5 questions for Mike Pepi

A tech worker turned art critic, Mike Pepi has carefully chronicled how Silicon Valley’s true evolution since the dot-com era has been defined not by the development of new digital tools, but rather by a fundamental rethinking about how society should be structured. His latest book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, traces the downfall of the egalitarian ideals from the earliest days of the internet. Pepi talks to us about his proposal for a Slop Tax, and why the pursuit of artificial general intelligence is doomed. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s one underrated big idea?

That nothing is inevitable. I’m starting to see this more in the critique of Silicon Valley and their deployment of technology. “Technology” itself, as a standalone term, is a misnomer. It’s always about its design and deployment by people, and people are political animals: they use institutions and have and cede power. The Silicon Valley techno-determinists want you to think that “technology” is on an inevitable march, but this is just a total fiction unraveling before our eyes.

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What’s a technology you think is overhyped?

AGI, and to a larger extent AI in general. Not only is it simply statistically likely output — math that basically just guesses at response — the implementations of it are coming back down to reality. In the office, it’s sowing chaos and most AI projects blow up, and in terms of its “creative applications,” we’re seeing mostly slop produced by some of the least interesting people on earth.

In 10 years’ time, we’ll look back on AI as an extremely overhyped homework help tool. As for AGI, where do we start? Even the most frontier models continually hallucinate, and worse, they lack context about tasks that only humans can provide. AGI is basically religion for a very small minority of people; on the other hand, it’s a myth manufactured by Silicon Valley to rationalize increased investment and to stoke fear into anyone who seems semi-critical of the increasing encroachment of AI in everyday life.

What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t?

Taxing AI companies and platforms that produce and host AI slop, and redistribute that money to sustain the institutions and creators that AI has stolen from. I call it the Slop Tax and I’ve drafted a whitepaper to advocate for this policy. We are looking for groups to pilot this with.
What book most shaped your conception of the future?

Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village by Richard Barbrook. Not only does this book provide a handy history of digital utopianism, [but] the thing that struck me most about [it] is just how often the history of 20th-century technology involves its boosters describing the potential benefits of a tool far before that capability is a reality. Then, once the tech arrives, the utopian ground has already been seeded, and a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy takes hold.

What has surprised you the most this year?

I wish I could say I was surprised by DOGE — which for me was the full culmination of the long-simmering libertarian basis of the Silicon Valley worldview being enacted at scale by the federal government. I could not have predicted, however, the brazenness. The way that [Elon] Musk sold this was also concerning, as it tapped into the very American strain of small-government ideology, though this time with a heavy layer of a vague AI-inflected anti-humanism.

I take heart that the entire thing failed, and that it led to a kind of counter-revolution in which everyday citizens now realize the full extent to which so many government institutions and federal funds ensure our most basic necessities.

Democrats go hard on Instacart

Democratic senators want the Federal Trade Commission to exert pressure on Instacart.

Seven senators sent a letter to FTC Andrew Ferguson, which was first shared with POLITICO’s Morning Tech team, urging him to launch an investigation into its alleged use of dynamic pricing — the practice of continuously changing prices based on fluctuations in demand or the time of day.

The senators cite a report by the Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union suggesting that Instacart has experimented with using AI to determine food prices. As the letter, helmed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), reads: “We are deeply concerned that Instacart’s pricing tactics may result in higher food prices, less competition, fewer opportunities to comparison shop, more incentive for companies to collect sensitive personal data, and increased customer confusion[.]”

Another stab at national privacy rules

Republican House members are gearing up to introduce data privacy legislation as early as January, POLITICO’s Gabby Miller was the first to report.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is putting the final touches on a law that would protect consumers’ data. If passed, the law would likely preempt state statutes on data protection, and finally end Congress’s protracted quest to establish a national privacy framework.

“There’s a consensus standard composed of, I would say, the majority of the states that would try to kind of conglomerate them all together,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), a member of the the committee’s all-Republican data privacy working group, told Gabby. “I think people aren’t going to be surprised, it’s a lot of ideas that have been tried successfully elsewhere, which the states are supposed to be the laboratories of democracy.”

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Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); Nate Robson (nrobson@politico.com); Ruth Reader (rreader@politico.com); and John Hendel (jhendel@politico.com).