Crypto winter had just started when software engineer Molly White launched her blog, Web3 is going just great. She’s now one of the most influential blockchain skeptics.
Molly White spoke with Protocol about her blog and her thoughts as a crypto skeptic.
Crypto was wrapping up a go-go year when Molly White launched her blog, Web3 is going just great.
Things weren’t exactly going great for crypto in December 2021. There were signs then that an impressive upsurge had come to an end and was on the precipice of a stunning crash: a crypto winter.
White created the blog precisely to turn the spotlight on the even more serious havoc that she feared crypto was going to wreak — not just on the startups and investors rushing into the field, but also people betting their life savings on tokens they’d barely researched after hearing about them online.
“It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
Web3 is going just great rapidly attracted an audience, and now gets 60,000 to 100,000 visitors a month, White said. Its Twitter account already has 114,000 followers. She only started the account in January.
White, 29, was a teenager when bitcoin launched in 2009. She is part of a generation of software engineers who entered the tech industry in the past decade when the crypto revolution was underway. Many of her peers ended up joining the crypto wave. White went the other way, emerging as one of crypto’s leading critics.
In an interview with Protocol, White, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, talked about her journey as a young technologist and why she became a crypto contrarian.
This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.
Your blog is called “Web3 is going just great.” You clearly have a specific view of Web3 and crypto. Do you think it’s all a scam, as some critics have argued?
I wouldn’t say it’s all a scam. I feel that implies that every person running one of these projects is intentionally trying to take advantage of people, which I don’t think is true. I do think the technology as a whole and a lot of the promise of it has been really overblown. But I wouldn’t say that it’s all a scam, per se.
You told the Financial Stability Oversight Council that you are “cautiously optimistic about some digital asset use cases, specifically the introduction of non-crypto-based digital cash.” Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
There have been some ideas of introducing other forms of digital cash which don’t actually require a blockchain to implement. We use what some could argue is digital currency already today when we transfer money electronically.
I think it would be really valuable for there to be more of a cash equivalent to something like that where you actually get the same privacy and surveillance expectations of cash with a digital currency. It’s not being traced as closely as digital transactions are. You’re allowed to make small transactions very privately.
I think that would be really beneficial for society to have something like that. But I think as soon as you start looking at crypto and blockchains, you end up with a more speculative asset that has a lot of inherent flaws and tends to not work so well as currency. I remain hopeful that there might be some sort of digital cash in our future but I don’t necessarily expect that it will look like a cryptocurrency.
You were studying computer science in college when bitcoin and the crypto realm were getting started. How were you introduced to crypto and what was your reaction?
I was actually a little younger than that when bitcoin first emerged. I was aware of it pretty early. I have been involved with the Wikimedia communities for a long time, which has a really strong overlap with free software communities and people who are really interested in freedom from surveillance and online privacy. I ran into it in those circles first. I thought it was interesting as a concept, but not something I necessarily had a use for.
Back then, I mostly knew of bitcoin as a way to buy drugs online, which is kind of what it was for at first. Or at least that was the biggest use case for it. And I was not doing that. It was like, “OK, I guess people can go do that,” but it’s not really something I was interested in.
The other use case was the people who thought that it was going to become much more valuable in the future. So they were putting money into it for speculative purposes. Well, I was in either late high school or college, and I didn’t have a ton of money just kicking around that I was trying to speculate with. It was something that I knew about but wasn’t particularly interested in.
I thought some of the aspects of it around censorship-resistant financial transactions was really interesting and the potential for it to be used to fund people who are not necessarily in the good graces of an authoritarian state, I thought there was promise in that. But as time went on, I watched what it became, which was largely quite different from the original principles of it.
Was there an incident or a development or maybe a conversation you had that made you become concerned about the rise of crypto?
I grew increasingly concerned as the years went on. I was vaguely aware of what was happening in the 2017-ish era when ICOs were really big and a lot of people were using those to skirt regulations on securities offerings.
I really started to become concerned in the summer of 2021. It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person. Anyone watching a sports game on TV or riding public transit in some places were getting bombarded with this idea that crypto was a good idea for someone to potentially make money off of, as though it was an investment or something that everyone should be trying out.
Then we started to see the narrative that crypto was going to be the future of the web with Web3. Every new project online was going to be using blockchains in some way. That’s when I really started to get concerned and to pay attention. I was really worried that people were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly. There was this magical, “Well, it’s computers, so it will work” feeling around it, which is obviously never true on its own. And I was also really concerned about the idea that this is how the web should be going forward.
I’ve always been someone who cares a lot about the web. I think it is quite amazing. I really like to see projects on the web that are benefiting humanity and moving in a good direction. The idea that everything should start incorporating blockchain, I was like, “Should it?” So I started doing some more research around that.
You’re part of the generation of software engineers who joined the tech industry in the early 2010s, many of whom became excited about and even became part of the crypto industry. But you went the other way.
It’s interesting because I actually don’t feel like software engineers in general have been overwhelmingly positive about it. A lot of the software engineers I know actually were very skeptical of it, especially when we started seeing things like NFTs and some of these schemes that were more plainly get-rich-quick schemes.
I remain hopeful that there might be some sort of digital cash in our future but I don’t necessarily expect that it will look like a cryptocurrency.
I think a lot of people actually took a look at the technology behind it [and said]: “Why is this the future of the web? I don’t understand how this is such an improvement.” I’ve actually spoken to quite a lot of software engineers in my generation and other generations who were actually very skeptical of it.
But there are definitely software engineers and other people who are very positive about it as well. Some people are actually very open about the fact that they don’t see much promise in the technology, but they realize they can make a lot of money. That’s been a fairly common thing I’ve run into.
So it’s like saying, “We’ll stick with this because there’s VC money flowing into this, and when it’s clearly not working we’ll get out?”
Yeah, that’s sort of the idea. Sometimes it’s not necessarily people who are starting companies. It’s like, “I’m going to go work for a crypto company because the salaries are incredible,” even though they don’t necessarily believe in the product that they’re working on. It’s just a great paycheck.
Tell me about the idea to start the blog. How did you come up with the name?
I launched it in mid-December [2021]. I was seeing two really different stories. I was seeing in both mainstream media and in tech media this narrative that crypto is making all these people rich. You can get such good returns if you start putting money into crypto. Look at all these people who have brought themselves out of poverty because they started a crypto project or they started selling NFTs.
Then on the other hand, I was seeing this stream of news stories that was like, “Oh, another project got hacked” or “Oh no, someone lost all their NFTs because someone got their wallet address or their wallet keys.”
It felt like I was seeing a lot of the first story in mainstream media. But the second one was going unreported.
So I started, on my own, keeping a list of examples of how often this was happening, scams were being run, hacks were happening. It began to become clear to me that it might be useful to illustrate this in one place instead of people just having to see a tweet or a news story or a one-off post or whatever.
That was the idea behind the project. As for the name, I just have a sarcastic, dry sense of humor. It felt like every time I was like, “How’s this whole Web3 going?” I would just find myself thinking, “Wow, it seems like it’s going just great.”
What have been the most troubling reactions?
Sometimes people get really mad at me personally for writing these things, especially if they have some stake in a project or they are personally involved with a project in some way. They see what I am doing as basically drawing attention to the negatives of their project, and that threatens their bottom line.
Sometimes people get pretty aggressive with me. In general, there’s people in the crypto community who are just hostile to any negative reaction or negative coverage of the space because they see it as threatening to crypto as a whole.
You told the FSOC that concerns about crypto regulations stifling innovation are “overblown” and that “the most impressive innovation we have seen with crypto has been in separating average people from their money.” That’s a pretty sweeping statement. What reactions have you gotten when you raise that argument?
People will just deny it. They’ll say, “Oh, crypto has been so revolutionary. It’s changed people’s lives.” And you press on that question and people tend to say, “Well, it’s made some people very wealthy,” which is true. But you could say the same thing about a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme.
It makes some people really wealthy and isn’t necessarily a revolutionary idea. Most people are really excited about what they think crypto might be able to do in the future rather than what it is doing today. And I think that’s a problem. I don’t think it’s reasonable to regulate or legislate around what something might possibly do in the future, especially when there isn’t that much evidence that we can really get from where we are today with crypto to this utopian future where crypto is perfect and there aren’t all of these issues with it that are actually very fundamental to the technology.
It’s almost as if someone said, “You shouldn’t ban fossil fuels because when we figure out how to burn coal without creating any emissions, you’re gonna be stifling the electricity industry.” You have to look at these things and say, “Well, is that actually possible? Should we be making decisions based on what might possibly happen at some point?”
Crypto has also been compared to the dot-com era when people were also skeptical about a new technology called the web, which eventually grew and thrived. Some argue the same could happen with crypto.
There’s two things there. The first thing is I think people actually overstate to some extent how skeptical people were of the early web. I think people had some questions around: Can the internet ever support something like streaming video? Or how it might actually be able to evolve. But I think people got the idea why the internet might be useful, why email might be useful, why these websites are useful in ways that I think don’t quite correlate to crypto.
I also think that it’s a bold statement to compare something like crypto or Web3 to the internet. The internet was a revolutionary technology, and by all real accounts, enormously successful. It’s become enormously popular. Pretty much everyone uses it to some extent.
I feel that you need to make the argument for why your technology is like the internet versus something more akin to, say, 3D TV. People were really excited about it at one point, but it never really took off the way that some people imagined. You can say that any technology is like the internet and you should just stop being skeptical of it, and everyone should get on board and you don’t want to be laughed at in the future for saying it has no promise. But you have to make the argument that the technology is actually more akin to the internet than some other examples of technologies that people had been excited about but have not actually lived up to their promises.
Crypto proponents also argue that blockchain could address the problem related to the concentration and abuse of data, which has become a serious issue, especially with social media and other platforms. How do you respond to those arguments?
It’s one of those things where people will make these bold statements like that. And other people will see that and be like, “Wow, that sounds great.” And suddenly it becomes a part of the narrative that blockchains are more secure, your data belongs to you, these companies aren’t going to be monetizing your data in the way that they are today.
But if you actually push back on those claims a little bit and say, “Wait a second, how is it any different if Facebook has your data stored on a blockchain? Or how is it actually better that all of this data is stored on a public ledger rather than a private database?”
The claims start to fall apart a little bit. I think we really just in general need to stop taking claims like that at face value, and try to understand how your project is actually going to try to be more secure than, name your big tech company …
AWS …
Yeah, exactly. How is that actually going to happen? We’ve looked at examples of crypto projects that have been running today and we’ve seen projects that absolutely are not more secure. And they are not more decentralized.
A lot of crypto is actually very centralized in very similar ways as today’s web. In fact, there are actually a lot of the same venture capitalists trying to get a stranglehold on Web3, the same people who have had a stranglehold on the current web. It really is important to question those base claims because they don’t really stand up to scrutiny.
What do you think of the current push to regulate crypto?
It is important that regulators get involved to some extent, because to date, they’ve been very slow to act, and I think the industry has really developed into this world of scams and grifts thanks to the lack of action from regulators. I’m glad to see that some regulators are beginning to pay a little more attention to it. But I’m also very worried about the regulatory capture that’s been happening and the amount of lobbying that has been coming from crypto groups.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to regulate or legislate around what something might possibly do in the future.
I’ve spoken to a fair number of legislators and regulators who are saying that basically they’re having a really hard time separating the truth from the marketing because they’re basically talking to mostly pro-crypto lobbyists. There aren’t that many people out there who can give a more neutral stance on it because no one’s paying lobbyists to lobby against crypto. That doesn’t really exist, right? There isn’t that much of a financial incentive to do that.
I really worry about how well-informed legislators and regulators are. There are certainly some who are quite knowledgeable about the industry, [SEC chair] Gary Gensler being one of them. But I think in general the level of understanding is actually quite low. I think the legislators are prone to accepting those statements that I referenced before that have become repeated as though they are inherently true. I’m worried that regulators are going to begin accepting those as truth and believe this whole idea that you can’t stifle innovation and you can’t put regulations in place or else all of this wonderful innovation won’t be able to happen.
I think that’s pretty absurd. There are a lot of regulated industries out there that innovate constantly. I don’t think having a complete free-for-all where people are able to run total scams is actually going to be good either for the crypto industry or for the general public. So it really worries me when I start hearing policymakers actually repeating those claims as well.
There was an uproar from the industry over a tax-reporting provision in the infrastructure bill that could impact developers and node operators, and regulators who argue that many crypto tokens are securities because there is a group of people in the middle who determine the way they develop. How do you react to these?
I think it’s complicated. I think that there are a lot of cryptocurrencies out there that are very clearly securities and that are very tightly controlled by the developing team or the group that has created it. I think a lot of those projects are hoping that they can claim to be decentralized or not controlled by a small entity in order to skirt securities regulations. I hope that the SEC actually starts taking a little more action against those groups because there are some where it is very clear that it is a security.
But I think it’s a complicated question. There are definitely arguments to be made that some of the cryptocurrencies that are popular today, like bitcoin and ether, are commodities or something more like a commodity than a security.
I don’t have a super strong opinion on that just because that is not my background. I’m not a securities lawyer by any stretch.
But I think a lot of it really does come down to the fact that the crypto industry would really like to be regulated by someone like the CFTC, which has a lot less resources and has generally been a lot more light-handed on the crypto industry than the SEC. I think a lot of the arguments have basically been made solely in pursuit of that goal.
What are your thoughts on the debate over Tornado Cash?
Boy, what a mess that was. I think it’s pretty clear that Tornado Cash was really enabling quite a lot of crime, including state-backed hacking groups out of North Korea and various other entities. That’s pretty hard to deny.
But the way that the government has gone about cracking down on that particular issue is a little bit concerning to me, partly in the sense that the individuals who have interacted with Tornado Cash since the sanctions were placed are now facing a pretty labor-intensive process of having to report their sanctions transaction with a sanction entity, potentially in perpetuity, like, forever.
In some cases, it is people who are sent money from Tornado Cash not necessarily out of their own choice. You know, people were “dusted” with funds from Tornado Cash to prove a point.
I do think it does prove the point that the way that this enforcement is being handled is very broad-strokes and threatens to catch a lot of really innocent people in the net.
I also think that for people who want to use cryptocurrency and who want to maintain some semblance of privacy on the chain, they don’t have a ton of options aside from using something like Tornado Cash, because in order to have any privacy in cryptocurrency you basically have to learn how to launder your own money. And Tornado Cash is a way of doing that. It’s forcing some people to choose between privacy and not risking interacting with a sanctioned entity.
Then there’s the question of the Tornado Cash developer who was arrested in the Netherlands. I think there’s a lot of questions there. It’s not clear exactly what he did, if it was that he just wrote the code or if it was because he was running a relay or what. I think the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster.
You mentioned in your blog letters sent by consumers to the judge handling the Voyager and Celsius bankruptcy cases. I wonder if there are specific letters or stories that really stand out for you and had an impact on you personally?
Those letters were really helpful in exposing the fact that not all of the people who are losing money in crypto are the stereotypical crypto investor. I think a lot of people picture a young male investor who has extra money kicking around and wants to gamble it on cryptocurrency. And if they lose it, it’s really not the end of the world. Maybe they shouldn’t have made that decision, but they’re still going to be able to pay their rent.
I think the Voyager and Celsius letters really show that it can be a very different type of person. A lot of those letters came from people who are elderly, or who had families relying on them. There were single moms, single dads. There were pensioners. It was a mix of people. They were not necessarily people who were making what they thought was a risky investment. A lot of them thought they were putting their money someplace that was similarly reliable or trustworthy as a bank.
That’s what really struck me about those letters. In some of these projects that were really marketing themselves as a safe option, there were a lot of really average people losing a ton of money and getting swept up into these schemes that they don’t fully understand.
One person was begging the judge to just release some of the money that he had in a Celsius account because he couldn’t afford to pay his mom’s medical bills. That one really stuck out to me. One woman attached an ultrasound photo of her baby and said, “I really need this money because I can’t pay for the things that my baby is going to need when it’s born in a couple of months.” Those really stuck out to me because that’s not the 22-year-old crypto bro who’s just wildly speculating. Those are real people with money they really couldn’t afford to lose on this kind of a bankruptcy.
You clearly have a following and are known as one of the prominent critics of the crypto industry. What’s your plan, and how do you see your role going forward?
I’m hoping to keep doing what I’m doing. I feel like the site has been pretty successful in tempering some people’s expectations. The goal of the site is not really to change the minds of the bitcoin maximalists and crypto evangelists who are pretty sold on crypto, but to encourage average people who are seeing the advertisements and seeing the stories about people becoming millionaires overnight to just take a second look at it and consider that maybe they’re not seeing the whole picture.
I’m just trying to make as much impact as I can as far as where this industry might go, how unregulated it might be allowed to continue to be. My goal is to just try to make a difference in what I see as a concerning direction of both the web and technology in general.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.
She’s bullish on generative AI given the “superpowers” it gives humans who work with it.
Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia, shared her thoughts about generative AI’s future.
Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.
Generative AI can create more than just text and images — it’s clearly generated a hype cycle around AI companies and rabid investor interest in the space.
In a bright spot for an otherwise lackluster funding environment, two “gen tech” companies became unicorns this week after Stability AI, the company behind the wildly popular image generator Stable Diffusion, and Jasper, which makes an AI-powered system that writes marketing copy, both announced funding rounds. The launch party for Stability AI drew people like Sergey Brin, Naval Ravikant, and Ron Conway into San Francisco for “a coming-out bash for the entire field of generative A.I.,” as The New York Times called it.
The buzz spilled over onto Twitter when a market map of companies in the space went viral after Sequoia partner Sonya Huang laid out the companies (including Stability AI and Jasper) that are building in generative AI, solidifying the space as a sector and not just a handful of companies making fanciful images.
A firm believer in the “superpowers” humans can gain by working with machines — she’s used the language model GPT-3 to help write a blog post on the future of generative AI — Huang talked with Protocol about what sectors founders are building in, the looming ethical concerns, and whether the hype in AI startups is overblown or justified.
This conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a market map go quite so viral on Twitter. Why do you think it generated — forgive the pun — so much attention when you posted it?
It’s speculative, but I think a few things. One, I would say I think the world is in dark times right now. People are looking for something to latch on to that is hope, and generative AI appears to be that. So I think part of it is just the emotional [impact] where we see so many terrible things happening in the world and [think], “Wow, what an exciting time to be in technology if you look at what’s now possible.”
Then the second thing is there’s been a lot of really exciting progress that’s been shared publicly in terms of models getting bigger, better, and amazing images that are flying around Twitter. But it was probably new to think about this as a model versus application layer. People were thinking, “OK, these models are not only going to be super interesting things that we can play with to make a fun image, but they’re actually going to drive the future of how we work and the next big application companies.” That was probably a new framing that people hadn’t really thought about in that way. Those are probably a couple of the reasons it took off, but it’s speculative. I don’t know what makes things go viral on Twitter. I’m not good at Twitter. [Laughs]
For me, it was interesting because I wrote a few weeks ago about how VCs were exploring whether this was a toy or the next big thing, and then there’s been this huge shift to VCs saying it’s definitely going to be the next big thing. Why do you think there has been a shift? Was it just companies announcing fundraises this week?
I think it’s market maturity. We’ve been following pretty closely these large models for the last several years, and if you look at what’s possible, it is pretty mind-blowing just the rate of progress. There is some benchmark, which is human-level performance, and now that these models are just in the last couple of years starting to exceed that, only then can you have AI that really, really augments how we work. Because if it’s not as good, the technology’s not ready. So the first thing I’d say is, the technology is finally getting ready.
Then the second thing is just that access to these models is now available. Obviously Stability has made an incredible amount of progress and developer interest because they’ve just made their models completely open. And OpenAI has also made their models more publicly available as well. I think GPT-3 was in closed beta until last year, if I’m remembering correctly. So these models are finally available for people to play with, which they weren’t before. Once technology becomes available for people to play with, it is very natural for step one to be very cool demos of what’s possible. I almost compare it to when the iPhone came out: It was a bunch of really gimmicky stuff that came out at first, but then you’ve got people who are really thinking about the business applications in deep ways, and we’re starting to see that.
This is obviously still a pretty nascent area, but where are you seeing most concentration of activity so far?
Image generation is a big one. Images speak to us so viscerally, and so they’re a lot more fun to share on Twitter than whatever GPT-3 could spit out for me. By nature, images are a lot more viral, so we’re seeing a lot there. People are moving on beyond one-shot image generation to a few different branches, whether it’s “Let’s make this really good for the process of interior design or product design” or “Let’s make it a really, really good image generator that you can continue innovating with the machine on” or “We want to take all these images that people are doing and the community we’ve built, and build the next big social media platform.” People are going different directions from image generation, but I would say that’s been an area of just incredible interest from both founders and from users because you need user interest for these things to work.
Then the other big category where there has been a lot has been in the text space. And in the text space, who needs to write all the time? Marketers. So there’s a lot of these marketing Gen AI companies, and some of them are really working. We’re seeing it evolve, as well, where people started from shorter-form generations and now we’re getting really, really long form. We’re getting creative writing, we’re getting scripts and novels. It’s pretty good.
And then code. Code is one that OpenAI has cultivated for a while, and I think GitHub Copilot is incredible. The stat — [that] they’re responsible for 40% of their users’ code — is just mind-blowing to me. I’ve seen the demos from Replit — it’s pretty extraordinary. And so code is the other effort where we’re seeing a lot of both exciting founder development and then also user interest.
The other categories — the boxes on our landscape that are relatively sparse now — I don’t think they’re gonna be sparse for long. When I first put out our blog post about how the tech and how the different pieces of technology are becoming ready, I thought 3D, video, bio, they were going to take longer based on some conversations. Basically everyone wrote in to me like, “You’re wrong, this stuff is happening way faster than you think it is.” And they were right. I think similar to what you saw with text and image happen where the models were a couple years back, I think you’ll start to see the application space start to flourish for these other modalities as well.
Are there any areas on the map that you left off that you’re excited to see happen someday? Any other to-be-discovered areas?
We organized the map by modality, which I thought was most relevant just because it’s the enabling technology that is creating the application within each box. I do think that a lot of the most interesting companies will own the end user, but they will be multimodality. I couldn’t fit that in a neat space on my map, but that would be one.
Another would be this concept of an AI companion or AI copilot. It doesn’t really fit neatly in the map anymore, but you have something intelligent — browse the web, stitch together all your different tools to do things for you — versus currently the map is very much focused on tools that you work with for a very specific test task.
What do you think about the hype cycle around AI right now?
Well, I would be alarmed if the hype was really high and the results weren’t there. The hype is high, and I think part of that is, again, people emotionally want to attach onto something that gives them hope and optimism, but the results are there as well. You see what these models are capable of doing. You see the fundamental technology. You see the applications that people are starting to build. I’ll go back to “writing 40% of people’s code” example — that is phenomenal both technological progress as well as economic value delivery. So absolutely the hype is high. I think it’s absolutely justified given the results that we’re seeing. My hope is actually that by putting out this landscape, we plant that seed and a lot of future founders that have been trying to figure out what to build next, I think it’s wonderful to draw them to this. If I was a founder in [Y Combinator] right now, I would 100% be pointing my guns at one of these models and seeing what I can do.
What about some of the ethical concerns? I spoke with Khosla’s Kanu Gulati about this a few weeks ago and there are some real concerns around copyright and other shortcomings in the space. What do you think the role of investors should be in addressing some of these?
Absolutely. I agree with the ethical concerns. The copyright concerns are a problem that’s really important and hasn’t been solved yet. There isn’t a legal framework for this stuff. Ideally, this is a constructive dialogue between all folks on all sides of the table because until there is that clarity, I think it’s very hard to make progress. I think our role would be helping ensure that whatever rules are crafted are clear so that once you have that clarity, everybody can innovate on all sides of the spectrum, and hopefully everybody feels good.
If I was a founder in [Y Combinator] right now, I would 100% be pointing my guns at one of these models and seeing what I can do.
One of my favorite responses to your map was if it was truly generative AI, it’d be able to generate a market map itself. Are we gonna get to that point anytime soon?
[Laughs] Actually, I’ll tell you how I created the map in the first place: I went into GPT-3.
Before even the map, we put out this blog post of what was going to happen. It wasn’t clear in my head even how to define generative AI. There was some stuff on the internet that wasn’t that good, and so I literally put it in OpenAI, “the difference between classical AI and generative AI,” and it started spitting out amazing stuff. So that became a lot of the base for our article. It wasn’t just a joke that the article was co-written with GPT-3; it actually was. And then, I’m not the most creative person, and I was having trouble brainstorming what the applications will be, so I typed into GPT-3, “the potential applications will be …” and then it started spitting out things, and I was like, “and then 10 more of them will be …” and it just kept on going, which is amazing. And then I’d be like, “Specifically for image generation, you can think of it as ….” That human-machine iteration loop I hadn’t experienced before, and it was very much how we created both the blog post and landscape.
It’s cool to see how the point of generative AI is that it can generate things that you don’t think about. It’s a new frontier for a lot of tech companies.
What I would have loved is if we have eight companies in a bucket on the map somewhere, I would have loved to have a natural way for having a machine that would browse the internet and find companies that sound similar and suggest them for my map. There isn’t a great product encapsulation for that yet, but as we dream about how this might play out, I would guess it’s probably not that far out.
I’m very curious if I can train a model on my newsletter and have it write my newsletter and then submit it to my editor to see if my editor can tell the difference of who wrote it. Although maybe I shouldn’t do that because I’d be out of a job one day.
I’ve had it write some investment memos for me and I swear it was as good as what I can write. [Laughs] To your point about being out of a job, I realize it was said in jest, but there’s the knowledge and the craft of being able to work with the machine and I think that is a new skill that we need to learn. But I think once you master it, you’re better than before, right? You’re more productive, you’re more creative, whatever it is, if you can really really embrace the machine. I don’t think there’s a world where the machine fully replaces us. We have to train how we work with the machines, but I think the result really is we are superpower humans as a result of being able to work with these machines.
Image: Sequoia
Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.
Today, companies across the world are facing unprecedented uncertainty. Consequences of the global pandemic, ongoing trade concerns and political conflicts have disrupted business operations, which has, in turn, exacerbated existing workforce issues, created supply shortages, and made demand forecasting and customer engagements more complex. How are businesses expected to thrive in this world order? According to a new report, the answer lies in the power of automation to stabilize workforces, drive economic growth, and build business resilience. Introducing the Automation Economy.
The Automation Economy—the focus this week at Imagine, and in response to Automation Anywhere’s third edition of the Automation Now & Next report—will accelerate how businesses scale automation and sustain performance. Of the 1,000 global organizations surveyed in the report, more than a third indicated automation will lead them out of global crises.
“Today’s business leaders must look beyond their current business processes and imagine how automation can enable them, and others, to make bolder moves and reimagine work,” says Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. “The reality is we just don’t have enough knowledge workers to do the work, and there’s much more work to be done. It doesn’t matter what you produce, but more importantly, how you are going to get the work completed and deliver the product to your customers?”
A fireside chat with Automation Anywhere youtu.be
For certain sectors, intelligent automation is a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. In financial services, automated processes can include loan payment management, car loan applications, bank account management and much more. In a case study published by Automation Anywhere, one data firm needed data to be converted from one system to another. The projected time for a vendor to finish this process was two years, but the migration was completed in just 12 weeks with automation and bots running 24/7.
In healthcare, automation can improve patient outcomes by supporting medical advancements, managing patient intake, scheduling, claims and billing, freeing staff to ensure patients get the care they need. In retail, automation services can make ERP and supply chain processes more-efficient, and can include creating and disseminating reports, clearing invoices, and checking payment status against service-level agreements (SLAs).
The C-suite views automation as a vital tool in the business toolbox that can revitalize their workforce and improve employee retention. After all, if workers don’t have to focus on routine manual tasks, they can be more engaged with other aspects of their job. In the Automation Anywhere report, around 40% of survey respondents believed that more than half of all employees could benefit from even just a single bot to help them in their daily work routine.
Also, a whopping 94% of respondents said moving employees to higher-value work is a top priority for the coming year.
For nearly twenty years, according to Shukla, he has been on a mission to unleash human potential by helping every company in every sector across the globe build a digital workforce and succeed with automation.
Teaming up with a digital coworker is par for the course for businesses seeking to address key challenges, but it is also useful as a strategy to interest employees with a new kind of colleague. At Automation Anywhere, they are using hundreds of digital coworkers internally in multiple departments. “Our employees aren’t just more productive with bots — they are happier,” says Shukla. “Employees and customers have quickly come to not only rely on their digital workers but to engage with them, giving them friendly nicknames and wanting to communicate with them in a more personal way.”
Shukla goes on to say that Automation Anywhere is delivering on that promise for customers. “When we empower human workers to offload manual tasks to automation, we unleash their potential to pivot to the next big idea, build deeper customer relationships and drive business growth.”
That is a future many business leaders are embracing to attain a competitive advantage.. A quarter of respondents in the Automation Anywhere report said they are escalating automation funding by at least 25% to help speed up automation deployments. Sitting on their hands simply isn’t an option any longer, especially as more companies focus diligently on building a resilient workforce buttressed by both human and digital workers.
Digital transformation continues to accelerate at a rapid pace across enterprise businesses, and it can be overwhelming to adapt to an ever-evolving culture of technological change. But to drive growth, embracing the Automation Economy can be a harbinger of positive outcomes ahead. Business leaders can continue to help run current operations with the status quo model, or they can choose the bold and rewarding path of making calculated bets and exploring new technologies and solutions to scale automation across the company.
The city has committed $54 million to a program that is working to ensure racial and climate justice.
The program will train up to 3,000 New Yorkers and connect them to green jobs, including solar and heat pump installation and EV charger maintenance.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol covering climate. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
BlocPower’s Civilian Climate Corps program has an ambitious dual aim: expand the green workforce while advancing racial and climate justice.
That program just got a big infusion of cash from New York City that could help it reach even more communities. Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday that the city is investing $54 million into the Precision Employment Initiative, the city’s name for the program.
The scaled up program will train up to 3,000 New Yorkers and connect them to job opportunities in the green economy, including solar and heat pump installation and EV charger maintenance. BlocPower primarily focuses on electrifying buildings.
The program serves New Yorkers in communities affected by gun violence and aims to reduce unemployment and increase public safety. BlocPower’s work to electrify buildings also means that residents in those neighborhoods will save money on utility bills and live in more comfortable homes.
“If we want less crime on our streets, we must make sure people are employed and they see the opportunities of the future,” Mayor Adams said at a press conference at BlocPower’s Bedford-Stuyvesant training center. “Green jobs are going to bring green dollars into communities and really put people on a pathway of success.”
The program is open to residents in five neighborhoods with the highest rates of gun violence: East New York, Flatbush and East Flatbush, Far Rockaway, Harlem, and Melrose. The majority of current and prior participants were previously underemployed or unemployed and part of “Black and brown communities that have been historically left out of the emerging profitable green sector,” Adams said.
This is the second year of the program, which began in 2021 under the de Blasio administration. The original program was funded by a $37 million contract administered by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, using money from the Cares Act.
Out of the 1,300 participants who have gone through the Civilian Climate Corps, 30% have been placed in full-time green jobs, and 62% of them have passed Occupational Safety and Health Administration training, which is critical to securing most of those jobs.
“Growing up not too far from here in Brooklyn, I remember learning about two forms of waste that were happening in the community,” BlocPower founder and CEO Donnel Baird said at the press conference. “One was the waste of fossil fuels and energy in our homes. … The other waste was a waste of human potential.”
New York has a target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Two-thirds of those emissions come from buildings, which means electrification and increasing energy efficiency are critical if the city wants to reach that target. New York has taken some steps to get there, including a gas ban in all new construction by 2027, as well as passing Local Law 97, which requires most buildings over 25,000 square feet to start lowering emissions drastically or start ratcheting up fines. The city is also retrofitting public housing with window heat pumps, which don’t rely on fossil fuels for heating or cooling.
All that work requires trained labor, and right now, there’s a shortage. The Civilian Climate Corps could help fill that gap while also ensuring that disadvantaged communities aren’t getting left behind in the rush to electrify everything. Instead, they could be helping lead it.
Other cities, including Ithaca and Menlo Park, have also announced ambitious new climate targets and partnerships with BlocPower to help them achieve the building decarbonization parts of them. Menlo Park is also exploring the creation of its own green jobs training program, which could launch early next year.
Baird said BlocPower is actively working on duplicating this program in other cities to help them address the labor shortages in their communities while preparing the local workforce for green economy jobs. “There’s a lot of excitement. We do think it is a model for different cities across the country,” he said.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol covering climate. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
Stop trying to make audio happen. At least until you nail the AI-discovery and audio clipping technology.
While the podcasting industry has grown substantially, there so far hasn’t been a similar market for short-form audio.
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
Audio is the white whale of social media. A TikTok- or Twitter-like platform for audio recordings sounds like a solid bet on paper. Audio is intimate and imaginative. The stakes are lower, and the costs more accessible, compared to recording video content. Best of all, social audio appears to be new and exciting — like it’s never been done before.
“Every couple of years, a new audio social media platform emerges, excites us through its novel approach, and briefly captures our collective attention,” said Michael Mignano, co-founder of podcast platform Anchor and a partner at VC firm Lightspeed. While the podcasting industry has grown substantially, with more than one-third of Americans listening to podcasts regularly, there so far hasn’t been a similar market for short-form audio.
No one has definitively cracked the code on how to entice people, on a large scale, to engage with audio-only content like they do videos or text, and any success has been short-lived. After capturing imaginations during the pandemic, live chat platform Clubhouse receded from the mainstream. Twitter pulled resources from its Clubhouse clone, Spaces, in June.
Meta shut down its short-form audio Soundbites and podcast hub in May. Startups like Shuffle, which billed itself as the TikTok for podcasts, have also shut down. Others like Snipd, an AI-based podcast app that lets users create and scroll through podcast snippets, have just started chasing the audio dream, convinced its take on social audio might have the right formula to finally take off.
Apple and Spotify, the preeminent podcasting platforms, are perhaps best positioned to experiment with social, shareable audio; Spotify has perhaps come the closest with its year-in-review Spotify Wrapped slideshows. Both declined to speak on the record, but pointed Protocol to blog posts about how they segment podcast episodes. Spotify acquired a company called Podz in 2021 that generates audio clips, hinting that the company may invest more in the social discovery aspect of audio. But its plans are unclear so far.
Will it ever be audio’s time to shine? It’s at a disadvantage in our short-attention-span economy filled with shiny images and the never-ending scroll, founders told Protocol. Listening is an inherently passive experience, making it more difficult to sell to investors and the average user.
“We’re doing something else when we’re listening to audio, right?” said Cliff Lampe, a University of Michigan professor specializing in digital communication. “That’s not true with either reading or video because it grabs more of our attention.”
“Is a hit machine for audio even possible? And is it something anyone even wants?” asks journalist Stan Alcorn at the top of his viral 2014 article, “Why Audio Never Goes Viral.”
Eight years later, the question remains. Audio is still more difficult to share on the internet, despite countless startups and platforms offering solutions to the problem. It’s not because companies haven’t tried hard enough — users just aren’t that interested.
“It competes poorly with video when it comes to user-generated enthusiasm, basically,” said Brian Lamb, co-founder of education tech company Swivl. “If you’re trying to get people to author original content, they’re more likely to want to just do video.” Swivl used to offer a user-generated audio platform called Synth that has since shut down.
Audio faces an uphill battle. For one, you can’t skim it easily. You have to listen to audio linearly, making it an inefficient mode of consumption. It also doesn’t require all your attention; many people listen to podcasts while running errands, working out, or cooking. “The reality is you can consume content so much more quickly and efficiently through your eyes than you can through your ears,” Mignano said.
If you’re trying to get people to author original content, they’re more likely to want to just do video.”
Because of this inherent barrier to listening, it’s harder to convince creators to invest in stellar content. Recording professional audio is hard enough at its core. Lampe also pointed out that it’s a rare skill to speak well, “especially using the cadence and emotion, reducing your number of ‘ums’ and hesitations.”
Chris Messina, social tech expert and inventor of the Twitter hashtag, said the cognitive cost for listeners creates a very high bar for audio content. “If I want someone to listen to what I have to say, I better be fucking, like, interesting,” Messina said.
Both Mignano of Anchor and Lamb of Synth started with the idea of an “audio Twitter” in which users could record original, short-form voice content. It’s not a bad idea; Twitter itself has audio origins with defunct podcast platform Odeo. But in Anchor’s case, Mignano quickly realized that while there was demand to create audio content, it hadn’t reached a critical mass. Plus, the content quality was poor without creative tools. Even a grainy, poorly recorded video can go viral. But choppy audio is far less engaging.
Once Anchor released creator tools, the social audio began to resemble podcasts. But who wants to visit Anchor, the new kid on the block, for podcast-like audio when you could get essentially every podcast from Apple or Spotify?
“We transitioned into being a really easy to use podcasting platform,” Mignano said. “With the tap of a button, instead of just publishing to your social graph inside of the Anchor app, we published it to Spotify and to Apple podcasts and all these places.” The model worked, and the switch ultimately led to a Spotify acquisition in 2019.
Lamb ran into the same problem with Synth. While the tech was sound, it didn’t have the content users wanted. Lamb pivoted from offering user-generated content to offering both manual and automatic podcast-snipping tools. Still, it didn’t resonate with consumers. Lamb shut down the consumer side of Synth a year and a half ago and officially shut the tool down for educators a month ago..
Kevin Smith, CEO of AI startup Snipd, said he’s not building a social audio app at the moment. Snipd lets users manually clip podcasts, automatically segments podcasts into highlights and chapters, and has a “for you” page full of clips with transcripts as the visual. Audio information can easily get lost in the big bad podcast universe. Smith wants to help listeners harness it.
“Our goal is to build an app that unlocks the knowledge in podcasts,” Smith said. “If the social aspect helps with that, then we don’t have a problem with it.”
He’s interested in tackling the barrier to discovering podcasts and making them easier to consume. Turning podcasts into bite-sized bits helps, but it’s also more social as well. It’s easier to share audio nuggets than the whole meal. Smith says Snipd appeals to a wide range of users, and he’s optimistic it will continue to grow. He credits the latest advancements in natural-language processing for making Snipd’s mission possible. Transcribing audio has become easier, as is segmenting it into core parts.
Snipd automatically segments podcasts into highlights and chapters, and lets users manually clip podcasts. Image: Snipd
But it’s especially struck a chord with the productivity community. For obsessive notetakers, being able to embed audio snippets into your Notion- or Obsidian-based second brain (productivity speak for note-taking system) is a win. “We didn’t expect that a certain percentage of our users would be so enthusiastic about plugging this into your second brain,” Smith said.
Finding a niche is powerful, and it can surround a product with passionate, dedicated users. But serving only a small subset of people can also hold products back from attaining mainstream popularity, the kind of success that VCs and media generally expect from ambitious startups. Synth, for instance, had a built-in user base of educators because of its parent company. It allowed teachers to incorporate student voices in class projects.
“In education, it’s a little bit different because someone’s requiring you to do it,” Lamb said. “There are very different motivators involved in capturing and creating that content.”
But Synth didn’t succeed when it came to the general consumer market. Shuffle faced a similar issue. Ada Yeo, co-founder and CEO of the now-defunct company, said the tool had early power users from tech Twitter. But the product was split between users who wanted the tool for note-taking purposes and general users who might have used it to share podcast clips on social media.
“We just couldn’t find a way to crack other communities,” Yeo said, referencing the worlds of comedy and sports podcasts, “that would lead to a more mainstream product.”
Podcasting itself is a niche form of entertainment compared to TV or movies. Anybody can create a podcast now, but in Messina’s words, this means a lot of the audio out there is “shit and probably should never have been recorded.” Excellent audio certainly exists, but blockbusters are rare. With a crowded audio market, there are fewer listeners to go around, making it harder for audio platforms to scale to the level of a social network. Maybe committing to the niche is the answer, Messina suggested.
“We evaluate [social audio] and define its success based on the size of success we’ve seen before,” he said, “as opposed to saying, ‘Actually, this can be a very healthy ecosystem, but it’s a small suburb of social media land.’”
If any type of audio platform were to grow into a proper social network, experts agree it would have to focus on short-form clips. This American Life rolled out a product called Shortcut in 2016 that was meant to “make podcasts as shareable as GIFs” (RIP GIFs, by the way). But it doesn’t appear to have caught on, and six years later, Shortcut is still in beta.
Smith says Snipd’s AI features may make the process of creating clips less time-intensive, while also making it more likely users see audio they like. Snipd’s AI discovery algorithm is far from perfect, but Smith said the team is working on improving it.
Messina said we have to be less precious about the way we consume podcasts. Allowing AI to chop podcasts into shareable bits makes audio easier to consume, and a social audio platform more viable. “In the future, it may become easier to remix, reshape, snip, and share those audio moments,” Messina said.
Apple is generating transcripts to help with search results, but they’re not publicly available to listeners. Spotify has transcripts only for its original shows so far. Messina thinks Spotify might be moving toward enabling social audio, allowing users to share response clips to podcasts.
Mignano, who left his role as Spotify’s head of talk in June, declined to speak about specific plans but emphasized the company’s ambitions to foster more podcast creators. “Spotify has been pretty public around its ambitions to be a platform for tens, if not hundreds of millions of creators,” Mignano said. “The company continues to do a lot of work to make it easier for nonprofessionals to make podcasts.”
“[S]ocial audio has come at the wrong time at the moment.”
While small startups may conceive of better recommendation engines, the popularization of social, short-form audio depends largely on major platforms and whether they decide to invest in supporting it. For companies like Apple or Spotify, experimenting with short-form audio makes sense. For the major social media platforms with visuals or text as the standard, audio feels more like just one feature among many.
“It certainly feels like something that’s untapped and ripe for experimentation, but social audio has come at the wrong time at the moment,” said social media expert Matt Navarra. “Twitter’s in disarray, Meta’s placing its bets on a very small number of things it thinks is going to work out.” In other words, audio is not on many companies’ list of priorities.
Mignano recently wrote about podcasts increasingly becoming more visual, with podcast creators releasing video segments on TikTok. Though Mignano believes in the beauty of audio, he doesn’t think it’s ready for social media prime time.
“Audio is just unique in the world of social,” Mignano said. “It’s incredibly rich, it’s intimate, it’s immersive, but it has this disadvantage.”
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
From climate tech to gig work, midterm races up and down the ticket stand to impact the tech industry.
Ballot measures will determine the future of everything from EV funding to how gig work works.
Kwasi (kway-see) is a fellow at Protocol with an interest in tech policy and climate. Previously, he covered global religion news at the Associated Press in New York. Before that, he was a freelance journalist based out of Accra, Ghana, covering social justice, health, and environment stories. His reporting has been published in The New York Times, Quartz, CNN, The Guardian, and Public Radio International. He can be reached at kasiedu@protocol.com.
As the midterms draw closer, some of the tech industry’s most urgent issues and opportunities are also on the ballot. At the national level, anti-Big Tech crusaders — who just happen to be backed by Big Tech money — have made cracking down on the likes of Meta and Google key planks of their campaigns.
Meanwhile, in states across the country, ballot measures will determine the future of everything from EV funding to how gig work works, with some policies kicking in as soon as next January if they receive approval from voters.
While all eyes will be on Washington, here are some issues that smart tech leaders should be watching.
What it does: Proposition 30 will impose a new tax on the state’s ultra-wealthy to finance climate initiatives. If approved by voters, it will impose an additional 1.75% tax on Californians whose annual incomes are more than $2 million. The tax will be in place beginning next January and will come to an end in 2043; it could end sooner if the state is able to cut its emissions to 80% of 1990 levels.
Why it matters to tech: The tax is expected to generate up to $5 billion annually, with the majority of the funds going toward California’s ambitious electric vehicle plans. About 45% of the tax dollars will be spent on rebates for people, businesses, and local governments that buy electric vehicles, and 35% will be spent on expanding the EV charging network in the state. California is the leader in terms of EV adoption in the United States.
Tech executives could be among the prime targets of the tax: 44% of billionaires in California made their money from tech.
Who’s backing it: The measure is supported by the California Democratic Party, environmentalists, and, because some of the money will fund wildfire prevention, the state’s firefighter association. But its biggest backer is Lyft, which has bankrolled the yes vote, contributing $45 million out of the $47 million made to the supporting committee, according to state filings. Last month, Lyft CEO Logan Green said the tax was needed “to help turn back the clock on this existential threat,” referring to the climate crisis.
But Lyft’s support is one reason why Gov. Gavin Newsom has broken from his party in opposing Prop. 30. In a TV ad opposing the ballot measure, Newsom described Prop 30. as a “Trojan horse” initiative. “Prop. 30 has been advertised as a climate initiative. But in reality, it was devised by a single corporation to funnel state income taxes to benefit their company,” he said.
What it does: In Illinois, voters will decide on a measure that would amend the state’s constitution to include an explicit provision that employees have the right to organize and collectively bargain over wages, hours, and working conditions.
Why it matters to tech: It comes at a time when workers in companies including Amazon and Apple have started unionizing to advocate for wage increases and other improved working conditions. In April, Staten Island warehouse workers became Amazon’s first unionized employees, sparking a union drive across the country. Earlier this month, workers at an Amazon warehouse in a Chicago suburb staged a walkout on Prime Day, when the ecommerce giant is especially busy.
Amendment 1 in Illinois will guarantee workers the right to organize, even as Big Tech has resorted to well-known union-busting strategies. That may be particularly important in Chicago, a city where the tech industry employs nearly a fifth of the city’s overall workforce.
Who’s backing it: The amendment is backed by many workers’ rights organizations, unions in Illinois, and the state’s Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker. “Worker safety and economic security is a fundamental right of all workers, from domestic workers to Ph.D.s,” Tim Drea, chapter president of the Illinois AFL-CIO, told a local news station. “Everybody deserves a safe workplace and economic security.”
However, local business groups warn it could make the state uncompetitive compared to its neighbors. “There’s so much going on that says we’re not business-friendly,” Todd Maisch, president of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, told local station WGEM. “It sends a signal that we are not serious about becoming a pro-business state.”
What it does: Proposal 1 is a ballot measure that will allow the state to borrow $4.2 billion to fund climate initiatives. A $3 billion bond was initially proposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but it was increased under Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Why it matters to tech: If approved by voters, it could be a major opportunity for the climate tech sector. Some $1.5 billion will be used for climate change mitigation, and $1.1 billion will go to flood risk reduction. The rest will be used for land conservation and water-quality projects. The proposal will fund the upgrade of cooling centers, projects aimed at making public universities and other state-owned buildings energy efficient, and zero-emission school buses.
According to the legislation that produced the measure, “disadvantaged communities shall receive no less than thirty-five percent of the benefit of the funds.”
Who’s backing it: The “yes” campaign has received endorsements from a wide range of local climate and conservation groups including the New York Botanical Garden and Central Park Conservancy.
What it does: Voters will partake in a nonbinding advisory vote on a bill that has already been passed by the state legislature. That bill, HB 2076, set a per-trip pay floor for Uber and Lyft drivers, gave drivers paid sick leave, and prohibited surge pricing during the first seven days of an emergency declared by the governor or the president.
Why it matters to tech: Technically, HB 2076 has already passed. But because the bill levies a premium on rides in Washington, state law also requires that voters get a chance to have their say. Their vote won’t definitively determine the fate of the legislation, but will act as guidance to the legislature as to whether it should repeal or uphold the law. The outcome of the advisory vote could also be an important measure of public support, which other states may find interesting.
The legislation stands to have a big impact on the ride-hailing industry in Washington. While it stops short of classifying the drivers as full employees and will restrict local governments from formulating their own policies, the expanded rights represent a big win for advocates of ride-hail drivers.
Aside from paid sick leave, the bill sets out processes for how platforms can deactivate drivers. It also will divert 15 cents per trip to a nonprofit that will fight for the rights of drivers in disputes with the platforms. Those fees will begin in July 2024.
Who’s backing it: When the state House was debating the bill, it received support from both Uber and Lyft. Local Democrats hailed it as the “best in the nation” package for app drivers. But it was opposed by the National Employment Law Project, which said the bill did not do enough to protect the rights of drivers.
What it does: C-48 will amend Montana’s constitution to explicitly require law enforcement agencies to secure a search warrant before accessing people’s electronic data. The amendment would update the state’s constitution, which already contains protections for physical items such as paper documents and homes.
Why it matters to tech: The bill’s proponents say it will bring Montana’s statutes into the 21st century, as everyday life revolves around electronic communication. “A majority of everything we do now is electronic — our finances, our medical information, our conversations — and this amendment makes it explicit that our electronic data and communications are protected from unreasonable search and seizures from the government,” Republican state Sen. Ken Bogner, who sponsored the amendment, told NBC Montana.
Who’s backing it: The amendment has support from conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity Montana. There are no active campaigns to oppose the ballot measure, but the Senate bill that produced the measure was voted against by some Montana House Democrats. The Montana Association of Chiefs of Police also opposed it, but is not campaigning to stop it. “When it comes to handcuffing us to the point we can’t do our job and we can’t hold people accountable for their actions against people, then I have an issue with it,” Wade Nash, head of the police association, said.
Without any opposition, Montana is set to join Missouri and Michigan, which added electronic data protections to their own constitutions in 2014 and 2020, respectively.
The Arizona Senate race
Why it matters to tech: With an equal split in the Senate, Republicans are hoping to wrestle back control with the help of two tech entrepreneurs. In Arizona, Blake Masters is challenging incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly. Masters has made criticism of tech companies, especially social media platforms, a central part of his campaign right from its inception.
“The internet, which was supposed to give us an awesome future, is instead being used to shut us up,” he said in his first campaign video. “America’s future will be determined by how Congress chooses to regulate Big Tech in the coming decade,” he later wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We must resist the domination of a corporate technocracy and chart a new course.”
Kelly has, meanwhile, his own tech bona fides, including his successful negotiation of the Chips Act, which was passed by Congress. Early signs show that the bill’s passage has led to billions in chip-related investment across the country.
Who’s backing it: Masters has received significant backing from his billionaire ally, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Despite Thiel’s deep pockets, Kelly has raised eight times more money for his campaign than Masters and is projected to win.
Why it matters to tech: Just like Masters, J.D. Vance has been vocal about his criticism of social media content-moderation policies, despite his tech ties. “I know the technology industry well. I’ve worked in it and invested in it, and I’m sick of politicians who talk big about Big Tech but do nothing about it,” he wrote on his campaign website. The solution is simple: “We need to break up the big tech companies, to reduce their power in our economy and our politics.”
A Vance campaign press account was suspended by Twitter in September 2021, drawing ire from the candidate. “This is what happens when we allow five companies to control what we’re allowed to say,” he tweeted. Twitter later said the suspension, based on suspected impersonation, was an error. Vance is running against incumbent Tim Ryan and is projected to be ahead. Ryan, has in turn, branded Vance as a “Silicon Valley elitist,” referring to his opponent’s ties to Big Tech.
Who’s backing it: Vance has also received significant support from Thiel. Since Vance now looks poised to win, Thiel is reportedly redirecting his efforts to support Masters in Arizona, where he is trailing. If both or even one of Thiel’s candidates is successful in helping the GOP flip the Senate, they could add to the growing list of Big Tech’s Republican adversaries in Washington.
Why it matters to tech: The race between Beto O’Rourke and Gov. Greg Abbott is especially important because of new laws passed in Texas with Abbott’s blessing, including a wide-ranging social media content-moderation law. The law prohibits social media platforms from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint, a law that platforms argue curtails their First Amendment rights and is currently being debated in the courts.
That’s not to say O’Rourke will go easy on tech giants. During his bid for the presidency in 2019, O’Rourke said, “I think the best way to approach the fact that people have become the products on these platforms — that our privacy has been violated, that we’re confronted with 37-page user agreements — is to regulate them more seriously, and perhaps to treat them a little bit more like a utility.”
Despite his anti-Big Tech position, Abbott has also courted companies including Meta to come to Texas, which is quickly becoming a major tech hub.
Who’s backing it: Because of Abbott’s policies, it is perhaps no surprise that O’Rourke has received significant contributions from Big Tech. While the post-pandemic work environment has lured many Silicon Valley workers to move to Texas, that has not translated to support for Abbott. “It’s not surprising they do not support Gov. Abbott,” Heidi Welsh, the founding executive director of Sustainable Investments Institute told Bloomberg in March, “because they’re moving to Texas for the job, not the politics.”
Kwasi (kway-see) is a fellow at Protocol with an interest in tech policy and climate. Previously, he covered global religion news at the Associated Press in New York. Before that, he was a freelance journalist based out of Accra, Ghana, covering social justice, health, and environment stories. His reporting has been published in The New York Times, Quartz, CNN, The Guardian, and Public Radio International. He can be reached at kasiedu@protocol.com.
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