For Progressives, Big Tech is Becoming the New Big Oil

Technology Highly ideological liberal elites are conspiring to take over the AI safety field. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) What would it take for a European country to sabotage its own energy security, pouring cement down its gas wells and sealing them off for good? Not much, it turns out. The Dutch government is doing exactly that, permanently burying reserves worth €200 billion (that's around €150,000 per Dutch citizen) because locals complained about tremors so faint that most people never felt them. Britain has banned new drilling in the North Sea, one of the richest oil reserves on earth. The EU has spent five years and counting forbidding oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, even as it declared its intention to wean itself off Russian energy. Stories like these are routine now. They are the fruit of a political crusade against fossil fuels that the progressive left has waged for decades. The United States has held up better. Every time progressives have moved to kill a pipeline or a drilling project, Republicans have been there to block them. Part of the reason is that Republicans, far more than their European counterparts, understood what these anti-fossil fuel policies were really about. In the 1990s, as the Democratic left grew more absorbed in environmentalism, the oil industry drifted toward the Republican Party for protection. The drift became a realignment in 2000, when voters narrowly sent two former oil executives, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to the White House. Progressives now had every reason to make the industry a public villain, and they went about it with enthusiasm. So began the golden age of the climate narrative. In 2006, Al Gore, the man Bush had beaten, released An Inconvenient Truth, and it became a global sensation. I was a 15-year-old liberal at the time and found it persuasive. A year earlier, my secondary-school geography class had sat through a solemn screening of The Day After Tomorrow, a climate-apocalypse film our teacher plainly regarded as required viewing. The fate of the planet, we understood, depended on our paying attention. All of this while two Republican oilmen sat in the White House, and while the oil, gas, and coal industries kept writing checks mostly to Republicans. I am still no admirer of Bush, but it is hard to believe that was a coincidence. Something similar is happening to Big Tech. When President Donald Trump said recently that data centers could be “bigger than oil,” he probably meant the economic upside. But the resemblance runs deeper than that. Today’s fevered warnings of a tech-driven apocalypse sound a great deal like the case made against oil in the mid-2000s, and they are driven by the same partisan logic. Four years ago, Silicon Valley was a progressive stronghold, the censorship arm of the global elite. Every major social media platform had banned Trump outright. Now the same industry is the left’s favorite villain. The platforms have not only restored Trump and his allies; they have made their peace with his administration. Elon Musk’s right-wing radicalism seems to deepen by the week. Palantir grips the far left’s imagination as an accomplice in ICE deportations. Data centers are cast as environmental plagues. And as with oil companies, Democrats are keen to demonize tech as an existential threat to humanity. The progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to completely ban the development of AI superintelligence—taking it as given that such a technology is even possible to develop, which remains a topic of debate. One would think the doyen of “abundance liberalism,” Ezra Klein, might disagree with socialist Sanders, but no—in a recent New York Times article, he suggests banning AIs from coding, a step which would be even more radical than what Sanders has proposed. More serious, because it is already playing out, is Anthropic’s insistence that all AI companies open up their technology to third-party evaluators. Sounds like a good idea—except the CEO of their handpicked AI safety outfit, METR, has expressed the belief that “effective altruism” means destroying the concept of national borders. As my institute, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has been laying out in a series of recent reports, these “neutral third-party evaluators” have much in common with the “disinformation” and “brand safety” experts who seek to insert themselves (sometimes via government mandates) as intermediaries between social media algorithms and the public. It is now on AI safetyists to prove that their project isn’t just a similar ideological power-grab over the technology of the future. The right still has real complaints about the tech giants. The headline reinstatements aside, biased content moderation remains an unsolved problem. But taken as a whole, the picture is hard to describe as anything but a full reversal. Given how quickly it happened, it is no wonder the narrative has lagged behind, but the story now filling the vacuum is a poor one. The public is being sold an account of the technology industry that blends legitimate worry with exaggeration and, in its wilder versions, plain paranoia. In this account, Elon Musk is poisoning democracy. He fed USAID to the woodchipper, which is true. My institute’s founder, Mike Benz, lent a hand, and the agency had it coming. Politicians in Europe and Britain accuse Musk of stoking “extremism” in their countries. The rest of the industry, we are told, has thrown in with the Trump administration, which is using Palantir to steal Americans’ data, deport innocent immigrants, and bomb Palestinians. Its moguls intend to reduce the rest of us to digital serfs, stripped of our jobs and of control over our data, our likenesses, and our identities. The data centers powering all of this will finish off the environment, unless superintelligent machines finish off humanity first. Democrats, career bureaucrats, and foreign governments have an even stronger motive to go after tech than they had to go after oil. The oil industry merely funded Republicans. Big Tech undermined the legacy press and thus also the control by liberal elites of public information. Across the West, the power of liberal officials and functionaries depended in large part on this control. When Musk bought Twitter (now X) and restored free speech, he became the face of a perceived threat to their continued rule. Among European governments, this political calculation is compounded by a wish not merely to rein in American tech firms, but to replace them with an indigenous “Eurostack” subsidized by the taxpayer, data centers included. “Digital sovereignty” has become a fashionable slogan in a Canada that seeks to get out from under American economic dominance. The panic isn’t actually about the dangers of out-of-control AI or the harms, real or imagined, associated with data centers. It is a fight to defend the power of Western governing elites. Conservatives, who instinctively distrust those same elites, should be made aware of this fight so that they can better understand the political stakes of the intensifying debate about Big Tech. Of course, not every critic of Big Tech is a political shill. When the podcaster Theo Von argues that data centers belong to a Silicon Valley scheme to achieve immortality, corner the necessary technology, and consign everyone else to permanent serfdom, he means it, even if the theory is a bit mad. Teenage climate activists who vandalize historic paintings because they expect the world to end within their lifetimes are usually sincere too. They need not grasp the elite politics that shaped their beliefs. The line running from Al Gore and The Day After Tomorrow through the permanent “climate emergency” back to American party politics in the 2000s may never occur to them. A belief can be sincerely held and still be the downstream product of an elite campaign against an industry seen as a political threat. Republicans eventually learned to tell a good story about energy. “Net Zero” is now a reliable target for right-wing populists, who tie it to stagnation, soaring power bills, and the petty indignities of regulated life, from paper straws to feeble air conditioning. In the United States, green policy came to be associated with the hollowing out of the Rust Belt and the loss of good jobs in mining and oil. Both stories were substantially true, and the parties of the right profited from telling them. Technology is a harder case. The industry does not employ a comparably broad domestic workforce, and its reliance on H-1B labor remains a stain on its record. Tying Silicon Valley’s prosperity to the prosperity of the average American is more difficult than tying energy production to jobs and cheap power. But conservatives can still explain the fight over political control. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox The story should begin with the industry’s pre-election gamble in 2024. Starting with Musk’s X, technology companies began refusing demands from governments and activist groups to censor their political opponents at scale. Data centers had existed for years by then. The nationwide panic over them had not. The timing deserves more attention than it gets. Many conservatives are understandably exasperated by what they see as conspiracy theories circulating among their fellow travelers in the podcast world, such as those regarding data centers. But the public should not be scolded for staying alert to elite coordination. It should be pointed toward the kinds of coordination that can be proved. Is there a concerted effort by the permanent bureaucracy in the United States and by foreign governments to weaken, capture, or replace American technology platforms, and with them Americans’ ability to speak freely online? There is. Is a similar cohort of highly ideological elites now assembling to take over the AI safety field? It certainly seems so. That is its own kind of elite coordination, and a story which many readers of this magazine will find familiar.