On January 1, socialist mayors will take office in both New York City and Seattle. That’s a total constituency of nearly ten million Americans. While Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson will necessarily be focused on fulfilling their campaign promises around addressing the cost-of-living crisis, their administrations will have the unique opportunity to serve as laboratories for the kind of imaginative policymaking the country badly needs.
One area that could especially benefit from an infusion of political creativity is tech policy. At the moment, the internet is in bad shape. The popularity of words like “slop” and “enshittification” — referring both to AI-generated content and increasingly poorly functioning websites and search engines — gives a sense of how degraded our digital lives have become. Meanwhile, many Silicon Valley capitalists have moved to the Right. Some openly supported Donald Trump’s bid for a second term, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort. Most swore their allegiance to Trump after he won, donating to the inauguration and heaping words of praise on the president-elect. The “tech oligarchy,” as it has come to be called, is now a MAGA coalition partner.
As the most powerful and dynamic faction of American capital, this is a troubling development. Socialist mayors certainly can’t single-handedly overturn the tech oligarchy. But they can kick-start policy innovations that sketch the outlines of an alternative technological blueprint for their constituents. The power of the tech giants is sustained — at least in part — through the limitations they place on our collective imagination. Their dominance is so absolute that it becomes hard to envision a different way of living with the internet.
Taking practical steps toward upending the status quo in New York and Seattle — which are, incidentally, two of the biggest tech industry hubs outside the Bay Area — would show that another internet is possible…
Auteur: Ben Tarnoff
