https://www.citationneeded.news/tech-influence-watch/
"I’ve been running my website
Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the
cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more
than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked.
Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation
that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products,
regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to
the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence
industry is following the same playbook.
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same
operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and
spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible
for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading
the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant
and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told
Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they
would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people
behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are
funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections,
is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same
operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer
protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at
the expense of everyday people.
So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called
Tech Influence
Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions
from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two
industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to
write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.
The site is live now at influence.citationneeded.news. Here’s a little of what
I found while building it."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
