I read an op-ed by Lina Khan in the New York Times today. She was the Biden administration head of the Federal Trade Commission. In that role, she has consistently tried to rein in the power of big tech…to regulate Silicon Valley monopolies…well, as much as that is possible in this oligarchic society. As I understand it, she was a rare bright spot in the Biden Administration and ran a powerful agency where good things were actually happening. And yet, even she, on the topic of artificial intelligence — and networked computer technology more generally — fell into the same tired, imperial arms race thinking that dominates this country.
She thinks American tech companies are monopolies and have too much concentrated power, and she’s right. But her argument for why that is bad is this: concentrated economic power stifles innovation and thus gives power to America’s enemies. That’s how she framed the recent DeepSeek scandal, when a Chinese company created an AI that could compete with the best that America had to offer, and at a lower cost and smaller energy footprint.
As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.
This is the crux of her argument for why Google, Facebook, and Microsoft must be broken up — “The best way for the United States to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home.” No where does she explain what she means by “staying ahead globally.” It is simply assumed people know. And people do know. Staying ahead means having the biggest guns and fastest computers. And she thinks open competition will be the best path forward to get there.
It’s such a crude way of thinking about “national security” — reduced to what’s good for America’s privatized security state…what will allow our paranoid ruling class to more develop a weapon that will blow China out of the water. It doesn’t at all factor in anything important — what’s actually good for people, what kind of society is worth living in, what kind of world are we creating, what’s good, eaningful life worth living, or what’s good for our planet, the only home we have? Nah, fuck that, we should just destroy ourselves and all life on Earth and plow all our resources into building an AI god that will give the Chinese a real scare!
I get that Lina Khan was a top bureaucrat — she’s speaking this language because it's the only language that people in Washington, DC understand. And I’ve seen over the years as the progressive anti-monopoly movement has veered into this kind of security state way of thinking. Still, if Lina Kahn is truly worried about the power of tech monopolies over American society, I don’t think she understands how counter-effective her argument is. If she’s saying that America needs AI to survive on the global stage, she provides these companies with more power — political and cultural. With this kind of thinking, they — and the tech they make — become central players in making America great. And that’s just sad.