loss due to these relatively small number of streams. Right? But the record companies, they still decided to sue for the maximum amount under the law, which is $150,000 per record, even though they could have sued for less. They also never even asked the Internet Archive to take the records down. They never received a request. They were just slapped with this lawsuit.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And if we had gotten that list, we would have taken it down. And we did, once they sued it, you just give us the list and we would have taken them down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the other thing is, and I’m not saying that this argument will hold up in court, but like, I think about a platform like YouTube, right? YouTube gets copyrighted material uploaded to it constantly. And the way it works is that when an interested copyright holding party requests that they remove certain content, that content then gets taken down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, that’s the way the internet basically works and those 78s are on YouTube. So it’s, so we basically have a, they’re after something else. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He thinks the publishing companies are going after the library system itself, the ability for people to access materials for free. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bigger picture that’s going on and the real contest is not about money, it’s actually about control. Can libraries own anything in the digital world? Is there digital ownership? That’s the central characteristic. And there’s a question, “is the United States going to have libraries have their traditional roles of buying, preserving, lending and interlibrary loan?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the case itself likely won’t move forward until later this year, so we’ll have to wait and see how that develops. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, changing gears a little bit. We are a tech show, so I feel like we’re almost contractually obligated to mention AI somehow in almost every episode that we make. But I don’t know, Chris, that feels like a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think so. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, new tab, Internet Archive and AI Legal Battles. AI companies have also been hit by big lawsuits from publishers, and you may not think of it at first, but AI companies like ChatGPT and the Internet Archive have some similarities. They both use tools to scrape the web for data and text and other content. Of course, what they do is different. The Internet Archive stores and preserves it, while AI companies use it to train their models. What’s Brewster’s take on AI? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he’s a big proponent actually. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re using the AI technologies for a bunch of what may seem like mundane tasks, but are super helpful. Like putting metadata on all these government documents. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He says that one of the big problems with a site like the Internet Archive is that there’s just so much stuff on there. Organization can be a struggle and people visiting the site can get overwhelmed. AI can make all of that easier by tagging and categorizing the billions of pieces of media they have to make them more easily findable. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, if you go to archive.org anecdotally people say, “You know you kind of arrive and it’s just huge and it’s a mass and holy crow and I don’t know where to start!” And so if we could make that on ramp easier wouldn’t that be fantastic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as the lawsuits against AI companies, he thinks that the laws are too in favor of publishers and copyright holders and that they should be relaxed to allow AI companies to operate more easily. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We don’t have regulatory clarity. So there are now 80 lawsuits around the AI world. So it’s going to be just who has more lawyers. And that’s going to end up with just a few gigantic players. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, I’m actually so surprised that he’s pro-AI. We’ve talked a lot about how AI has ushered in this era where everything is essentially editable. So yeah, for somebody who’s so preoccupied with the preservation and accurate recording of history, I was surprised that he’d be so on board with technology that seems to be like the antithesis of that in some ways. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. One thing that is clear is that the outcomes of these AI lawsuits could impact the Internet Archive because they’re both about the enforcement of copyright law. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, it seems like there’s this trade-off where if you want a free and accessible internet where information is free and accessible, you also have to expect it to be scrapable. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">100%. And the Internet Archive does similar kinds of scraping techniques that AI companies do, like you said. Overall, it seems that he thinks that’s a trade-off worth making. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we have the Internet Archive, this organization that provides all these public services that the internet has become dependent on. And we also have this massive lawsuit that threatens to shut the organization down. I mean, it feels like we’re in a moment where that possibility is more concerning than ever. We have political turbulence, disinformation, these new AI technologies that are making it harder and harder to get the truth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wait Morgan, Morgan… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think that’s a new tab? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, you know what? You’re so right, Chris. Do you wanna do the honors? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would love to. Let’s open a new tab. What happens if the Internet Archive goes away? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We talked about this at the top of the episode, but the Internet Archive plays such a critical role in our information ecosystem. And like Brewster says, our ability to go back and check the record. I mean, that’s what we lose when we lose the Internet Archive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s such an important issue, especially right now. Brewster says that after each presidential term, they go through and catalog all of the government websites, including the ones we talked about earlier. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have, since the year 2004, gone and done an end of term crawl to go and record all the federal websites that we possibly can to go and download and preserve what it looked like before the change and then right away after the change. And are there changes? Yes. Are there always changes? Yes. Are there changes that you agree with? Depends on how you voted, but the idea of library is we’re there to preserve the record. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the logical question is, what if it does shut down? What then? Has Brewster even entertained this idea? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think it’s hard for him to go there. Like, this is his life’s work. But he has definitely thought about the threat that looms if our ability to preserve our understanding of the past goes away. So he references George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future from the book 1984. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The image of the memory hole is just the idea that next to your desk is this hole that you can go and put the only copy of that newspaper in an incinerator and be able to change history is upon us. The average life of a web page is 100 days before it’s changed or deleted. If we do not actively collect them and preserve them and keep them accessible, we’re living in the memory whole universe of George Orwell. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, okay, is there any hope here? Is there only option to just give it and crawl into a memory hole and accept it? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think we have to accept the memory hole, and I certainly hope that we don’t. But I’ll wrap up with an observation about Brewster himself. So what struck me about him the most was he just has this unrelenting optimism. He seems to truly love what he does, and he believes in it so strongly, and he’s cultivated this team around him that really shares in that vision. So, even with the looming threat of this extinction-level lawsuit coming up from the music publishers, it’s like he can’t quite bring himself to imagine that the Internet Archive could really go away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I think we’re doing fine. I think that there might be pieces of the Internet Archive that are chiseled away by very powerful interests, but the idea of a library or even just the Internet Archive as an organization has got lots of support. So, can the Internet Archive go away? Yes. Would it be a bad thing, I would think so. But I think the real issues are going to be whether the legislatures and the judiciary go and side with people’s access to information in some way or another. We’ll see that play out over the next 25 years of the Internet Archive’s life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For Brewster, it’s about the Internet Archive, of course, but it’s also so much more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know the words exactly, but in every librarian’s mind, those who control the past control the present, those who control the present control the future. The idea of a library is part of an ecosystem of how society remembers. That’s how it thinks of itself. If you were to erase the Internet Archive and the libraries, which is in many ways happening now, then we will live in a danger of having people be able to recast what happened. Oh, as a society that believes in universal education and the fulfillment of individual possibility, we just can’t let that happen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So are you ready to close these tabs? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Our producer is Maya Cueva. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Additional music by APM. Mixing, mastering and additional sound design by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram at CloseAllTabsPod. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For decades, the Internet Archive has preserved our digital history. Lately, journalists and ordinary citizens have been turning to it more than ever, as the Trump administration undertakes an ideologically-driven purge of government websites. But the Archive itself faces an existential threat. In this episode, Close All Tabs Senior Editor Chris Egusa joins Morgan to discuss his visit to the Internet Archive and its colorful founder Brewster Kahle, the legal battles that could shut it down permanently — and what losing it might mean for accountability and the preservation of history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4918161208\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guests:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://brewster.kahle.org/\">Brewster Kahle\u003c/a>, Founder of the Internet Archive\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Further reading:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/internet-archive-major-label-music-lawsuit-1235105273/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – Jon Blistein, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rolling Stone\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.techradar.com/pro/open-internet-web-scraping-and-ai-the-unbreakable-link\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Open Internet, web scraping, and AI: the unbreakable link\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julius Cerniauskas, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TechRadar\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/musicians-demand-music-labels-drop-their-internet-archive-lawsuit-214139644.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAK2IFY7PAMZw0BT91Rg2Pvhx66osGJFtnuFHxCEEx9slXFq6Lu1c6VJvuUZm0sVSQBFj11ViHZ6hZN6a_JMUEDU_hhjxeh_HxVHNP47DDOj9w5pnFaUWg81zH_miG2pKzGHH68STu0eXU_K2zFYpaJcNSunaSm1U71VVfyL2DIlF\">Musicians demand music labels drop their Internet Archive lawsuit\u003c/a> — Ian Carlos Campbell, \u003ci>Engadget\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is The Purge… Of government websites. Since President Trump’s inauguration, federal agency and military websites have been wiped. Some are gone completely, while others have been overhauled to remove any references to so-called woke terminology, all in this effort to comply with an executive order to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it seems like in the rush to remove all of these woke words, there were maybe some unintentional cuts, like when the Department of Defense took down a 1940s photo. It was a picture of a pilot, posing in front of one of the planes that dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what does this photo have to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion? Well, the plane was named the Enola Gay. It was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbitts. There are still other photos of the Enola Gay available on government websites, but in the past few months, countless pages with crucial information have been wiped from the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, for journalists, historians, and anyone who cares about keeping track of facts, there’s a tool that lets us go back and see exactly how those websites have changed. Unfortunately, that very tool is under threat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cem>Close All Tabs\u003c/em> Senior Editor \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is gonna walk us through this magical tool called the Wayback Machine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I already have a tab open. It’s the current version of the State Department’s safety tips for queer people traveling abroad. And you have your own tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s the same web page, same URL, but I have gone back in time, kind of. That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in. It’s part of this organization called the Internet Archive. And for the past 30 years, it’s basically scraped the internet page by page and archived it. So if you have a URL or link to a website, you can go back and see all the ways that that website has changed. I used the Wayback Machine to look at the page from January 5th, before this executive order. At the top of the page, it’s addressed to LGBTQI plus travelers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Unlike the one I’m seeing, the one that’s currently live, which just says, L-G-B Travelers. What else does your version have? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it has a lot of resources. It has instructions for changing your passport’s gender marker, warnings about conversion therapy practices in other countries, and also links to the National Center for Transgender Equality and other organizations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, this current one I have on my screen doesn’t have any of that, just no warnings about conversion therapy and definitely none of those resources for trans people. There’s actually no mention of trans people at all. They kept a link to the Trevor Project, but they made a point to say that it’s an organization for LGB youth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which is wild, because the Trevor Project is very involved in advocating for trans youth and gender-affirming care. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, and again, this is just one page out of who knows how many that have been altered to take the T out of LGBT. How panicked should we be about the scale of erasure of public information? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, this has happened before. During Trump’s first term, pages about climate change and the environment were altered to soften the language, or they were just wiped entirely. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But that purge wasn’t nearly as expansive or haphazard as the one we’re currently living through, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No, but I think it has prepared a lot of us for a situation like this. This time around, a lot more people are relying on the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, and in all of this mess, the existence of the internet archive itself is under threat, which could spell trouble for the future of all online libraries. So to get a better understanding of it all, Chris, you went to the archive in person a few weeks ago. Let’s start there. Let’s make that our first tab. What is the Internet Archive? You know, when I think of the Internet Archive, I’m thinking of like the Matrix, Cyberchase, when they’re like running through this kind of like cloud and there are just binary numbers everywhere. But the Internet Archive is a real physical location. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, no, it’s a real place. It is not in the Matrix. It is in San Francisco in the Richmond district. It’s in this very grand building and out front it has these huge Greek columns that kind of line the entrance of it. They actually chose the building in part because it resembles the archive’s logo, which is the columns of the Library of Alexandria. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Library of Alexandria. I mean, that is like the Greek idea of a universal library. That’s a pretty lofty idea to aspire to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is. And the organization isn’t shy about their ambitions. Their stated mission is to provide, quote, universal access to all knowledge. According to their website, the archive currently contains, and I’m just gonna reel off a bunch of numbers here, 835 billion webpages. I think last I checked, that number’s actually close to a trillion. 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, and on and on. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a lot, like, I can’t even quite conceptualize what a trillion web pages even looks like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Chris, tell me, what was the archive actually like? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was actually really cool. Brewster Kahle is the founder of the archive and he was really excited to give me a tour and introduce me to all kinds of old media devices they’d collected over the years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Edison invented these cylinders in 1880. Mostly, you know, things that you’ve never heard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So yeah, right when we got there, we go up some stairs and he shows me this very vintage, beautiful old gramophone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a Victor Talking Machine 5 from 1927. So it’s a old 78 RPM player, no electricity, it’s a crank, has a horn, so spinning up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Song: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey / A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know if you recognize that song, but it immediately made me think of Twin Peaks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes! Yes, it does. I am right in the middle of my rewatch right now, so… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I need to do a re-watch in David Lynch’s honor, for sure. Yeah, and then when he started playing this, he then started dancing around the room, which is just like-. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Audrey Horne. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Song: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A little bit jumbled and jivey \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So after visiting this little museum area, Brewster takes me into this huge room and it has this beautiful domed ceiling. It used to be a Christian Science Church. The whole building did. There are all these lines of pews that are facing where the pulpit used to be. And in place of that pulpit, there’s this huge projector screen. And so they use this place for like movie screenings, for local community events and things. But there is one thing that draws your eye more than anything else in the room. That is the statues. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Statues? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they are these hundreds of terracotta figures. They are about waist high, and each one of them has distinct features in clothing. And they’re all kind of facing forward, like they’re congregants in this hall of worship. Haunting. So it’s a bit of an eerie scene, but according to Brewster… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you work for the archive for three years, then we make a little statue. Basically tributes to the people that made the organization happen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So not like framed photos, just a three foot statue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, exactly. And they’re really detailed. Another employee was with us on the tour. His name is Chris Freeland. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Freeland: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s weird to be standing here in front of a terracotta statue of yourself, but here we are. It does look like me, and that’s also uncanny. Everyone says they got the beard right, which is making me sad, since it is covered in gray and no longer brown, or red-brown, like it was when I was, you know, 20 years younger, but here we are. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all these statues are standing in the pews and around the outside of the room, facing the front, sort of at attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know what this reminds me of? It’s that terracotta army that’s like protecting the tomb of like the first emperor of China. And they’re meant to like protect the emperor in the afterlife. And I guess it’s fitting because these statues look like they’re, I don’t know, protecting the internet ephemera long after it’s gone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s actually very appropriate because behind all of these statues in the very back of the room is where the servers live. Um, he tells me that they hold 145 petabytes of data, which I don’t deal in petabytes, it’s the one after terabyte. Um, so it’s a lot. And yeah, these are the servers where all of the billions of web pages, videos, and audio, where all of it lives. There’s a cool moment actually, like when you stare at these devices, you see all of these twinkling blue lights flashing and flickering across them, um, like hundreds a second. And here is what Brewster told me about that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every time a light blinks is somebody uploading or downloading something from the Internet Archive. I think that the technology reflects the people that make it, so let’s make it beautiful. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That sounds almost magical. I mean, I get how this could be like a religious experience. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, and I almost compare it to the way that old cathedrals were meant to evoke that sense of awe. It was hard not to feel a little awestruck being in that place. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These servers hold some non-trivial percentage of all of the published works of humankind. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so tell me about Brewster, the guy who founded this whole thing, started this statue army and this cathedral of servers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, as you can already tell, Brewster is pretty eccentric and he kind of comes from that old school vision of the internet where he thinks it should be free and open. He really feels that now power is way too concentrated in a few big companies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Companies often don’t sell anything anymore. They just license it. Now, if you use Netflix or Spotify, you don’t even have a video library like you used to with DVDs or you don’t have MP3s on your device or records in your collections. So there’s been this shift by the large-scale publishers towards ongoing control of materials and surveillance of what it is being viewed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They believe that most things should be open and available to the public, and especially that old things should be preserved, even old webpages. And so that’s where you get the Wayback Machine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have the World Wide Web on Archive.org, available back to 1996, so you can go and find your old webpages, your old GeoCity sites, or whatever it is that you’ve done in the past. But it also is relevant to people currently. Journalists are using it a lot to find, well, what did that person say? And they’re saying something kind of different. um… and they said they never said that well no we don’t know we found that in the television news archive and you can search and find this on television transcripts uh… back to 2009.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you can tell that Brewster is old school because he uses the phrase worldwide web, which I love. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So vintage of him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it is kind of miraculous. I do feel that you can go back and look at a website like that and see exactly what it looked like, but there’s no other place that that exists. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so clearly the Internet Archive is this incredible resource. Is it true that it might shut down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, let’s talk about it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, let’s open a new tab on that, but right after this break. Okay, new tab, Internet Archive Lawsuits. So let’s talk about these lawsuits that the Internet Archive is facing. They’re not about the Wayback Machine or the webpage archiving, right? They’re about a totally different part of the archive’s operations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Internet Archive also has these huge operations where they preserve old physical media. In some cases, the stuff they’re preserving is very clearly public material that is for public access. Like they have this program called Democracy’s Library, where they go and digitize all the print records for all kinds of government agencies. But they also digitize things like books and music, and sometimes that includes copyrighted material. So there are two specific lawsuits at the center of this. The first was a case called Hachette v. Internet Archive, and that was brought against the Internet Archive by book publishers. They objected to the Archive’s practice of digitizing books and lending them out digitally, even though many of them were out of print. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but that sounds like a normal library thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it kind of is, though there is a wrinkle to it because of this program they did in 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns. So before, the archive operated kind of how libraries normally do. They have a certain number of licenses, you can check each book out, but during this time it became unlimited access for anyone. Though I will say that Brewster and his team strongly dispute the idea that the case was about this pandemic era program at all. They say the lawsuit had been planned before that program ever started. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Either way, after a lengthy appeals process, the judge did rule against them, and the judgment required the Internet Archive to pay publishers an undisclosed amount. And even though the lawsuit was about like these specific 127 copyrighted works, the Archive ended up removing over 500,000 books from their digital collection, which free speech and pro-access people were very upset about because a lot of these books aren’t available anywhere else. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that brings us to this next lawsuit. This was brought on by the music industry, two major record labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. What can you tell us about this case? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this suit was brought against them in 2023 and it centers around another one of the Internet Archive’s programs. This one is called the Great 78 Project. And 78 stands for 78 RPM records. It’s a format that was super popular from the 1890s to like the late 1950s. And this program was this massive communal undertaking to digitize and preserve these very old 78s. They digitized and cataloged more than 400,000 of these recordings since starting the project in 2017. And they made those recordings available to the public to stream on their website. And the key here is how they thought about this project. They felt like they were undertaking the preservation of a defunct technology and the sound of American culture in a bygone era. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those older materials that were sort of foundational of what did America sound like are so obsolete that we went and we circulated in the industry conferences to say, “okay, there’s going to be this project, the Great 78 Project,” and libraries and archives, a hundred different ones came together to go inform this. The industry knew about it. They were all supportive that when we talked to them, it was all great. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the record labels saw things differently. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They definitely did. In their lawsuit, the labels called the Great 78 Project quote, “wholesale theft of generations of music.” And they claim that by making the records available to stream for free, that the Internet Archive was displacing streams that generate royalties on platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, royalties that could have gone to either the platforms themselves or the copyright holders like the artists. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, do they have a point? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So obviously I’m not a legal expert, but here’s what the record labels say. In the suit, they’re focusing on 4,000 specific recordings that do have copyright protections. They are commercially available and many of them are still very popular, including Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, which is the best-selling single of all time. So I think it’s gonna be tough. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we know what the actual amount that they’re suing for is, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s $621 million. And just to put it in perspective, the Internet Archive’s operating budget is a tiny fraction of that, just around $30 million. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If we’re found guilty of being a library and then that will cost us, yes, it would snuff the Internet Archive. And that may be the point. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s pretty bleak. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah it is. I will also add that regardless of where you land on, okay, was this copyright infringement or not, the details of the case strike me as kind of strange. First thing is there were a notably small number of streams per audio file in question. Um, like hundreds, or, you know, in some cases a few thousand. But not like hundreds of thousands or millions. And so, if you actually convert the number of streams to a dollar amount based on how much Spotify royalties pay, you’re generally looking at a couple of dollars per audio file. A bit more in a few cases. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So clearly publishers are not experiencing, you know, dramatic monetary loss due to these relatively small number of streams. Right? But the record companies, they still decided to sue for the maximum amount under the law, which is $150,000 per record, even though they could have sued for less. They also never even asked the Internet Archive to take the records down. They never received a request. They were just slapped with this lawsuit.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And if we had gotten that list, we would have taken it down. And we did, once they sued it, you just give us the list and we would have taken them down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the other thing is, and I’m not saying that this argument will hold up in court, but like, I think about a platform like YouTube, right? YouTube gets copyrighted material uploaded to it constantly. And the way it works is that when an interested copyright holding party requests that they remove certain content, that content then gets taken down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, that’s the way the internet basically works and those 78s are on YouTube. So it’s, so we basically have a, they’re after something else. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He thinks the publishing companies are going after the library system itself, the ability for people to access materials for free. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bigger picture that’s going on and the real contest is not about money, it’s actually about control. Can libraries own anything in the digital world? Is there digital ownership? That’s the central characteristic. And there’s a question, “is the United States going to have libraries have their traditional roles of buying, preserving, lending and interlibrary loan?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the case itself likely won’t move forward until later this year, so we’ll have to wait and see how that develops. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, changing gears a little bit. We are a tech show, so I feel like we’re almost contractually obligated to mention AI somehow in almost every episode that we make. But I don’t know, Chris, that feels like a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think so. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, new tab, Internet Archive and AI Legal Battles. AI companies have also been hit by big lawsuits from publishers, and you may not think of it at first, but AI companies like ChatGPT and the Internet Archive have some similarities. They both use tools to scrape the web for data and text and other content. Of course, what they do is different. The Internet Archive stores and preserves it, while AI companies use it to train their models. What’s Brewster’s take on AI? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So he’s a big proponent actually. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re using the AI technologies for a bunch of what may seem like mundane tasks, but are super helpful. Like putting metadata on all these government documents. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He says that one of the big problems with a site like the Internet Archive is that there’s just so much stuff on there. Organization can be a struggle and people visiting the site can get overwhelmed. AI can make all of that easier by tagging and categorizing the billions of pieces of media they have to make them more easily findable. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, if you go to archive.org anecdotally people say, “You know you kind of arrive and it’s just huge and it’s a mass and holy crow and I don’t know where to start!” And so if we could make that on ramp easier wouldn’t that be fantastic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as the lawsuits against AI companies, he thinks that the laws are too in favor of publishers and copyright holders and that they should be relaxed to allow AI companies to operate more easily. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We don’t have regulatory clarity. So there are now 80 lawsuits around the AI world. So it’s going to be just who has more lawyers. And that’s going to end up with just a few gigantic players. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, I’m actually so surprised that he’s pro-AI. We’ve talked a lot about how AI has ushered in this era where everything is essentially editable. So yeah, for somebody who’s so preoccupied with the preservation and accurate recording of history, I was surprised that he’d be so on board with technology that seems to be like the antithesis of that in some ways. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. One thing that is clear is that the outcomes of these AI lawsuits could impact the Internet Archive because they’re both about the enforcement of copyright law. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, it seems like there’s this trade-off where if you want a free and accessible internet where information is free and accessible, you also have to expect it to be scrapable. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">100%. And the Internet Archive does similar kinds of scraping techniques that AI companies do, like you said. Overall, it seems that he thinks that’s a trade-off worth making. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so we have the Internet Archive, this organization that provides all these public services that the internet has become dependent on. And we also have this massive lawsuit that threatens to shut the organization down. I mean, it feels like we’re in a moment where that possibility is more concerning than ever. We have political turbulence, disinformation, these new AI technologies that are making it harder and harder to get the truth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wait Morgan, Morgan… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think that’s a new tab? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, you know what? You’re so right, Chris. Do you wanna do the honors? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would love to. Let’s open a new tab. What happens if the Internet Archive goes away? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We talked about this at the top of the episode, but the Internet Archive plays such a critical role in our information ecosystem. And like Brewster says, our ability to go back and check the record. I mean, that’s what we lose when we lose the Internet Archive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s such an important issue, especially right now. Brewster says that after each presidential term, they go through and catalog all of the government websites, including the ones we talked about earlier. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have, since the year 2004, gone and done an end of term crawl to go and record all the federal websites that we possibly can to go and download and preserve what it looked like before the change and then right away after the change. And are there changes? Yes. Are there always changes? Yes. Are there changes that you agree with? Depends on how you voted, but the idea of library is we’re there to preserve the record. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the logical question is, what if it does shut down? What then? Has Brewster even entertained this idea? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think it’s hard for him to go there. Like, this is his life’s work. But he has definitely thought about the threat that looms if our ability to preserve our understanding of the past goes away. So he references George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future from the book 1984. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The image of the memory hole is just the idea that next to your desk is this hole that you can go and put the only copy of that newspaper in an incinerator and be able to change history is upon us. The average life of a web page is 100 days before it’s changed or deleted. If we do not actively collect them and preserve them and keep them accessible, we’re living in the memory whole universe of George Orwell. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, okay, is there any hope here? Is there only option to just give it and crawl into a memory hole and accept it? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think we have to accept the memory hole, and I certainly hope that we don’t. But I’ll wrap up with an observation about Brewster himself. So what struck me about him the most was he just has this unrelenting optimism. He seems to truly love what he does, and he believes in it so strongly, and he’s cultivated this team around him that really shares in that vision. So, even with the looming threat of this extinction-level lawsuit coming up from the music publishers, it’s like he can’t quite bring himself to imagine that the Internet Archive could really go away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I think we’re doing fine. I think that there might be pieces of the Internet Archive that are chiseled away by very powerful interests, but the idea of a library or even just the Internet Archive as an organization has got lots of support. So, can the Internet Archive go away? Yes. Would it be a bad thing, I would think so. But I think the real issues are going to be whether the legislatures and the judiciary go and side with people’s access to information in some way or another. We’ll see that play out over the next 25 years of the Internet Archive’s life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For Brewster, it’s about the Internet Archive, of course, but it’s also so much more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brewster Kahle:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know the words exactly, but in every librarian’s mind, those who control the past control the present, those who control the present control the future. The idea of a library is part of an ecosystem of how society remembers. That’s how it thinks of itself. If you were to erase the Internet Archive and the libraries, which is in many ways happening now, then we will live in a danger of having people be able to recast what happened. Oh, as a society that believes in universal education and the fulfillment of individual possibility, we just can’t let that happen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So are you ready to close these tabs? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Our producer is Maya Cueva. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Egusa\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Additional music by APM. Mixing, mastering and additional sound design by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram at CloseAllTabsPod. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"politicalbreakdown": {
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
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"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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"reveal": {
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"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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},
"rightnowish": {
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"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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},
"science-friday": {
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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"snap-judgment": {
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"title": "Snap Judgment",
"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
"info": "The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap's musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. This is storytelling... with a BEAT!! Snap first aired on public radio stations nationwide in July 2010. Today, Snap Judgment airs on over 450 public radio stations and is brought to the airwaves by KQED & PRX.",
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},
"soldout": {
"id": "soldout",
"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
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