Part Two: May You Live In Interesting Times …
Changes in the tech industry and thoughts on how we can all show up for one another during these times
Welcome back to a special part two edition with my takeaways from the last two and a half weeks. In part one, we covered the election and tech’s role. Today, we will cover trends I’m seeing in the tech industry - including some thoughts from TrustCon - and some observations about how people need support as we go through all this craziness.
Let’s get into it.
Tech
Some tech execs lean into political preferences. After Trump’s shooting, Elon Musk came out in support of the former president and supposedly offered $45 million a month to a supporting Super PAC, which he then backtracked on. When Trump picked Vance, it was reported that Musk, Peter Theil, David Sacks, and other Silicon Valley big whigs pushed the President to pick him. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have donated to Trump, believing him to be the better candidate for their issues. Once Harris became the nominee, folks like Reid Hastings, Sheryl Sandberg, Ron Conway, and others have vocalized their support. The Valley has always been politically mixed, but now it is more in the open. Some CEOs will try hard not to make any endorsements (like Zuckerberg). Regardless, expect this to be a nasty side fight as a part of the election, which will bring more into question how those, like Musk, who run speech platforms handle content there - including what they post.
In the last few days, Trump, Musk, and others have been going after Google and Meta for their perceived bias in handling content about Trump and Harris. Google had to respond in its own thread, as did Meta. Forbes breaks it all down here. Companies will continue to be under a microscope from both sides of the aisle for things like this. I’ll remind everyone that everything is political, but not everything is about politics. Elon and others calling it out continue to raise the stakes. I don’t think Elon will sway this election, but he will continue to raise the temperature in extremely irresponsible ways. Especially when the New York Post adds on with covers like this:
AI conversation shifts from models to products. Alex Heath at the Verge made this point last week, and I think it is worth amplifying. Zuckerberg also discussed it on the Circuit with Emily Chang podcast. What this means is that you should start to think of AI models in somewhat the same way as the backbone of the internet (which is part of the reason Zuck thinks open-source AI is the way to go), and that is where the real money is going to be will be in the products built on top of it. Why do you think OpenAI announced a search product? Keep an eye out here because this will change how we think about trust and safety regarding AI and the potential explosion in need from start-ups building on these models. (This includes start-ups focused on providing tools to political campaigns.)
The Trust and Safety industry is transforming and on the rise. TrustCon was full of excitement and high energy. Last year, attendees licked their wounds after rounds of layoffs. This year, they rejected the notion that we had hit peak trust and safety while acknowledging that the work was evolving. They weren’t scared about AI taking their jobs but excited about how it would equip them to do them better. There were calls from keynote panelists for people not to be afraid to innovate. In only its third year, TrustCon - run by the Trust and Safety Professionals Association - has grown substantially year over year, with over 1,300 attending in 2024. People were talking about how open-source tooling can help the industry and how to make sure we get more voices from the Global Majority into these conversations when they can’t get visas to attend conferences like this. I don’t have the space here, but there is so much more to unpack that I will get to in future newsletters.
How we show up for one another
We need more emotional support. A theme throughout all of this was the emotional support that people need. At all of my events, many attendees talked about how they were burnt out, were recovering from it, or had recovered from it and didn’t have the same energy they had in the past. At TrustCon, Alice Hunsberger and Jen Weedon held a session on burnout. Alice wrote in her newsletter, “The highlight of TrustCon for me was the workshop I led with Niantic's Jen Weedon about burnout. We left with half a suitcase full of sticky notes about root causes of burnout, themes, and ways that people and teams need more support.” For me, the biggest value at TrusCon was seeing so many people. Chatting with them face to face and not over a computer screen. To share friendship bracelets, eat a meal, and talk about how we were doing. Some folks were exploring what they wanted to do next. Talking with folks who know what you are going through is huge. We need to give folks more support to work through these big emotions. This is a good piece with some advice on navigating the election with your team.
Rethinking community. All of this got me thinking about building community and whether that can be more spread out and virtual versus in-person. We all know the decline of local participation in things like volunteering for church picnics or town celebrations that would unite people. Local media has declined, and we tend to focus more on what is happening nationally. (I am embarrassed that I recently had to guess who my Congressman was when asked. Thankfully, I got it right.) New Public has long been thinking about this problem, but this is an area I’d like to do more in. What immediately came to mind is that I’ve long wished I lived somewhere I could have a little neighborhood library to share books with those around me. I want to see if I can figure out a way to do an online version.
Voter contact gets more personal, but have we lost the plot? Campaigns are increasingly trying to get more personal. GOP digital strategist Eric Wilson says, “The most effective campaigns this cycle are figuring out how to reach voters via personal relationships. The first method is bottom-up through relational organizing to overcome low contact rates. The second method is top down via influencers (para social relationships).” I think Eric is right, but Makena Kelly made a good point in her Wired newsletter about Harris’ online presence versus Bidens, “It’s as if they played fast and loose with all of the data and analytics and missed the larger issue. The campaign was seemingly concerned with serving every voter the one specific message, vibe, aesthetic, or whatever that would persuade them to support Biden that it lost control of the overall narrative.” Both the personal and the overall narrative are going to be important.
The art of saying goodbye. Moving on from a job you have poured your soul into and became a huge part of your identity is hard. I wrote about my experiences with this when Sheryl announced she was leaving Facebook. While we all might wish that folks like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden had retired sooner, we need to recognize how long it can take to go through the emotions of being able to do so. We also need to recognize the generational shift we are going through and how that will change how DC works. We don’t talk about this enough or give people the tools to think about how we say goodbye or move on from things. (If you want something, I highly recommend Arthur Brooks’ book Strength to Strength.)
Like Bruce said in his Sunday Substack, everything changed, and nothing changed. I always remember
’s first rule, which is that it will all get crazier. I know that I can only control how I respond to things. We all have a role in keeping the temperature down and deciding what information we consume and put into the world. A lot will and can happen. So, be prepared to go with the flow and pivot as needed.Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.