The results are in, and the winners are not primarily the various Republican candidates – president, senators, and others – who won their respective tickets. Whatever the majority of voters hoped to gain from this, it’s actually Big Tech that won the election.

I’ll grant that we’re in for some major policy transformations, like new tax plans and budget cuts and realignments in foreign policy, and a lot more. All of these will be seismic changes. But look beyond this purely political dimension and we can see a more fundamental shift. We’ve crossed a line that confirms and cements the unassailable power of Big Tech.

Examples? Where should I start:

• Lina Khan won’t be FTC chair much longer. The very real progress her team made in antitrust will be halted. Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft were under investigation for self-dealing, killing competition, stifling innovation, and abusing customers and their data. Big Tech leaders can breathe easier today. The guardrails are coming off.

• The billionaires are already showing where their loyalty lies. Jeff Bezos, days after unilaterally squashing a Harris endorsement by the Washington Post, has posted a congratulations to the incoming president. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has done the same.

  Billionaire Peter Thiel can celebrate his investment in JD Vance, who had won his Senate seat with Thiel’s help before becoming the VP pick. Now Thiel’s mentee will be, as the saying goes, a heartbeat away from the presidency.

• Elon Musk might be the biggest winner of all, having so publicly aligned himself with the campaign before the win. His companies – Tesla, SpaceX/Starlink, X/Twitter, and now xAI – will face less scrutiny, and fewer obstacles, in their pursuit of growth and government contracts.

  Meantime, it recently came to light that Elon Musk is aligned with Vladimir Putin – see the WSJ article (gift link, Oct 25, 2024) detailing calls between Musk and Putin over the past two years. This is unfortunate, given Musk’s intimate access to our defense operations. The Pentagon and NASA are both dependent on Musk’s SpaceX for rocket launches.

  But Musk can laugh off the Putin connection. The incoming president can, if he chooses, put a stop to any investigation of Musk – or, if necessary, issue a pardon.

• The guardrails are coming off. Consider the Big Tech companies that are already growing at astonishing rates: Google’s cloud business just reported a 35% increase in revenue year over year, Amazon’s AWS saw a 19% increase, and Facebook/Meta’s profit is up 35%. What happens when these companies operate with even less regulation?

  Mark Zuckerberg gave a clue in a recent investor call: Facebook will soon be promoting even more AI slop.

  A third of American adults get their news – their news! – from Facebook, every day. Read the Pew report. For years now, the Facebook algorithm has amplified whatever content gets the most engagement – a design that, of course, has helped create the polarized, lunatic politics we see today. And now Zuck wants to add more AI slop to the mix.

  Don’t look to responsible print journalism to fill the gap; the entire industry is hollowed out, thanks in large part to Facebook’s sludge-amplification algorithm. Citizens have fewer and fewer choices to learn the truth about what's happening, while Facebook keeps getting richer and richer.

• The internet is going to change. Big Tech, the multi-trillion-dollar surveillance-capitalist cartel, will concentrate its power to new levels.

  I know the internet feels corporate already, but this election signals that we’ve crossed a line. The internet is going to become a fully surveilled space, entirely captured by Big Tech. Everything you say, type, click, swipe, tap, like, rate, or otherwise do on or in range of any networked camera, microphone, touch screen, keyboard, sensor, or other device – all of it you should assume is going to be sent to one or more Big Tech companies, and their government partners, and any third party with a dollar and enough interest in you, or people like you – all to be stored, analyzed, rendered, and turned back on you in the form of manipulating nudges – indefinitely.

  Now consider how valuable Big Tech’s surveillance infrastructure will become to any authoritarian leaders, either in the US or elsewhere, who have the money or power to gain access to your data.

  Outside the US, spare a thought for the citizens of Ukraine, who have been fighting off the Russian invasion for over two years, trying to prevent a full-scale dismantling of their democracy, their identity, their history. The incoming American president has stated his desire to stop assisting the Ukrainians and cut a deal with Putin. This, too, will open the door toward more power for those invested in surveillance and authoritarianism. (See my recent column on Ukraine.)

• Big Tech, as the engine powering surveillance capitalism and the center of American economic power, is devouring every industry. Listen to my dystopia update on Techtonic this week, covering how the automotive, retail, and healthcare sectors are following Big Tech’s lead in installing surveillance tech to exploit citizens and customers.

  This isn’t just an economic story. Political power, cultural power, and military power are naturally accompanying Big Tech’s rise. Yesterday’s election is just going to make Silicon Valley stronger in all respects. The guardrails are coming off, and we’re headed into some strange and disturbing times.

• What to do in response? I’m going to continue to run the Creative Good community, one place online that’s not captured by Big Tech or the billionaires. It’s funded by members, and our gathering point – the Creative Good Forum – is behind a login wall, beyond the reach of the AI slop that will increasingly overwhelm the Big Tech feeds. If you’d like to support what I’m doing, and be a part of our community, join Creative Good.

I do hope you’ll join me at Creative Good. Whatever happens next, we’ll do better by sticking together.

Until next time,

-mark

Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon

P.S. Your subscription is unpaid. If you want to support my work on the newsletter, please join us at Creative Good. (You’ll also get access to our members-only Forum.)

Initiatives related to ranked choice voting in political primaries and general elections were on the ballots in eight states and the District of Columbia. On the ballots were also an initiative that would repeal ranked choice voting (RCV) and restore plurality elections in Alaska, and to prohibit ranked choice voting in Missouri.

RCV lets voters rank candidates for political office by preference instead of choosing just one. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who picked the eliminated candidate as their top choice have their votes transferred to their next preference. This process repeats, eliminating the lowest-ranked candidates and redistributing votes, until one candidate achieves a majority.

First-past-the-post plurality party primaries exacerbate political polarization because candidates are generally chosen by each party's base consisting of relatively few but highly ideological voters. This setup pushes candidates to adopt more extreme positions to gain favor with primary voters.

Proponents of RCV argue that it helps ensure the winner has broad support and allows voters to express multiple preferences, creating a more representative outcome in multicandidate races.

Cato Institute scholar Walter Olson argued in 2021 that RCV "should hold a lot of attraction, I believe, for those of us with libertarian views." Why? Because libertarians, he observes, "tend to be aware that the so-called political spectrum does a poor job of capturing important facts about candidates; the ones we recognize as best (or worst) on matters of liberty and the rule of law do not necessarily line up neatly along a party spectrum. For libertarians, as for other groups, RCV respects and incorporates the complexity of actual voter preferences."

Federal courts have consistently ruled that RCV does not violate federal constitutional and statutory requirements with respect to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equal protection under the law. Specifically, courts have found that RCV in primaries and general elections does not violate political parties' free speech rights because it neither limits parties' ability to express their positions nor restricts their freedom to support chosen candidates. RCV simply changes the mechanics of how votes are counted without suppressing party messaging or candidate competition.

While not all the votes have yet been counted, ranked choice voting appears to have been strongly rejected by voters in nine states. Only voters in Washington, D.C., chose to adopt RCV.

Let's take a look at the results.

Arizona Propositions 133 and 140: The first would amend the constitution to require partisan primaries and the second would amend it to permit the adoption of ranked choice voting in elections: Both were rejected (by 59 percent to 41 percent and 58 percent to 42 percent, respectively). Basically maintaining the state's current semi-closed primary system.

Colorado Proposition 131. Top-four ranked choice voting in primary elections and RCV for both federal and state general elections: rejected by 55 percent to 45 percent.

Idaho Proposition 1. Top-four ranked choice voting in primary elections and RCV for both federal and state general elections: rejected by 69 percent to 31 percent.

Montana Constitutional Amendment 126. Top-four ranked choice voting in primary elections for both federal and state general elections: rejected by 52 percent to 48 percent.

Montana Constitutional Amendment 127. Requires a majority vote to win state and federal general elections: rejected by 61 percent to 39 percent.

Nevada Question 3. Top-five ranked choice voting in primaries and RCV for both federal and state general elections: rejected by 54 percent to 46 percent. Note that a ranked choice voting amendment to the state constitution passed with 53 percent of the vote in 2022. (Amendments must be passed in two successive state general elections.)

Oregon Measure 117. Ranked choice voting in primary and general elections for federal and state executive offices beginning in 2028: rejected by 60 percent to 40 percent.

South Dakota Constitutional Amendment H. Replace partisan primaries with top-two primaries for state and federal elections: rejected by 66 percent to 34 percent.

Washington, D.C. Initiative 83. Semi-open primaries and ranked choice voting for all elections, beginning in 2026: adopted by 73 percent to 27 percent.

What about the initiatives that would repeal and prohibit ranked choice voting?

Alaska Ballot Measure 2. Repeal top-four ranked choice voting in primaries and general elections: too close to call now but it's 51 percent to 49 percent for repeal. Note that RCV squeaked through in 2020 with 50.55 percent vote in favor.

Missouri Amendment 7. Prohibit ranked choice voting and require plurality primary elections: prohibit wins 69 percent to 32 percent.

For anyone obsessively watching election results in the US, Apple News will bring live updates to iPhone and iPad users’ lockscreens. And if you’ve got a recent iPhone, you can keep tabs on the electoral count right in the Dynamic Island while doing other things on your phone.

To get the updates on your lockscreen, you’ll have to register first. Open up Apple News and tap on the “Follow the 2024 election live” banner. If you don’t see the option right away, look for “Election 2024” under the “Special Coverage” section of the menu. You should get a notification that the Live Activity has been enabled.

The widget will be available on iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches starting tonight as votes in the US presidential and congressional elections are counted, AppleInsider reports. It’ll show the electoral count for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as well as Senate and House election results.

Apple News similarly shared caucus results through Live Activities earlier this year. Apple didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge requesting more information about today’s live election updates.

The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports. 

While Mozilla is best known for its Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Foundation — the parent of the Mozilla Corporation — describes itself as standing up “for the health of the internet.” With its advocacy and global programs divisions gone, its impact may be lessened going forward.

“Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”

This is Mozilla’s second round of layoffs this year. In February, the Mozilla Corporation laid off around 60 workers said it would be making a “strategic correction” that would involve involve cutting back its work on a Mastodon instance. Mozilla shut down its virtual 3D platform and refocused its efforts on Firefox and AI. The Mozilla Foundation had around 120 employees before this more recent round of layoffs, according to TechCrunch.

In an email sent to all employees on October 30th, Nabhia Syed, the foundation’s executive director, said that the advocacy and global programs divisions “are no longer part of our structure.”

“Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak,” wrote Syed, who previously worked as the chief executive of The Markup, an investigative news site. “Lofty goals demand hard choices.”