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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
I read that post and I thought "this is nuclear-grade culture war fodder."
In his analysis, money in politics was an underused weapon- either going to groups that don't really need it (generic voting ads), or just not enough of it (very low hard-money contributions to reps in competitive elections). The one exception is AIPAC, which has apparently minmaxed the system to wield massive power for decades. Everyone knows this, every politician is afraid of AIPAC, every political strategist admires their success, but no one has managed to copy it. Not the tobacco industry, not big oil, not any other foreign country- the Israeli lobbyists are just in a league of their own when it comes to buying influence in washington. And they don't even spend that much.
If that's true (and many comments raise questions about how true any of this is)... how do you not feel incensed? It's almost literally "Jews run the government," a least on the specific issues that they care about. And maybe now apparently some tech-billionares are starting to copy that strategy, so we'll have a few of them running it to. But definitely nothing like a respresentative democracy. We count even counter them by using the same tactics because... I don't know, apparently everyone else is just too stupid and disorganized to pull off anything similar.
I think Scott wrote it just thinking it's interesting that the total money in politics is still so low. But... iti's hard not to read and that and think "something here is corrupt and fishy as hell."
In my own personal opinion I think AIPAC can't be replicated unless you have your own Epstein. Money comes and goes but Blackmail material could very well be more valuable than gold in forcing people to your whims.
In my personal opinion, I think that’s stupid. If you could wave some Polaroids around and coerce Congress, why would you bother spending all the money?
Better yet. Scott gave an example of AIPAC deploying its money to win an election. Can you give me one where they did the same with their magical kid-diddling blackmail?
But I think we’ve had this argument before.
Regardless of anything else having to do with this conversation, there is absolutely no reason that anyone should have to explain to you that these options aren't mutually exclusive.
Of course not.
I still wanted to know how it worked in his model.
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