New Frontiers

Mark Williams: Gary Winslett is an associate professor of political science, the director of the International Politics and Economics Program, and a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, all at Middlebury College. As a faculty fellow he co-directs the Rohatyn Center's Program on Global Economics, Development, and Political Economy. An expert on political economy, Gary's written extensively on trade policy. His first book, Competitiveness and Death: Trade and Politics in Cars, Beef, and Drugs, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. He's currently working on a new book, Big Tech and Its Populous Critics, which is what we're going to talk about today. Gary Winslett, welcome to New Frontiers.

Gary Winslett: Nice to be with you, Mark.

Mark Williams: Generally, what is this book about?

Gary Winslett: So this book is about the criticisms that populists on the political left and the political right have about big tech. And it's a response to many of those criticisms. You know, it concedes where populists make good points, but it pushes back on a lot of these arguments that actually don't make sense once you really start to sort of peel back the layers of the onion there.

Mark Williams: Okay, very good. Before we go any further, I've got to ask you a couple of definitional questions. The book's title, Big Tech and Its Populist Critics. One question I have now is, what do we mean by big tech? Is it the actual technology? Is it AI, social media platforms, smartphones, the analytics industry? Or do we mean specific tech firms? Twitter, Google, Tik Tok, Facebook. Or do we mean the individuals associated with tech firms? Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook.

Gary Winslett: So I definitely don't mean the individuals. We're talking about the five big companies that have been large technology companies for a while now. Apple, Amazon, Meta (so Facebook), Microsoft, and Google. It's those five big tech companies because they've really been at the heart of the technology industry in the United States for the last 10 to 15 years.

Mark Williams: Okay. So we're talking about specific companies then as representing big tech. My second definitional question is, regarding the critics, who are the populist critics that you're looking at and what makes these folks populists?

Gary Winslett: So, I actually want to take the second question first. So in political science scholarship, we talk about populism as a political style, and it presupposes a basic antagonism between the elite and the people. And the people are good and they're being put upon and oppressed by the elite. And so that's sort of what political scientists mean by populism. Now, there's a right wing version of that: Donald Trump, JD Vance, Josh Hawley, these kinds of people.

And then there's a left wing populism, think Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, AOC, these kinds of people. Again, you'll notice that even though it's different from a right wing populism, both sides of this populism presuppose that antagonism between the elite and the people. And they have a different set of critiques of the big tech companies.

Mark Williams: So when you're talking about populists, you are not talking about populism as expressed or experienced in other countries. This is an American kind of populism. You're not talking about Tulio Vargas or Juan Peron or Hugo Chavez or any of the populists that comparative political scientists would naturally call up as examples of populism?

Gary Winslett: That's correct.

Mark Williams: Okay. So we're talking about an American kind of populism. It comes in two varieties. It could be right wing; it could be left wing; or left of center, right of center. Okay, good. What are some of the populists’ biggest complaints about big tech?

Gary Winslett: If you start with the political right, it's much more of a cultural thing. They would argue that tech has squelched free speech. So, Twitter is not one of the companies that I look at, particularly after Musk takes it over. But they were very critical of Facebook, for example, during COVID for basically repressing misinformation. And that would be a real core of the right wing critique of big tech is around free speech kind of stuff.

Mark Williams: As Gary explains, common right wing populist critiques of big tech flow from a fundamental misunderstanding of free enterprise capitalism and free speech rights. Whereby the owners of private corporations like Twitter or Facebook should somehow be legally obligated to carry their views on those platforms regardless of their inaccuracy or potential danger.

Gary Winslett: Right wing populists see these elites as substituting their own value judgment for the people’s. You know, if I'm on Facebook I should get to say what I want to say. At least that's the right wing argument. Right. And who are you to be telling me that my speech just disappears off this network because it's not from your approved, you know, elite scientists who say whatever about COVID–I don't think they're right. Right. Like that would be the sort of right wing populist, critique on speech grounds. That would be the right wing critique. The left wing populous critique of some of these big tech companies is gonna be much more economics. Think of the Neo Brandeisian school in terms of antitrust. Right. There’s a lot of ways in which Lina Kahn, when she was in charge of the FTC, and Jonathan Cantor in charge of the DOJ under the Biden administration had sort of a sustained critique of the size of the big tech companies and the economic sins that they were accused of having committed.

Mark Williams: Is it more accurate to view these criticisms from both left and right as being aimed at the actual technology, or is it being aimed at the actions that a big tech company takes?

Gary Winslett: Actions and also power. Populists think very strongly in terms of power. Who has power to do what? And so the power to moderate speech, for example, is not a power that the right wing populists think tech should have. You know, populists are very animated by who has power. Like that, that is something that pushes them and drives their thinking, at least as much in what is to be done. So the right wing populists don't really like the power to moderate speech. The left wing populists, their economic views don't actually center around growth as much, and certainly don't center around consumer convenience.
They think in terms of like relational economic power. And so, a really good example of this, I like to use Acemoglu and Johnson's book, Power and Progress, here. Because even though they’re not necessarily associated with populism, there’s lots of populist thinking going on in their new book. One of the things that they really hate is self-checkout at the grocery store. Because they think that it undermines worker power in groceries. And I just find that such a telling, little example that they pulled out as something they think is a bad technology. To me, it's great. Like I can get through the grocery store more quickly that I'm not having to wait in a long line, because I can just like self check out. And so there's just this interesting way in which that little nugget of technology is a good, I think, window into how dynamist versus populist would think differently about tech.

Mark Williams: My critique about the self checkout is that the stores are getting me to do their work and they're not paying me, and they're not giving me lower prices. So that’s my own pet peeve.
So let's dive into your book. Chapter two argues that populists like to analogize big tech to two kinds of monopolistic or oligopolistic gilded age businesses: railroads on the one hand, Standard Oil on the other. But they seem to overlook other plausible analogies from that same time period, like refrigeration, electricity, early medicine. Why do you think they focus on these particular analogies rather than some of the others that are available?

Gary Winslett: So one of the things I go into in this chapter is the sort of political use of analogies. Why do political actors use analogies at all? One of the reasons is that analogies gets at a politics of vibes. And I knew this is a new word, and people might think I'm being dismissive when I say that, but I'm really not. We sometimes talk in political psychology as like heuristics are shortcuts for political thinking, Right. You go into a voting booth, somebody has a D next to their name, or R next to their name. It's like a shortcut for like, okay, I can figure out broadly what these people are associated with without a ton of mental load. Well, vibes are actually a shortcut to values, and so political actors want to use analogies as a shortcut to a communication of values.

And so when you'll see a left wing populist, analogize the big tech companies to the railroads, what they're trying to get at is this vibes of a capitalist for-profit entity that has the ability to make all kinds of economic decisions that will have enormous implications for you the people. Whether or not the railroad goes to town A or town B is an enormously important thing. Right. And then once they’ve built the railroad, you need them to get to market. And so they have a lot of leverage power over you. If the railroad decides it doesn't want to take your product to market, your product doesn't get to market. And so you collectively need to exercise strong D, democratic, democracy and use the political system to reign them in. Like that is the vibes that they're trying to get at with the railroads analogy.

And then the other thing that analogies are for is thinking about actor configuration. Who are the actors that really matter? What are the economic identities that really matter? Right. And so, again, the railroads analogy. The actors are this big private sector organization you're dependent upon and you the little people, and then the government has gotta be brought on your side to fight the big company, or else they're gonna take advantage of you. That's the purpose of that analogy. And then the Standard Oil analogy, you know, Standard Oil, like it did a lot of things that were extraordinarily underhanded. Right. There's just no other way about it. Their behavior was at minimum highly unethical, and in many cases straight up illegal.

Mark Williams: Criminal.

Gary Winslett: Criminal. Yeah.

Mark Williams: Particularly towards competitors.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, exactly. Right. And so part of what the populists are getting at with the Standard Oil analogy is the combination of size and criminality. And so these are the two analogies that populists really like for the big tech companies. I actually think that they're overlooking a lot of other analogies that might make a lot more sense and give you a different way of thinking through big tech. One of them is early refrigeration. So the World's Fair in 1893 in Chicago. The biggest accident is actually an ammonia explosion at this new refrigeration factory, more or less. Dozens of people died. It was awful. That doesn't mean that we're gonna not advance refrigeration. So that's one analogy you might think through is like, we've got these burgeoning new technologies, how do we make it work right?

Mark Williams: We're not saying do without refrigeration.

Gary Winslett: Right, exactly.

Mark Williams: How do we harness it to make it beneficial and safe.

Gary Winslett: And one of the things that I'm working on right now and as I'm updating the manuscript is the way we think about AI with that. One of the big challenges virtually every organization is gonna face over the next decade is how to try to get the good stuff from AI without the bad stuff. Right. We do want some of these processes to get automated. Self-driving cars are, at this point safer than humans. They don't get road rage, they don't get drunk, they don't get sleepy. The stats on automated vehicles are really good. Like, that'd be cool. Let's do that. There's good stuff from AI, there's bad stuff. How do we get the good stuff and not the bad stuff?

Mark Williams: If we move to chapter six, Gary. In this chapter you are looking at the hostility that populists show towards big tech, and you find that hostility undermines the effectiveness of the US economy. Can you give us some examples of what you mean by that?

Gary Winslett: Yeah, so one of the things that's really core to right wing populism is a certain nativist instinct. Right. Very xenophobic, very anti-immigrant. And the difficulty companies now have in terms of bringing in immigrants in high skilled tech jobs is making it harder to launch tech startups, but also just to do the most cutting edge AI research. And so right wing populism by blocking flows of human capital, these highly skilled immigrant workers, are really undermining some of our national champions. The question is, do we want the technological frontier to be an American led frontier, or do we want it to be a Chinese led frontier? And if we can't bring in the best talent, that's undermining us in the long run.

Mark Williams: Wouldn't the populists also say, rather than let these great jobs go to foreigners, we should train Americans to do the jobs that we are not permitting immigrants to do–these highly skilled engineering computational positions. Wouldn't that be a populist argument that we should be training our own as opposed to importing so-called technicians?

Gary Winslett: It very much is the populist argument, and it was one of the things I discussed there. It’s you see this really explode, last Christmas actually. Over the holidays you had this real vicious fight between like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk on one side, and the much more nativist people in the Trump coalition on the other, around specifically H1B visas and Indian immigrants. And they make exactly this argument that these are highly paying jobs and we need to keep them for native born workers. And what I would say to that is that's ultimately going to slow these companies down. And that's ultimately going to slow down pushing out at the technological frontier. We also have a lot of evidence that suggests that high skilled immigrants create many more economic benefits than anything they might be sort of taking out.

Mark Williams: While we're at it, could you give us a short list of populists on each side of that political divide, left and right?

Gary Winslett: Yeah. So on the left, I think your most famous ones would be Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren. Zoran Mamdani is a new one, but he's sort of interesting in that in comparison to previous populists, he tends to care a lot about consumer prices and affordability. On the right, you would again go with Donald Trump, JD Vance, Josh Hawley. These are really good examples of those sort of more right wing populists in the US perspective.

Mark Williams: Okay, great. Lately many economists have been arguing that Donald Trump's tariff wars are hurting Americans' economic interests and damaging the country's overall foreign economic policy. In general, how would you compare the damage that the populist stance toward big tech is inflicting on US economic foreign policy versus the damage inflicted by the tariff wars?

Gary Winslett: The tariff wars are significant and they're also very immediate and very easy to explain to people. You put a tax on imports. What that does is it raises the price of imports quite mechanically. And so that raises consumer prices. As importantly, it raises the price of input goods. And so tariff wars, you can point to a very clear set of numbers: this is what is costing you. Yale Budget Lab has done some really interesting stuff on how basically the average family will pay about $2,000 more this year, because of Trump's tariffs. And so it's very easy to put a very tangible number, and the causal chain is shorter. So that's one of the things that makes the pain of the tariff wars just more apparent.

The pain from these populist critiques of the big tech company is more long term and it has a longer causal chain. What it's doing is it's constraining consumer choice. It's slowing growth, it's slowing technological progress, and these things over time stack up to a poorer, less dynamic world than we otherwise would have. But it has so many multifaceted consequences that it is difficult, if not impossible, to do the kind of Yale Budget Lab scorecard of like, this is exactly how much money it's gonna cost you in 2031.

Mark Williams: How'd you get interested in this topic?

Gary Winslett: Well, so, I was writing my first book on regulatory trade barriers. It was around goods, and I like to do a very sector-by-sector analysis. So in that book it looks at, automotives, pharmaceuticals, and the beef industry. There's different conceptual frameworks you can use to talk through political economy. For example, social class, economic geography, or varieties of capitalism. Another one is sector analysis, like manufacturing looks different than hospitals, which looks different than construction, which looks different than entertainment. And you could often get at these really important details doing sector-by-sector analysis. And so as I was finishing that project and going into the next one, I thought, well, what is a sector that is really timely and exciting and fresh and that I would like to spend all this time investigating? And tech seemed the natural focus.

Mark Williams: Throughout the book, Gary, you argue for something that you call a dynamist approach to public policy when it comes to big tech. Can you help us understand what you mean by dynamism? And are there any periods of US economic history that you think best reflect this?

Gary Winslett: Yeah. So dynamism comes out of this book by Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies, and it's just a fascinating book. I really love the way it sort of orients political thinking around leaning into the future. And it's really about having a positive-sum view of the world. Political economists talk a lot about this difference between a zero-sum view of the world–for me to get richer, you have to get poorer–versus a positive-sum view of the world, which is like we both can be better off. So the first thing about a dynamist viewpoint is that it leans into the fact that the world is very positive-sum. If growth happens, that's great for all of us. On top of the positive sumness, there's also an acceptance of risk. You really can't have growth with literally zero risk. You want to get more entrepreneurialism, you want to get experimentation. And you want that sort of leaning into the creation of new things. It's not trying to pull down institutions or pull down the elite. It's about trying to create this really bright future. And I think that's something that we've lost in a lot of our populism inflected political rhetoric over the last decade, is that excitement about the future. And I think it's possible to get that back.

Mark Williams: So dynamism, part of it is innovation and excitement about the future. Okay. And are there periods of our history that reflect this kind of environment?

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I think so. It's interesting to think about it on both the left and the right. On the right, you had the Reagan era, whatever other political disagreements people might have with Ronald Reagan, he was doing the shining city on the hill. He had a very sunny optimism about the direction America was going. I'd like to see the political right in America re-embrace that set of instincts. Our best days can be in front of us, not behind us.

Mark Williams: Are populists not doing that now?

Gary Winslett: No, generally not.

Mark Williams: Make America Great Again. Isn't the goal to make America great and to have a better future?

Gary Winslett: I think that their understanding of it is that America's been in decline, and that the past was better than the present. And what we need to do is basically recreate a simulation of the past. It's very much about turning the clock back, not that sort of Reagan building the shining city on the hill.
And then on the political left, I think that more recently the Obama administration had a very upward trajectory view of history. Barack Obama would say things like, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. And it was a way in which the Obama administration really liked the tech industry, and really liked technological progress. And I think that the populist left has lost some of that.

Mark Williams: So dynamism, is it a policy stance? What exactly is it? I'm trying to get to the substance. It seems like a key concept for you, and I'm trying to put some flesh on it. So that we can understand.

Gary Winslett: So what I wanted to do was flesh out a different political logic. Much as I said that populism isn't one ideology, but is a thing that presupposes this basic antagonism between the people and the elite. A dynamist political logic doesn't presuppose that. It views growth and technological progress as things that make us all better off. And so in order to get those things, what we need are a culture of risk taking, a view of the world as positive-sum, right. An excitement about the future. Positivity and optimism. That political logic brought together, I think is the most effective and appropriate response to the political logics of populism.

Mark Williams: Listening to Gary describe this positive dynamist vision for America’s future, I couldn’t help but think of the intense political polarization, fragmentation, and democratic regression currently taking place in the US. Struck by the contrast, I wondered if he really believed America could actually experience a dynamist approach to public policy any time soon, or is that just wishful thinking.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I think so. We have no idea who the next democratic leader is gonna be. Could be Abigail Spanberger, just one governor of Virginia, right? You never know who's gonna be the next person. Until a year before he was becoming president, people thought Donald Trump becoming the next president was like a joke and an impossibility. So I don't assume that politics are frozen where they are for very long. I just don't think that makes a whole lot of sense. If you assume a kind of kaleidoscopic turning of the politics, it just always keeps shifting, then that opens up to possibility for us leaning into much more positivity in our politics. I brought up Mamdani earlier. He's a really interesting guy in that in some ways he is quite populist. Freeze the rent. He identifies as a democratic socialist. He wants government run grocery stores. But one of the things that I like about him is that he's less angry than a lot of other populists are. He's like very nice, smiles a lot.

Mark Williams: Do you mean Bernie Sanders?

Gary Winslett: Bernie too. But Elizabeth Warren can't go more than about three sentences about using the word fight. Sanders is not the only cantankerous populace out there. But yes, he's, he would be one of 'em. Mamdani’s just in his temperament, not like that. And so even amongst populists, I think you could get some sort of movement toward a more dynamism there. And who knows what happens to populism on the right after Trump. He seems to have the secret sauce when it comes to like low engagement voters. But then every time he’s not on the ballot, the Republicans do quite poorly. I'm just not sure that JD Vance actually has the juice to take over all of Trumpism in 2028. So you never know what's gonna happen on the right either.

Mark Williams: Where do you see big tech going in the future if you were able to forecast the next five years, which is an eternity in big tech world. Where do you see the industry and the political minefields that have been laid around the industry, were do you see that proceeding in the next five to 10 years?

Gary Winslett: In terms of the political minefields, the first thing you gotta think about is AI. Right. Who is going to be associated with what kind of AI? And it's been interesting seeing ChatGPT get a lot of the mind share in terms of people thinking about AI. When there's all kinds of other AI based tools that I actually like better. I think Claude works better in a range of things than ChatGPT. I think it hallucinates a lot less, it's much more reliable. And so it'll be interesting to see which kinds of AI, the different big tech companies leverage and how they respond to public concerns about various kinds of things.

So one thing that we're seeing is there's a lot of concern about data centers. And you have one concern that is misleading, which is concerns about water. The amount of water the data centers use really isn't much compared to all kinds of water we use for all kinds of other stuff, growing beef, for example. There's a different concern, which is electricity usage. That's a different story. The data centers do use quite a lot of electricity, but there you would have a populist response, which is to get really mad at the big tech companies. Be like, how dare your data centers use all this electricity that's driving everybody's prices up. The dynamist response would say, well okay, that's why you need to build a lot more electricity. That's why we need a lot more electricity transmission lines. That's why we need a lot more green energy. The other thing you're starting to see the big tech companies do is do a lot of their energy production, what's called behind the meter. So instead of just being part of broader electricity markets, they create all their own electricity basically in-house. That's why some of the big tech companies are refurbishing nuclear power plants. That way if people are mad about the electricity prices going up, the big tech company can say, not us, we're doing all our own stuff. Our data center's powered by this big power plant over here that's nuclear. That's a minefield that I would see them trying to get around. that also speaks to some of these like populism versus dynamism challenges.

Mark Williams: Do you think there's likely to be greater regulation of these firms or less?

Gary Winslett: Depends on which areas you're talking about. And this is part of the reason why I wanted to write a book on it, not an article. I could imagine much greater regulation and stuff around social media. I think that animates a lot of voters. It animates a lot of parents. People are worried about all kinds of different facets of social media. So that's one where I could see more regulation.
The challenge is what the populist right and what the populist left want are often very opposed to each other on terms of what they actually want from more regulation. What the populist right seems to want are rules that the big social media companies can't discriminate against various kinds of speech. And that's almost the opposite of what the populist left wants, which is rules that tell them they have to differentiate between different kinds of speech. And that's just the speech thing. But still, I could see more regulations on various kinds of social media.

Whereas I don't see a whole lot of new regulations popping up on say Amazon delivery. I think people just like getting their packages in three days.

And sometimes big tech makes mistakes. Right. Like I could have told you when Google was creating Google Glass, that people were not gonna be thrilled about the idea that you were wearing glasses that could surreptitiously record them or maybe have concerns that you could somehow look through their clothes or something. I could immediately have told you that this is not gonna go over well with most people. And it did not go over well.

Mark Williams: I wanted to circle back to the criticisms that populists might levy toward big tech with respect to free speech. There seems to be a disconnect between those criticisms and a sort of stand on private enterprise and a private business firm. Can you talk us through what that disconnect might be?

Gary Winslett: Well, they are private property owners and they do get to say, you're not allowed to say this on my forum.

Mark Williams: This is really the point of my question because a free speech criticism of social media, that, I've heard those from both sides of the aisle, basically. And that argument seems to run a ground when it confronts the fact that this is a private business. The government, per se, is not restricting your capacity to say whatever you want. To believe whatever you want. The idea that private companies should be required to carry citizen speech regardless of what it might be, how it impacts their business or doesn't, or their own interests. That seems disconnected to the notion of private property.

Gary Winslett: I think that's exactly right. If you run a bar, you would like people to come to your bar to buy beer. If somebody walks in and they're clearly a neo-Nazi, you have every interest in like kicking the neo-Nazi out so that the regular people will come to your bar. A social media platform…

Mark Williams: And it's not the government kicking them out. It's the owner of the business that says, you're not welcome here anymore.

Gary Winslett: Exactly. And, the owner of a social media platform has understandably an interest in making people on that platform feel that their time has been well spent and that it is pleasant and enjoyable for them to be on. And so if there's some people who are making this an unpleasant experience for everybody else, the platform has every right to be like, well, you're making this not a pleasant experience and you're costing us customers, so you gotta go. That was the old pre Elon Musk Twitter understanding, is that some people who are engaging in hate speech, we're just not gonna allow that because you are chasing people away who we would like to be here.

Mark Williams: So looking forward, is it fair to say that you're an optimist, Gary, over the future of big tech?

Gary Winslett: Very much so. I think I'm more optimist than almost anybody you'll find.

Mark Williams: A lot of people look at the future, they look at technology and they see shadows, they see concerns coming with the technology, on the one hand; and depending who’s actually promoting or owning the technology that complicates the concerns, amplifies the concerns.

Gary Winslett: I still think we want to lean into the technological progress. We get a lot of great things from technological progress, like that’s how things get better. And I think we need to try to get that back, that excitement about the future.

Mark Williams: Well, this has been a very fascinating discussion, and I wanna thank you very much for coming in and visiting us here on New Frontiers.

Gary Winslett: Thanks, Mark.