Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I spent the weekend wondering about the insistent feeling in the United States that few but the ultra-rich, even businesses, are making enough money to afford the basics of a comfortable life.
The New York Times published a story recently about Broadway’s rising costs that featured the grim stat: “None of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit.” The shows’ failure to recoup their investments comes even as Broadway tickets are more expensive than ever before. So who is making any money?
More broadly, the rising prices of groceries versus perceived wage stagnation played a significant role in the 2024 presidential election and persists as a major policy issue in the New York City mayoral election, which is a local contest that plays out on a national stage.
Despite the high price of food in the US, farmers aren’t raking it in. They face enormous shortfalls, largely due to Trump’s tariffs and China’s retaliation against them. The gap between perception and reality was the subject of a series from the Guardian’s US business desk last year, The Confidence Question, which I’d highly recommend if you’re in the mood to ruminate like me.
The only exceptions seem to me to be technology companies. Everyday job seekers describe a harsh and sluggish market, with one job seeker – cut from USAID by the scythe of Elon Musk’s Doge – telling the Guardian that 400 applications resulted in just six interviews. Contrast that with Meta lavishing $100m payouts on individual AI researchers. For the past 11 quarters of the financial calendar, our reporters have written another version of the headline: Nvidia prints money while valued at a level you can’t comprehend. Perhaps CEO Jensen Huang is the only one not thinking about the cost of his weekly shop.
I’m not sure where this gloomy division of have-alls and have-nones will lead. Likely nowhere good.
Meta and YouTube are papering over recent history
Illustration: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design
YouTube announced last week that it would allow video creators once banned for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 US presidential election the chance to be reinstated. The company blamed the account suspensions on pressure from Joe Biden.
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” a lawyer for YouTube wrote in a letter to the US Congress.
Both YouTube and Meta have cast their moderation decisions as compliance with an overeager and now disfavored administration. Mark Zuckerberg has similarly reversed course on bans for Covid misinfo and likewise blamed Biden. The change was part of the CEO’s all-out charm offensive towards the Trump administration, which also included scuttling third-party fact-checking and scrapping his company’s diversity programs.
Read more: Zuckerberg’s swerve: how diversity went from being a Meta priority to getting cancelled
YouTube’s genuflecting change seems to share motivation with the tech giants’ donations to Trump’s inauguration and visits to him at Mar-a-Lago. I find the moves by Google and Facebook less overt and more insidious, though, because they paper over recent history. The creators who were banned spread lies at a time of great uncertainty, no small thing. Both Facebook and YouTube seem swept up in the anti-vaccine spirit of the current administration.
These reversals are not the redress of egregious wrongs from the past. They are the results of the shifting winds of power.
I recall one of my own headlines in The Daily Beast from not so long ago, just 2021: Instagram Bans America’s Worst Anti-Vaxxer. Guess who? None other than health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. At the time, an Instagram spokesperson said bluntly: “We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” Kennedy’s account has since been restored and grown from 800,000 to 5.4 million followers.
What motivates their recalcitrance and stubbornness, though, is what has animated the vast majority of recent reluctant moderation by technology companies: an unwillingness to establish a precedent and standard to which they will be held later. Moderation is expensive and messy, especially when it comes to controversial, novel and uncertain issues like Covid-19. To my mind, both companies are wielding content moderation as a political weapon and sacrificing the truth.
Opinions on tech
The cronyism of Trump’s TikTok deal
A TikTok office in Culver City, California, on Thursday. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner.
Under the plan, US investors will take over the majority of TikTok’s operations and take charge of a licensed copy of the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm. US companies are expected to own about 65% of the US version of the spun-off company, while ByteDance and Chinese investors will own less than 20%. The new version of TikTok will be controlled by a seven-member board of directors made up of cybersecurity and national security experts, six of them Americans, according to the White House.
Along with Oracle and its co-founder Larry Ellison, Trump said at the press conference that other investors include media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the CEO of Dell computers Michael Dell.
Murdoch’s Fox News is helmed by his son Lachlan; Paramount, parent of CBS News, is under the control of Ellison’s son David. Under the terms of Trump’s deal, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the country’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.
The landscape of US media is looking very red as Trump’s TikTok deal takes shape.
Read more about Trump’s TikTok deal
Digital IDs: 21st century necessity or privacy in dire peril?
The narrow win will come as a relief to Switzerland’s main political parties, which mostly supported plans for the e-ID. Photograph: Westend61 GmbH/Alamy
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has announced plans for a mandatory digital ID to prove a person’s right to work in the UK. The IDs will be required by 2029. Starmer’s angle on reviving the proposal, long a matter of debate in the UK, is border security. He said that digital IDs could “play an important part” in making Britain less attractive to illegal migrants.
Most countries in the European Union have had digital ID systems for years now. Outside the bloc, Swiss voters approved the creation of a national electronic identity card in a referendum on Sunday.
My colleague Robert Booth reports on the brewing fight over virtual credentials:
Starmer appears ready to try the idea again, and ministers believe there will be less public opposition, although digital ID cards could worsen the effect of digital exclusion. Age UK has estimated that about 1.7 million people over the age of 74 do not use the internet.
Proponents like Tony Blair argue digital ID can close loopholes exploited by trafficking gangs, reduce pull factors driving illegal migration to Britain, speed up citizens’ interactions with government, reduce errors and identity fraud and boost trust as a tangible symbol of a more responsive and flexible state.
The arguments against often centre on privacy. Civil liberties campaigners fear any mandatory ID card system, even one intended to tackle illegal migration, would require the population to surrender vast amounts of personal data to be amassed in national databases. They worry that the information could be amalgamated, searched and analysed to monitor, track and profile people.
Computer security experts also say centralised data could create a juicy target for hackers who, as the cyber-attacks on Jaguar Land Rover, the Co-op, the British Library and others have shown, pose a growing threat to the UK’s ability to function.
Opponents of the virtual IDs – approximately 1.6 million of them – have signed a petition against the creation of digital IDs.
