In her high-profile campaign for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination, Mallory McMorrow has suddenly gone viral with an explainer video depicting herself as a crusader against surveillance pricing. It’s a solid video boosted by legacy media and online lefty groups, and it touts a crucial cause pioneered by leaders like former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as well as by state and federal lawmakers who are bravely challenging the power of Big Tech.
So, as I watched my own state’s legislators this week doing the hard work to advance a bill to curtail surveillance pricing, I went looking for how McMorrow has championed this cause as one of the top leaders of her own state’s legislature. She purports to believe deeply in stopping corporations’ practice of spying on consumers and then using the data to charge different consumers different prices. So surely she must have a detailed voting record on the matter that will tell us exactly how she’s going to change the game in the US Senate, right?
So I looked. And looked. And looked — and I ultimately found nothing other than what appears to be a cartoonish level of cynicism . . . and a series of McMorrow votes to provide state tax incentives to build the data centers that power the surveillance-pricing system she’s now going viral for saying she opposes.
I started my search in the Michigan legislature and found a whole list of bills that reference pricing. I did find HB 5771 and HB 5222: Democratic legislation in the state’s GOP-led House that’s designed to curtail surveillance pricing. McMorrow is not listed as a sponsor of these bills nor do there appear to be versions of these bills in Michigan’s Democratic-led Senate, where McMorrow serves as the chamber’s majority whip.
Was I looking in the wrong place? I decided to ask the surveillance system itself: I logged on to ChatGPT and asked. Here’s what it told me:
OK. ChatGPT sometimes gets stuff wrong. Was it…
Auteur: David Sirota
