Pod Insights The Vergecast The politics and laws changing tech in the US About this episode This week on
02:10 - The Verge's David Pierce tries out Neeva's Bias Buster, an attempt to get people out of their echo chambers and show them new information in its search engine.
20:25 - Senior reporter Adi Robertson talks about her story How America turned against the First Amendment
42:27 - Policy reporter Makena Kelly explains the CHIPS and Science Act, and how it could reshape the tech industry in America.
Further reading:
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
Micron launches $15 billion Idaho project amid federal push for US tech manufacturing
President Joe Biden speaks after groundbreaking for Intel’s $20 billion semiconductor plant
Micron’s investing up to $100 billion to bring the country’s ‘largest semiconductor’ facility to New York
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Transcript 13,945 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of semiconductor foundry construction. I'm your friend David Pierce. I am currently in Union Station in DC, just off an Amtrak home from Connecticut. Big weekend with family time and ironically, a lot of technology. There was a floppy disk adapter involved. I got to tell my mom all about the wonders of VLC media player, and we did an awful lot of password sharing. Nobody's on Netflix. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. Technically, as you're listening to this, the US midterms were yesterday, but we still wanted to spend some time this week talking about politics. So we're going to talk about how political news works on the internet, and whether anyone can build tools to make it work better. We're also going to talk with Addie Robertson about the state of free speech in America and on the internet.
0:48 David Pierce? Fair warning, it's pretty bleak. And then McKenna Kelly is going to come on to talk to us about the Chips and Science Act, and which US cities might turn out to be the next big tech hubs. All that is coming in just a second, but I gotta get out of this train station, get into a cab, and get home. Wish me luck. This is The Vergecast. See you in a second.
1:09 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:54 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:39 Speaker 02 Welcome back. I want to tell you about this slider I'm looking at. So I'm on Niva.com. Niva, if you didn't know, is a search engine, which is built by a bunch of ex-Googleers who think they can build a better, ad-free, privacy-respecting search engine. Super interesting company. We're going to talk a lot more about it in a later episode. But anyway, I'm on Niva.com and I search for, let's say, 2022 midterms. They're happening right now. There's a lot going on. I click on the news tab and I get some news. "Midterm Elections Latest News", which is a stream of stuff from The Washington Post. "Midterms 2022: The Ultimate Insider's Guide from Newsweek." "Charlie Kirk: The Hidden Parents Votes Will Sway Midterm Election", from Fox News. There's the Westlake Pick-a-Yun, which is a local newspaper from Texas that's here.
3:24 Speaker 02 So is the Houston Chronicle and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, NBC News, ABC, Dallas Morning News, Yahoo, Fox, Reuters, fairly standard news stuff. But then there's this slider at the top, right? It's like a third of the page wide, and it goes from dark blue on the left to a sort of faded white in the middle to a dark red on the right. If I grab the black arrows in the middle and pull them all the way left, the whole thing tilts toward blue and the news changes. Now, first up in my search results is The Daily Beast. It says GOP spends "F you" money in blue seats as polls tilt their way for midterm elections. Then The Guardian, "Democrats insist Joe Biden's low midterms profile is smart strategy." Then there's a Slate story about J.D.
4:09 Speaker 02 Vance and Tim Ryan in Ohio, a Rolling Stones story with an SNL cold open making fun of Republicans.
4:15 Speaker 03 My name is Herschel Walker, Texas Ranger, and I'm running for president of the United Airlines.
4:22 Speaker 02 You get the idea, right? This is deep blue pro-Democrat news, at least according to Neva. Now, let's go all the way the other way. Grab the arrow, slide it to the right, the whole thing tilts dark red. Now I have a story from Breitbart. It says, "Poll: Independent Voters Swing 18 Points Toward GOP on Generic Ballot." One from Newsmax, CBS's Margaret Brennan tries to pin political violence on Republican reps tweet. One from The Daily Mail, "Newt Gingrich Says Biden Likely Doomed Midterms By Inviting Dylan Mulvaney to White House." The Daily Caller is on here, The Federalist is on here, this is like the who's who of far-right news sources. If I tilt back slightly towards the middle, now I'm getting The New York Post, and Fox News, and The Washington Examiner, and The Epoch Times.
5:06 Speaker 02 It's still very right-leaning, obviously, with headlines about Big Tech and Democrats being in bed with each other, and China's supposed attempt to undermine the midterms. And then if I grab it again and flip slightly left, I get a Yahoo story about the Senate race in Pennsylvania, and a Politico story about Democrats needing Obama to help them, and a bunch of CNN and NBC. This slider is called Bias Buster, and it's Neva's attempt to get people out of their echo chambers and filter bubbles and show them new information and new perspectives. Here's how Vivek Raghunathan, Neva's co-founder, described it to me.
5:40 Speaker 04 This kind of thing has never existed before. Yeah, sure, you can look up a query like Inflation Reduction Act, or, you know, election results, and add like Fox News, or add like, you know, Mother Jones, or add like, you know, Huffington Post, and you can get like views from across the spectrum. But what we're really trying to do with Bias Buster is to dramatically reduce the bar to sampling diverse points of opinions from all sides of the spectrum. And so we built that into the product design from the ground up. For example, this Bias Buster resets itself on every search. We don't want it to be a setting that kind of remembers itself as you go along. We want you to try out and sample different points of the same opinion.
6:21 Speaker 02 My immediate first question on seeing this or even hearing about it was basically, says who? Is this just someone at Niva looking at a bunch of news sources and articles and saying, that one's center-right, that one's super-left? Vivek told me, no, in a way, it's actually simpler than that.
6:40 Speaker 04 And there are a number of third-party publications out there that have, you know, published points of views of where various sources land on various parts of the spectrum. They've often used polling and other techniques that involve like surveying users to create a map of the various news sources and where they lie on the spectrum. We are using those as guides to decide where various publications land on various parts of the spectrum.
7:03 Speaker 02 Okay, wait, hang on. Quick diversion here. Vivek also told me that Niva tried to not just categorize everything in one specific place because publications aren't the same all the time, which makes sense. But it got me wondering how these ranking systems work. It does kind of sound like someone is just out there reading news articles and going, oh, Mother Jones, super-left, AP, very-center, Breitbart, ultra-right. It feels weird to me that it's that simple, or that it's possible to boil it all the way down like that. So I called up Julie Mastrini, who is the Director of Media Bias Ratings at AllSides, which is one of the best-known companies doing this kind of work. Here's how she explained the process.
7:41 Speaker 05 So if we have high confidence in a rating, it means that we've applied multiple high-confidence methodologies to the news source's content. And that typically means it's undergone two things: an editorial review by a panel of people on the left, center, and right, who are actually looking at the news source's content and assessing it for bias, and then coming to a consensus on a rating, and a blind bias survey of Americans. So that is when we strip news reporting content of any branding, so people don't know that it's coming from CNN or Fox. We send it out to thousands of Americans, and we ask them to tell us what they think the bias of the media outlet is after reading headlines and news reports from the outlet.
8:23 Speaker 05 So we're kind of mixing, you know, expert panels of people who are trained to spot bias with everyday Americans to get the perception of the country.
8:34 Speaker 02 She said this process involves a lot of nuance and that publications change over time, but I definitely don't think this is a perfect system. But it is at least a consistent one and an approach I've heard from a few people building tools like Neva's. I definitely think this is better than trying to do like some really complicated personalized AI analysis of every article to figure out where it falls politically. That's something a lot of tech companies would try and I don't think it would work. And in Neva's case, keeping it simple is probably the right call because with a tool like this, giving people a transparent understanding of what they're seeing and why is actually a really big deal.
9:10 Speaker 04 We think any personalization users do should be explicit. We should not be doing implicit personalization on their behalf. And we think doing it at a level of granularity they understand, in this case, sources, is very important to building that trust and transparency.
9:22 Speaker 02 Look, do I think this is going to instantly solve all problems of polarization on the internet? No. Do I think stuff like this is worth trying? Absolutely. But honestly, my biggest question with all of this is, will anyone use it? Sure, there's a subset of people who say they'd like to read widely and understand other arguments, all that good stuff. It sounds nice, but it's just human nature to seek out stuff we know and stuff that agrees with us and the sources that we feel like get us and we're most comfortable with. Is it even possible to expose people to new things this way, especially in such a high stakes and constantly argumentative space like politics? I asked that question to Sean Munson, who's a professor at the University of Washington.
10:03 Speaker 02 And in 2012, he created a tool called Balancer that was meant to do something very similar to what Neva's doing now. It was a Chrome extension designed to help you see a wider spectrum of information about the news.
10:15 Speaker 06 We thought about kind of this whole range of options for pushing folks or giving them kind of this nudge or at least feedback. Some included, maybe we actually redirect them, right? So if you've read from a left-leaning or a right-leaning source too often, maybe when you go to read an article on a topic on the backend, there's something that actually takes you to that article on the same topic, maybe on a source you wouldn't choose.
10:36 Speaker 02 That last bit, actually changing the articles you see, felt like a bridge too far. So Balancer eventually settled on just giving you feedback on your activity. But the goal, he says now, was fairly simple and matches what Vivek told me about Neva.
10:49 Speaker 06 If I were to have continued the work, metrics for success would have been things like, are people more aware of other arguments? Are they able to cite the range of opinions that might support another opinion, even if they still don't agree with it, right? So are they basically more prepared to have conversations with people who hold different views because they kind of understand a bit of where they're coming from or understand some of the background? And it might not change any minds, but at least kind of this shared understanding or shared reality.
11:15 Speaker 02 You might have noticed that at the beginning of that, Sean said, "If I were to have continued the work." Spoiler alert, he didn't continue the work. In part, he didn't because he felt like he wasn't actually pressing at the most important information problem we have.
11:28 Speaker 06 Balancer is a tool that works if articles exist in a mostly shared reality, they just have different opinions about what to do about that reality. And if we look at where the information space has gone these days, it's not a shared reality. Misinformation, disinformation are much bigger threats. And I don't think something like Balancer could really possibly address them.
11:48 Speaker 02 I asked Vivek about this too, because one thing that jumped out to me using Bias Buster was that tools like this seem to think that everything is a matter of what right and left believe. And doesn't that set up a false dichotomy? Like, oh, reasonable people can disagree, when in reality, some things are true and some people are just wrong? Facts exist.
12:09 Speaker 04 My current sense is the veracity of information is an orthogonal axis to political opinion. There is legitimate political opinion on both sides, but whether something is true or not is like the next level of... We don't currently, or personally, I don't feel equipped to tackle misinformation as a completely by myself at the current moment. And so in be one of the Bias Buster, we are not attempting to tackle the veracity of information. We're attempting to tackle different opinions on different sides of the political spectrum.
12:37 Speaker 02 That strikes me as a tiny bit of a cop out, but honestly, also the right call. Vivek said Neva's goal is to match what Google and Bing and others are doing right now, to push to be as authoritative and correct as they are, without trying to reinvent the wheel and solve everything all at once. After playing with it for a few days, something about Neva's Bias Buster does feel valuable to me. And I'm clearly not the only one. Over the years, lots of folks have tried to figure out how to do this kind of thing in a responsible way. Exposing users to new ideas and sources without just causing flame wars seems good, right? But still, I come back to this idea. Is this a problem worth solving while there are such bigger ones out there? I'm torn on all of this. But luckily, The Verge's Addie Robertson
13:22 Speaker 02 has been paying attention to this kind of speech issue a lot longer than I have. So I figured I'd just call her up and ask.
13:29 Speaker 02 Addie, hello. Thank you for being here.
13:31 Speaker 07 Hey.
13:32 Speaker 02 I don't even have a question for you. Just like, tell me, tell me how to feel about tools like this as someone who's been paying attention to this for a long time.
13:37 Speaker 07 On one hand, I think anything that lets you filter and sort information is kind of just a good. I think that's, it's neat from that perspective. I think also you kind of want to be clear eyed about its limitations, though. So the first thing I think of is that this doesn't really control for a super key issue in search bias, which is your input. So as a scholar, Francesca Tripodi, who's done a lot of work on this, which is that the way you phrase a keyword or the topic that you're dealing with, there are just inherently different ways that different sites cover that information. So if you, in her example, you put in immigrant voting rights, then it doesn't matter how far right you slide the spectrum. There's going to be a lot more coverage on the left because that's just how the issue is framed and how that's written about.
14:21 Speaker 07 Whereas if you write illegal immigrants voting, then you're just going to get something that's inherently right biased because that's not terminology that, you know, the New York Times or Mother Jones is going to use. And the same token, like, there are topics that just, there's one side of the political spectrum that's going to write a billion essays and news stories about them. Like, I don't know, Hunter Biden's laptop and others that they're going to cover them, but there's just not that, not as much data there.
14:46 Speaker 02 That's super interesting because I'm now thinking about the way I tested this and a lot of it has been very sort of generic, right? You search terms like inflation and Joe Biden and midterms 2022. And I think some of that is like how people use the internet. But for the most part, it is the stuff you're describing. It's like, here's a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. And so you Google Hunter Biden's laptop. And just by virtue of looking for that thing, there are places like the New York Post has covered Hunter Biden's laptop to like the nth degree. So just by definition, you're more likely to get stuff with that kind of bias just because of the fact that you're searching for that thing with those words.
15:19 Speaker 07 Right. And there's some stories where it's just, there's almost a complete data void on one side of the spectrum because this is kind of the problem with describing any news coverage as objective, which is that the stories you decide to cover are sort of inherently from a viewpoint. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that I think that it is increasingly limited to describe the political spectrum as left versus right. That I think there's a lot of intersection now between, say, issues that matter to the left and issues that matter to the right. They're just motivated by different things and framed sometimes in a different way. And I think that a lot of the sources there are also, from what you've described, they seem like sort of a kind of well-known subset of sources.
16:01 Speaker 07 So yes, maybe, you know, you usually don't watch Fox News or read Fox News and you're going to get more Fox News, but you're not really going to burst the bubble of a specific subset of media. Like, you're not, as far as I can tell, going to get, you know, unicorn riot results from like a leftist collective.
16:20 Speaker 02 Right.
16:20 Speaker 07 Like, you're going to get things that are still pretty firmly within a specific media bubble.
16:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, and that's one of the things I've been thinking a lot about too, is like, I wound up sort of deep down this rabbit hole of these companies that rate media bias. And it ends up setting up this weird dichotomy where like, I've talked to a lot of people over the years who say like, you know, I watch Fox News for one side of the political spectrum and I watch CNN for the other side of the political spectrum. And I sort of get the impulse, but like, I would not, I would not agree with the assertion that those are like equal but opposite platforms. And then it's like, okay, what is the like left version of Breitbart? And it just ends up in this like really messy. See complicated headspace where like these things are not equally weighted. And I think even the idea that there is like a centrist take on everything is not true anymore. And then we wind up down this crazy road of like, is QAnon a political question?
17:08 Speaker 02 Like, is the earth flat a political question? And I don't know, this is just where my head starts to spin about like, where does truth versus fiction and where does right versus left? And where does politics versus just nonsense? All of the, all these lines feel so blurry that it, to me, it's like, this is a valiant attempt. But I almost wonder like, how deep towards that solving the real problems here can a tool actually go?
17:32 Speaker 07 It also kind of cuts against one of the key purposes of a search engine, which is to give you correct information.
17:39 Speaker 02 But then what is correct? This is the world we live in now. None of this makes any sense.
17:43 Speaker 07 But that's the thing is that Google and search engines are comfortable trying to make these judgments for some things. Like if you ask, you know, what year did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln? Which is a real thing that Google at one point had to correct for. They're like, no, this is obviously incorrect. There are things that are just beyond debate and these things, we're failing if we don't deliver these things. But then I think that as soon as something enters a specific culture war frame, then suddenly people are really afraid to say that something is true.
18:13 Speaker 02 No, I think that's right. And I think that question is sort of forever more complicated. And from some of the folks I've talked to, even talking about this stuff is the bigger, sort of more important question, right? It's like, we can talk about political bias, but only if we sort of exist in this shared reality when we all agree on what is real and true. And we don't anymore. And that feels problematic.
18:34 Speaker 07 Yes. And there are a lot of ways to frame stories that involve agreeing with specific baseline facts, but then just spinning them in a completely different way. Like if you read the New York Times versus Fox, even if the facts are right, you can come away with a really different impression. But that's still, to some extent, that's just a matter of opinion. And I think that that is clearly distinguishable from sites that just say very clearly wrong factual things with no backup.
19:02 Speaker 02 Right. This is helpful. This makes me feel, we need to take a break. But you should stick around because I want to spend a bunch of time talking about your story about the First Amendment. Do you have a few more minutes? You want to hang out?
19:12 Speaker 07 I do.
19:12 Speaker 02 Okay, cool. We will be right back.
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19:53 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
20:14 Speaker 10 We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.
20:39 Nilay Patel? This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.
20:52 Speaker 11 This series is presented by EY.
20:57 Speaker 02 We're back. Addie's still here. Thank you for sticking around, Addie. Yeah, hey. Okay, so I want to talk about this, this big story you wrote called "How America Turned Against the First Amendment." And I wrote down the way I would summarize the thesis of your piece. And I want to know if, how good a job I did summarizing the thesis of your piece. You ready? Yeah. Okay, my summary of the thesis of your piece is basically because a bunch of politicians and people on both sides of the aisle want to score political points by capitalizing on the backlash against big tech, they are using Section 230 as a wedge through which they can stick government speech regulation into the internet. And that's a huge problem and an actual threat to the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech. And even if we acknowledge all of that to be true and agree that it's bad, our legal
21:40 Speaker 02 system basically is not equipped to handle it. How's that? How'd I do?
21:45 Speaker 07 That's pretty fair, yeah. At the absolute broadest level, it's that everyone claims to love the First Amendment, by everyone, I'm Muslim, talking about politicians in courts, and then they increasingly just try to undercut it by claiming a bunch of other things that are not First Amendment-related are somehow creating problems. And so they are using all these things as smokescreens to kind of get around, really what they want to do is change what speech is legal.
22:10 Speaker 02 You point out that it's basically politically ridiculous to say you don't like the First Amendment. Like, just no one would do that in America, to say "I am against free speech" is just political suicide. And yet, to come out and say, you know, "We should be moderating these companies, we're banning books, we have all these issues," picking the fight with big tech and in these specific ways seems to work in a way that saying "I am against free speech" doesn't work. Why is that?
22:37 Speaker 07 Part of the issue is that free speech and the First Amendment are kind of different things, that the First Amendment is the specific legal doctrine that says that the government cannot do this thing, and has been interpreted in varying ways over the years. But then, free speech also, it's this much broader question, and I think that the internet has made it increasingly weird, which is that it's harder and harder to tell what speech, and it's harder and harder to tell what is free. Like, in a world, say, with almost infinite information, if you bury a bunch of speech in a bunch of harassment and weird nonsense, is speech meaningfully free? I think that there are really useful intermediary for a lot of people. There is a version of this where it's that a lot of speech in America now is mediated by these corporations.
23:20 Speaker 07 So if you really want to put your thumb on the scale and make speech, either you want to change the way that these sites work and you want to force them to carry certain information, or you want to say that they should ban certain information, but you're not going to quite say that should be illegal, you're just going to say it should be really hard to put up. That I think that that's it's kind of a way to work around the First Amendment and make it kind of meaningless.
23:44 Speaker 02 Right, okay, so you can sort of kneecap the First Amendment without ever actually saying, "I am against the First Amendment," which is, as established, a bonkers thing to do.
23:52 Speaker 07 I mean, a lot of places in the world don't think it's a bonkers thing to do. A lot of places in the world look at the First Amendment and go, "That's ridiculous. Why would you not ban hate speech?" But in America, it's more or less a foundational principle of just how speech works.
24:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, that makes sense. Okay, and then one more concept I want you to explain, because I was actually reading the comments on your story, and this came up a bunch, and there was a bunch of debate about it, and I think it's one of the things about Section 230 specifically that people willfully or otherwise misunderstand a lot, which is that what Section 230 does is actually allow companies to moderate their platforms, not forces them to be neutral, not forces them to have one specific point of view. It allows them to do the things that a lot of people are actually asking them to do, and that's a good thing. Can you just explain how that actually operates? Like, what does Section 230 allow these companies to do that is good and useful and valuable?
24:43 Speaker 07 If you are a regular Virgus Cast listener, maybe you already know this, but the reason Section 230 exists is that there were these two cases involving, I think libel, that were involving these two separate companies, like very early internet service providers. And one of these places did not moderate things. It was just this free-for-all, and somebody said something that was illegal and defamatory, and somebody sued over it. And then the other one was trying to be family-friendly. It was actively moderating things. It was looking at this content, and then someone also said something illegally defamatory, allegedly, and they got sued. And the principle at that point, the way that courts decided it, was thinking, "All
25:23 Speaker 07 right, let's compare this to a bookstore or a newspaper, and let's say that you cannot reasonably expect somebody who runs a big bookstore to have read literally every book. That's ridiculous. They're just these sellers. They don't really have a great knowledge of everything that's in here, so they shouldn't be responsible for selling it." But say if you're a newspaper and you're publishing a thing and you're just curating absolutely everything. Then you have control over this, but you should be responsible for it. And then they looked at this in the context of the internet and went, wait, this is actually really counterproductive. Because what it says is that if you bother to figure out what's going on on your site and make it better, then we're going to punish you for it by saying that you are responsible for anything illegal that happens.
26:07 Speaker 07 And what is illegal is often not clear, especially with speech law. That's something that is defamatory. You actually have these really long, complicated legal cases about it. And so it's very, very hard for a website to make something that is a judgment that often courts have trouble making. And so Section 230 basically says that you are allowed to run your site how you want, and you don't have to deal with trying to figure out what's legal and illegal, with some exceptions.
26:33 Speaker 02 And that flip side would be, and I think this is the concept that it took me a really long time to wrap my head around, and I think is hard for a lot of people, is that the flip side would be that the expedient thing for all these companies to do would be to just bury their head in the sand and not try. Because then you have plausible deniability that says, oh, we didn't even know this was here. It's horrible. We're so sorry. You can't sue us about, we didn't know. We didn't do it.
26:56 Speaker 07 Right. It's basically saying you're an internet service provider, whatever, you're, we're dumb pipes. We do nothing here to moderate. And so it incentivizes either way too much moderation or none at all.
27:06 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. What a lot of people perceive is that without Section 230, these companies would be forced to do a really, really, really, really good job of moderating. And I think the actual reality of the fact is that it's impossible to do it well enough without Section 230. If not impossible, it is massively difficult to do it well enough without Section 230 to be legally safe. So the easy response then would be to do absolutely nothing and just turn the blindest possible eye to everything happening and just let chaos reign. And that is what companies would do, rather than actually invest the astronomical resources you would have to in order to do this successfully.
27:44 Speaker 07 Yeah, and on their do what really well side, I think a helpful comparison here is that one of the things that Section 230 doesn't protect in the same way as everything else is copyrighted information is piracy. So there are distinct laws in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You have to actually make this serious effort to try to take down copyrighted stuff that's being put up illegally. No one likes this on the internet. The internet is full of stories about saying, look how terrible YouTube deals with this. Like, look at the fact that it takes down, you know, birdsongs because it thinks the birdsongs are copyrighted. People typically do not think that this situation has turned out well in the way that they often want to try to make it work for other pieces of content.
28:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, and if it's possible to do this successfully, we certainly have never seen it, right? And like, Facebook has talked about this forever. They're like, "We invest more resources into this than anybody." Like, wasn't it Facebook that said, "Our moderation staff is the size of Twitter"? It's just crazy. They put all these resources into it, and they still have this, like, earth-shattering, gigantic set of problems.
28:47 Speaker 07 Yeah. The only consistent answer I have heard for this is that if you're not able to moderate well, you should not exist at the scale that you do. Which I think is kind of the only feasible and consistent way to say this, and I'm not sure a lot of people want to go there.
29:01 Speaker 02 Right. That changes, I think, a lot more than people realize, if that ends up being the decision that a lot of these folks have to make. But, okay, let's go back to the speech thing, because one of the things that I think underlies a lot of your story is this idea that there is a bunch of sneaky political maneuvering going on here, and it's hard to sort out what is an actual desire for government speech regulation versus what is sort of a political response to the cultural backlash against big tech versus what is just a bunch of relatively out-of-touch politicians not understanding the unique challenges of the internet. Am I describing the jumble there correctly? Do you feel like one of those things is a bigger push for some of what's happening here?
29:46 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think that's right. Part of this is people maybe genuinely not understanding the internet. Part of this is people identifying real problems with the internet and wanting them to work differently, but in ways that conflict with a lot of basic American law. And then part of it is what I would just call bad faith.
30:01 Speaker 02 Okay.
30:02 Speaker 07 I don't like to assume that, but it's really hard to look at a lot of these projects and see anything except I don't like the way that these companies work politically and I don't like whether or not they take down things that I like. And so I'm gonna work the refs and I'm going to punish them.
30:18 Speaker 02 Right. And that's where you see things like the laws in Florida and Texas, right? And I feel like when you look at these like blanket social media moderation bans, it feels very hard to assign anything other than bad faith to those at this point.
30:30 Speaker 07 And they're very, very clear about their purpose, that they're all, they start with these preambles about, isn't it really terrible that big tech is censoring Republicans? Which there are, I think it was the Florida decision, starts with just saying, there is, the First Amendment does not protect you specifically having your particular ideology included on something, which is like, I don't want to go too far with this. Like, there are obviously, the First Amendment means that you should not try to create laws that censor specific viewpoints. But the fact that a private company is doing something that ends up incidentally causing collateral damage, that it's not even clear if it disproportionately
31:10 Speaker 07 affects Republicans, they remove a ton of content, that in itself is not inherently a First Amendment problem. Like, there's a situation where maybe it would be, but it's not enough.
31:21 Speaker 02 There's a back and forth that you just described that I think is super interesting because like, we are reporters, which I think probably by definition is going to make us pro free speech people, right? Like, it is better to do the job that we do in a, in a world where free speech is protected. We also just like, believe in it generally. And I, knowing you for a long time, you are a free speech person more than most, I would, I would say. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.
31:44 Speaker 07 That's fair. Yeah, that's fair.
31:45 Speaker 02 But it's also true, I think, and I think you'll agree with this, that we both sit here and say there are things that happen on social media that are bad and wouldn't it be great if they didn't happen? And so I think how to look at those two things simultaneously and sort of part of this, I guess, is just like acknowledging that the world is complicated and you can't have it both ways all the time. But to look at it and say, these are places that people live a lot of their lives and we have entered into like a style of conversation that like we as humans are clearly not ready for. And we probably do need it to work slightly differently than it is. But also to change these things in these fundamental ways, break this other thing that we believe in really strongly. I don't know. Do you just like sit here and wrestle between those two things all the time in your head?
32:29 Speaker 02 Because it feels like I have to do that more and more all the time.
32:31 Speaker 07 Yeah, oh god, yes. Mostly in two ways. The first is trying to figure out what a speech, which was part of the piece, which is that if you just say anything that runs in code is speech, then like Airbnb is speech, like Amazon selling poison is speech.
32:44 Speaker 02 Right. And there's some real legal evidence that that is speech, right? Like that is, that is a definition some people really adhere to.
32:50 Speaker 07 Right. And in some places it's complicated, like if Amazon recommends you buy something, is that speech? Like, maybe, I don't know. But it feels kind of wrong to say that if it happens on the internet, it has to be speech. That feels like it just cuts against the intent of the First Amendment, which is that expressing ideas is, I mean, among, among other parts of the First Amendment, that is important.
33:10 Speaker 02 My idea is that you should buy toilet paper. That is my, that's my political belief.
33:14 Speaker 07 My idea is literally selling you toilet paper. My idea is goods and services. Like, that feels weird. And then the other part of it is the legalism of what does speech law say and the practical aspects of like what is actually letting people speak? Like, a world where you can say anything, but it's literally impossible for anyone to find it because it's buried under huge amounts of harassment. That's, just feels like it also doesn't fit the spirit of the law. Like, a world where you can say something, but the internet also makes it incredibly easy to retaliate against you and to make you afraid for your life, that also, that doesn't really work either.
33:55 Speaker 07 Like, if there's a world where the law makes sense and the law is consistent, but I don't want to get in a position where there, if the law isn't doing the thing that it's supposed to, what is the point of the law?
34:05 Speaker 02 Right. Well, yeah, one of the questions that comes up about the internet in a lot of ways is, are the worries about the internet different than some of the things in the past, right? Everybody says, you know, there was a moral panic about newspapers and there was a moral panic about radio and there was a moral panic about television. It's like, all these things are true, but it does seem like, and especially to your point, like, the scale of the internet does seem different. And it seems like politically and legally, that's been an incredibly hard thing to keep up with, that like, it's cross borders, it's more people, it's just happening at such great pace that it does, even if we haven't yet perfectly defined why it's different, it feels like a different question about speech. Like, you go back and the newspapers
34:48 Speaker 02 all said crazy shit about each other and most of it was nonsense because it was all politically motivated and the First Amendment allowed that to happen, right? Like, that was not different, even though some people were mad about it. But there is something about the speed and scale of which it's happening now, and especially that it's concentrated into these couple of platforms across the world, that makes it feel different. Like, is that part of why this is so much harder for anyone to wrap their heads around, just because it's so much bigger now?
35:15 Speaker 07 Yeah, and I have, always have trouble with this because, among other things, you know, I'm not 150 years old, but I think it's also that every new medium has created problems and trade-offs that people have had to deal with. Like, radio, it's, I think a lot of people accept radio was one of the things that helped Nazism grow, that radio helped instigate the genocide in Rwanda, that radio really, all of these things have caused terrible problems, that it's just that we decided that speech was important enough and that this technology did enough good things, that it's worth those trade-offs and that really any kind of technology is going to create a set of trade-offs and we have to evaluate those. And so I think the internet has a bunch of distinct problems
35:59 Speaker 07 that a lot of these things didn't have, and the internet has a bunch of opportunities that these things didn't create. I don't know, I think one of the issues is that coming, just coming back to what is speech on the internet, that I think there's a world where... Our lives, like, you know, our bank account information and our physical addresses and there are specific other things that we just decide we're cordoning off, that those aren't going to take place in this world where we also just argue with each other all the time. Because arguing with each other all the time sometimes has value. But it also, I think that when our entire lives are consumed by it and it's incredibly frictionless, to tie that to people's real safety, that starts getting really difficult.
36:39 Speaker 02 Okay. So before I let you go, let's come back to these laws in Florida and Texas, because it feels like in the legal system, which has, I think, historically, as you point out, not done a great job of figuring out how any of this stuff should work, those two laws, one of them seems like it is probably going to end up in front of the Supreme Court, right? So we're going to get this big reckoning about what the government can do to social media and how we feel about speech and moderation and like this is going to get its moment in the true sun, right? That's coming, it feels like?
37:06 Speaker 07 Yeah, almost certainly. And there's also another case that's going to reevaluate parts of Section 230 that's already come up. But yeah, there's going to be a reckoning.
37:14 Speaker 02 Are you, are you hopeful, terrified, nihilist, who cares, burn it all down, somewhere in the middle? How are you feeling about all of that?
37:21 Speaker 07 The people I've talked to are maybe more hopeful than I had expected, that they point to, that there's still five Supreme Court justices that looked at the Texas law and went, you should not be able to enforce that. Of the four that did not vote for it, there's really only one who seems very, very clearly weird about it and anti the thing we would describe as free speech, which is Clarence Thomas. And so I guess I want to take heart in that. I am also just increasingly worried about the legitimacy of courts in general and the way that any part of civic life in America functions. And so I think speech is part of that and that is not encouraging.
38:02 Speaker 02 So, reading your piece, it's very hard for me to not end up in this like, "deep, we're all screwed, everything's a disaster, it's all totally hopeless, nobody knows anything, this is gonna get worse before it gets better" place. What does the hope or reason for optimism look like? Do we have a path toward figuring out how to handle this in a way that actually makes logical sense? Or are things about to change in bigger, more fundamental ways than they even have so far? Because it feels like one of those has to be the case.
38:28 Speaker 07 Oh, optimism is the thing that I am the worst at. But, I don't know, I think that there are people who are, even if I disagree with them on some points, really seriously considering those issues. There are people like Daniel Cetron, who has proposed changes to 230 that I don't necessarily, again, agree with, but that I think are really thoughtful. So I think that if you listen to a lot of these people, and if you really try to identify the trade-offs and try to figure out where we want to make changes, if we do, I think that is where I would pin my hope, is people who look at these problems and are willing to seriously admit where the problems and trade-offs in what we think of as American free speech are, and try to figure out what you do about them.
39:10 Speaker 07 Like, I think specificity is maybe the way I think things may get better.
39:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, and to that point, actually, one of the things I thought was really interesting about the way you described the Texas and Florida laws is they're so hysterically broad that I think the point you made was that it would make it illegal to reject changes on Wikipedia, based on Wikipedia's own community standards?
39:33 Speaker 07 Yeah, this is, it applies to large websites, and it applies to anything that involves viewpoints. And, I mean, I don't know, maybe they'd sue, and maybe they'd discover that it's not part of a law, but who knows, because the law is terribly written.
39:45 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah, that's fair. Specificity is a good thing. But it also feels like this stuff has become so black and white for so many people that it's like, Section 230 in particular is like, you're either in it or you're out on it. And I'm increasingly wondering if there is even a middle ground that we're gonna find. But it sounds like maybe somewhere there is one.
40:03 Speaker 07 I think there are corners.
40:04 Speaker 02 Okay.
40:05 Speaker 07 I don't know if it's a middle ground, because I don't even know if the middle is really where we want to be.
40:09 Speaker 02 Fair.
40:09 Speaker 07 But I think that there are pockets of people who are serious, and I just want to try to grow those pockets.
40:18 Speaker 02 I like it. Well, thank you, Addie. I appreciate it.
40:22 Speaker 02 All right, we need to take a quick break and then when we come back, we're going to talk to the verges Makena Kelly about the Chips and Sciences bill that was passed over the summer and what that bill and all of the billions of dollars that come from it mean for the future of chip manufacturing and the tech industry as a whole. We'll be right back.
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42:01 Speaker 02 Welcome back. So on August 9th of this year, President Joe Biden signed into law the Chips and Science Act, a $280 billion package meant to invest in American scientific and technological research and progress. Big bill, lots of money, but one of the biggest chunks of that money, $52 billion, is specifically meant to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.
42:24 Speaker 13 The future of the chip industry is going to be made in America.
42:29 Speaker 02 This law is a big deal and it could start to reshape not just how chips get made in America, but the whole tech industry in this country. And there are big political consequences in how all of that shakes out. That's what The Verge's Makena Kelly has been looking into. She talked to a number of folks over the recent months about the bill and its effects, including New York Senator Chuck Schumer. And now she's here to give us the breakdown. Hi McKenna.
42:52 Speaker 14 Hey David, it's great to be here.
42:54 Speaker 02 It's midterm season. Do I need to worry about you like emotionally and spiritually right now? How are you holding up?
42:59 Speaker 14 Honestly, I've been talking to sources all this week and it's always just been like, hey, how are you? Hope you're staying alive. And they're like, hope you're staying alive too. Actually, I'm dying, but we're gonna get through it. This has been a wild one.
43:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, I would say. So for our purposes today, we're gonna talk mostly about the Chips and Sciences Bill, which is like, I think everybody just calls it CHIPS now, right? Like all caps CHIPS.
43:23 Speaker 14 CHIPS, they're yelling. This is the best thing to happen to consumer tech in so long, CHIPS.
43:27 Speaker 02 Can you put exclamation points in law names now? It should just say like CHIPS, exclamation point.
43:31 Speaker 14 It might as well be that. It took so long to do. Everyone was really excited about when it finally got over the finish line.
43:36 Speaker 02 So, okay, and it has these sort of big, wide-ranging ramifications of like, the future of tech and America and geopolitics and all this stuff that I think is really interesting. But the history part of this, I think is really interesting because I was reading your most recent stories about it and realizing that some version of this bill, CHIPS, exclamation point, has been in negotiations since 2019, if I'm remembering correctly. So rewind me all the way back to the beginning, before the pandemic, before chip shortages and the crazy supply chain stuff we've seen the last couple of years. Like, what was this supposed to do in 2019?
44:11 Speaker 14 Right. So this was prior to all that, like you said, and when I was talking to Chuck Schumer, he was talking about the time when he walked into the Senate gym, which is something that exists, and he went to do whatever he does, aerobics, weightlifting. I don't know what Schumer does in there.
44:27 Speaker 15 Now, I was on the bike panting away, and on the bike next to me was a guy, Todd Young, a senator from Indiana, Republican. And I was talking to him about this and he said, I've had the same anxiety about America losing ground here. We gotta do something. And so we agreed to come together and we put together the Science and Chips Bill.
44:45 Speaker 14 He had been looking for some kind of partner to bring the economic success and funding and money that was mostly sent to Silicon Valley and like software, Facebook, et cetera, and bring that to more industrial parts of the United States. We've seen a lot of industries fail over the past 20 years. There's been a change in what people buy, where things are manufactured. The auto industry in Detroit is a very good example of a place that could really benefit from that kind of money. But there's all of this land, talk about Syracuse, New York, talk about Detroit, talk about Idaho, Ohio, that has been a manufacturing epicenter for the United States. But with a lot of things going overseas in manufacturing businesses, I think Schumer and a lot of folks are thinking
45:30 Speaker 14 about how can we readjust our manufacturing sector in a way that positions the United States in a competitive way for the next 50 years. And they targeted chips, which is something that the US used to do really well, but has become ever more necessary in literally every product that we have. Like when I was talking to Schumer, my favorite thing, I opened it up, asking him if he was using his flip phone, which he infamously uses a flip phone still.
45:56 Speaker 02 Amazing.
45:57 Speaker 15 Let me tell you, my flip phone, people ask with a 50/50 majority, how do you get things done? And I am talking into it, my flip phone. Every senator, Democratic senator and some Republicans have my phone number. They talk to me directly. They don't go through staff. They don't do email. And it's a way you can weave a coalition together.
46:19 Speaker 14 Everything from dumb tech, flip phones, when it comes to refrigerators, things like that, all the way to like artificial intelligence, advanced computing, all of these things rely on these semiconductor chips. And I think that's why Schumer and everyone really targeted that sector for this bill.
46:34 Speaker 02 And obviously, the sort of underlying theme of a lot of that is China, right? That like, there is very much this like global thing happening, but so much of it is concentrated in China. And it feels like over the last, I don't know, a long time, but especially kind of over the course of the Trump administration and into the Biden administration, China has become a big focus in like remembering how to compete with China and not be so reliant on China. Like, was it about China the whole time?
47:01 Speaker 14 Right. I think the first name of the bill before, of course, this is just, these bills change, the text changes, the names change. The first one was like the Endless Frontier Act.
47:10 Speaker 02 Oh, boy.
47:11 Speaker 14 And it had very much to do with competitiveness with China.
47:14 Speaker 15 I've been for a long time worried that America's losing ground on investments in science and in high end manufacturing and the union of the two. And that if we continue to lose ground, our economy would suffer. If a more authoritarian country like China got ahead of us, they could set the rules, which wouldn't be in the open entrepreneurial free market way that we like to do things here in America, and that we would suffer in many different ways.
47:42 Speaker 14 So much of American manufacturing has gone overseas. That leaves the United States, right, in an anti-competitive advantage if supply chains fail. If, you know, for some reason, down the line, China becomes, you know, a major economic hegemonic, right, power. And so it's getting to that, you know, national security risk concern about being able to, I guess, you know, American excellence, all that stuff and national security.
48:07 Speaker 02 Right.
48:07 Speaker 14 So CHIPS, of course, with their military necessity, and then also just like daily life, they've become such an important factor and such an important piece of equipment for the US to have.
48:19 Speaker 02 This seems like what you're describing would be the kind of thing that almost every American politician would immediately get behind, right? Like, it's pro-America, it's pro-business, everybody wins, we get to yell about, you know, nationalism and America being great and the future and technology. And yet, there was this massive political battle that made this thing take forever. Walk me through a little bit of that. Like, what was the big fight about in getting this bill actually done?
48:45 Speaker 14 Let me work our way from beginning to end here. At first, of course, it was 2019. There was an election coming up, the 2020 election.
48:53 Speaker 15 All the productive activity in the Congress is coming out of the House. The Senate remains a legislative graveyard for so many different issues. Now on impeachment.
49:04 Speaker 02 This literally feels like ancient history that you're describing.
49:06 Speaker 14 I know.
49:08 Speaker 14 It wasn't necessarily a priority at the time. And then, of course, that also comes down to, well, who is this going to benefit? You know, when it comes to a senator, they want to bring stuff home to their constituency to be like, hey, I got you jobs in this bill. So there's a little bit of discussion back and forth on that to make sure that, you know, this benefits everyone's state, majority of folks. And then, of course, slows down 2020 election and then the pandemic hits.
49:34 Speaker 02 Right.
49:34 Speaker 14 And all of a sudden, it is impossible to get your hands on consumer tech goods. And then, of course, like just semiconductors, period. Like, look, when we were in the middle of the pandemic, gosh, it's like, it's so weird to think back to 2020. But at the time, do you remember when like you couldn't get an Nvidia graphics card?
49:53 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
49:54 Speaker 14 Do you remember when like the PS5, you couldn't get that? Like, this was when all that stuff was rolling out at the same time when people were stuck inside. So we have all these new products, people stuck inside, people working from home, maybe investing in new laptops, investing in tablets, investing in all of this tech equipment. And so, demand surges, but then supply chains break because of, you know, COVID restrictions and things like that. So it became this absolute explosion of, it just became an explosion of mess, right? That all of a sudden you needed to clean up. And I think that's why, you know, it got to be 2020. And then the bill really got a lot of folks behind it. And but of course, it wasn't until this year that it was actually passed.
50:34 Speaker 02 Was it less about everybody picking fights about this bill and more about it just being maybe not the most immediately important thing as we were dealing with all of this other stuff going on in the world?
50:45 Speaker 14 It's a confluence of, there's so much going on. I mean, because look, like, look at what else the Senate did and like Congress did during the pandemic. It was, they were passing the bipartisan infrastructure law. Remember when we got sent money? Like, they were fighting over that, you know? And so that was happening. And then it's also like a confluence of that factor, but also the fact that everyone wants something in this. You have the Ohio lawmakers who are like, we have all this land, we need jobs, we want to be resilient in the future, let's make. Make sure that this gets everyone equipped. And I think the important thing there, I think something we don't talk about the bill enough. Of course, it's like subsidies for like the chip manufacturers, but it also includes money through the Commerce Department for states and localities to make pitches for funding to create these national tech hubs,
51:30 Speaker 14 which lets localities and states fight, you know, and basically pitch to be like, hey, we could use this funding and really make good work with it.
51:37 Speaker 02 Right.
51:38 Speaker 14 And so there was also that, which I think was a part of the negotiations and making sure that everyone is, you know, benefiting from the bill.
51:44 Speaker 15 We wanted to see parts of the country that had not benefited from advanced manufacturing and science gain. I was thinking of upstate New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany. He was thinking of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne and South Bend, and that was another unifying factor for us.
52:01 Speaker 02 I can imagine this got like crazily competitive because everybody's looking at this being like, we can be the next Silicon Valley, which everybody has been trying to be for 40 years. And now it feels like there's more money being put to that use kind of than ever, right?
52:14 Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, I'm from Nebraska and I remember it got towards the end of me graduating college and everyone was using the phrase Silicon Prairie.
52:21 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
52:22 Speaker 14 And so everyone's fighting over, you know, being the next big tech hub.
52:26 Speaker 02 Silicon slopes was always my favorite for Salt Lake City.
52:29 Speaker 14 Oh, I hadn't even heard that one.
52:31 Speaker 02 It didn't work. Spoiler alert.
52:32 Speaker 14 Right. And so Silicon Valley, you know, of course, got all this investment because folks are moving there. There was the whole VC craze. It's still going on, you know, this just was kind of like the focus where you went to Silicon Valley if you were interested in tech. And now tech has become so, you know, omnipresent in our lives that it could benefit everyone if they could just kind of shake loose, you know, the whole Silicon Valley has on the industry.
52:58 Speaker 15 When you need such a huge amount of space for these chip fab companies, you also need adequate water, cheap power. It tends to benefit some areas that hadn't seen those benefits before.
53:11 Speaker 14 And if you have a little bit of subsidizing money, a little bit of incentive to do it, these can crop up everywhere.
53:17 Speaker 02 At the end of it, did everybody get what they want? Did Chuck Schumer get what he wanted? Like, who kind of came out ahead in the way that the CHIPS bill actually ended up being written and passed?
53:26 Speaker 14 The corporations.
53:29 Speaker 02 Surprise.
53:30 Speaker 14 That's always the way it is, right? Of course, like towards the end of the negotiating phase, you had Bernie Sanders, some more progressives being like, we need some more checks and balances on how the subsidy money is being handed out. Because again, like it's touted as this revolutionary thing for the American economy. But who is the money going to? It's going to Intel, it's going to Micron. And they're going to be the ones who see the benefit of this faster than everyone else. And we're talking about the midterms, right? This has been something that I've been thinking about a lot because a lot of the economic work that the Biden administration has done, whether it's the bipartisan infrastructure law, whether it's the CHIPS bill, all these things take time, you know, to go into effect. And they, they do have the ability, you know, to be really revolutionary.
54:14 Speaker 14 But people are really hurting right now. And so as much as we talk about, you know, the benefits of this bill, everyday people aren't seeing it in their pocketbooks right now. And so it's hard to see whether or not it'll have that kind of effect on the voter base.
54:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, there was that amazing Bernie Sanders quote that was basically like, why are so many people in Congress willing to basically bribe Intel to stay in the United States?
54:36 Speaker 11 The CEO of a major corporation, which made nearly $20 billion in profits last year, is saying to Congress that if you don't give my industry, the microchip industry, 76 billion that despite their profound love for our country and their respect for American workers, in order to make more profits, they are prepared to go to Europe and Asia. Now, Mr. President, I am thankfully not a lawyer, but that sure sounds like extortion to me.
55:13 Speaker 02 And that strikes me as a fair criticism, right? Like, I think as Pat Gelsinger was on the Decoder podcast talking about this, that like, maybe Intel should have done better. If Intel wanted to be successful without government intervention, maybe Intel should have been successful without government intervention. And I think there is this funny thing that I feel like this bill is trying to do, which is on the one hand, like, build new things and prop up new innovation. And there's like, there's money for the National Science Foundation, I think, in there. And so it's, it's like, we want to, we want to start new stuff. But also, the lion's share of the money is going to, like you said, this small handful of really big corporations that, like, Intel didn't do a good job. And for not doing a good job, got billions of dollars to stay in the United States. And that, that seems messy.
55:58 Speaker 14 What else are they going to do, right? They'll create their manufacturing plants, their fabs and stuff in China, which then, of course, really hurts the United States. So it's gotten to this point where China has become, we are so reliant on China for semiconductors and chips and manufacturing that there's no reason for, you know, these companies to come back. And for the Biden administration, when we talk about how this could take a really long time to be effect, it's probably the fastest way to get this moving, especially like over the last five years, when you've seen, you know, Chinese tech companies, Chinese military, you know, we've seen this rise, this like tension with Taiwan, you know, the Chinese working with a lot of like US adversaries.
56:37 Speaker 14 It's just, this feels like a Band-Aid, a $52 billion Band-Aid that hopefully heals. And hopefully, they don't pick the scab. We don't pick the scab off too often. And it just like, really just, you know, sets in stone and we can get moving on this. But I mean, it's, it's hard to tell.
56:52 Speaker 02 Do you think it eventually got done just because this all got so visceral with the chip shortage and the supply chain issues that it like, it became really obvious to everyday Americans that this was a thing? I feel like chip supply chains were not a thing that most people were aware of three years ago in a way that I think a lot of people like, sort of deeply understand now. Like, I couldn't buy a car because they couldn't get a chip from Taiwan. It's like a thing people understand now in a way that they didn't before. Is that what finally got this across the, the line? Was there some gating thing in the bill that finally got fixed? Like, what, what did it at the end?
57:26 Speaker 14 So I was looking at past reporting that even like we did at the version like Sean Hollister was writing at the beginning of this year, the companies were starting to figure it out, right? You were able to get this Nvidia GPU, you're able to get all this stuff at the beginning of the year. This wasn't really affecting consumers in the same way, but what was affecting consumers and what voters were looking at were the midterms. And so this bill got signed this fall, I believe it was September, and Biden, Schumer, everyone wants to be able to say, wants to have that Intel groundbreaking ceremony. They want to have the CEO of Intel in their state breaking ground and promising thousands of jobs for folks. Like, this is what the Biden administration, this is what Democrats did for you. This is what we pushed it over the line.
58:10 Speaker 15 I mean, Syracuse, New York is a place that has suffered for a while. Carrier, for instance, the air conditioner was conceived and developed and manufactured in Syracuse. They decided to move all the manufacturing to Singapore, and it was a sad day for Syracuse, a very sad day. Now, Micron's huge investment, $100 billion, four major chip fabs, 2.4 million feet of manufacturing space, and up to 50,000 new jobs. Syracuse has a bright future again, and people feel good about it.
58:42 Speaker 14 Of course, they're not going to feel it immediately, but I think the promise of jobs, while paying manufacturing jobs, that people in these states, you know, just generations have relied on manufacturing jobs. I think that was really what pushed it over the edge, to get that, to tell and bring to voters.
58:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, that makes sense. And do we have a sense yet where, like geographically, that stuff is going to start to happen? Like, obviously, Intel has made a lot of noise in Arizona. Chuck Schumer is deeply obsessed with Syracuse and Buffalo. But do we have a sense of where these other kind of new rising tech hubs are likely to be?
59:13 Speaker 14 Yeah, so if you look at where Micron, Intel, all these companies are investing money right now, Idaho is a big one with Micron. I think that was like a $15 billion project. Yeah. And then there's the $20 billion project from Intel in Ohio. There's like some smaller companies that are working in like the Carolinas, you know, places like I'm naming states where this is traditionally not happening.
59:37 Speaker 02 Sure, yeah.
59:38 Speaker 14 There's communities, colleges, people who are looking for these jobs, right? And so it's areas like that, rather than the more condensed urban, you know, central hubs of tech that we've seen in the past.
59:49 Speaker 02 Is there a political connection between all of those places? Like, can you, can you sort of draw a line between trying to win midterm elections? And what happened there?
59:59 Speaker 14 I mean, it's blue collar voters.
1:00:00 Speaker 02 Sure.
1:00:01 Speaker 14 You know, these are people who, a lot of them, I was listening to some interviews and reading some polls about people who voted for Obama, then voted for Trump. Right? And these are, you know, just mostly like, blue collar folks who feel like they've been left behind. And if, you know, they think about these golden days, of course, there's been this like weirdo movement of like, return to tradition on the right.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:25 Speaker 14 Right? But the people do see, you know, American manufacturing as like, the glory days. And if we could bring some of that back with like, a eyes set to the future, I think that really benefits a lot of people.
1:00:34 Speaker 02 Okay. And I would assume the tech industry is psyched about how all of this turned out, right?
1:00:39 Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. I mean, they'll get chips, right?
1:00:41 Speaker 02 Right.
1:00:42 Speaker 15 Obviously, the tech industry got behind the legislation. They were so entranced by all the investments in science and the high end manufacturing. And so we did have a coalition.
1:00:53 Speaker 02 What's your sense of how much the goal is? And this is, this is a question I have with like, basically every law like this that gets done, is the question of like, how do we solve the sort of specific problem we have right now as quickly as we possibly can? Which is like, give money to Intel. It knows how to make chips. Give them money to build more buildings to make chips. Right? Like, that is, that is the quickest, cleanest solution to an existing problem versus some of this longer term, build new tech hubs, increase the size of the ecosystem. What's your sense of both like, where the money is going and also the sort of goal of a bill like this? Which of those two things does it try to do more of, do you think?
1:01:30 Speaker 14 Right. I'm sorry to come with like, a left hook from this, but when I look at this and I see like, people wanting to build jobs and, you know, try and start new industries and benefit people, I automatically go to the labor sector.
1:01:42 Speaker 02 Hmm.
1:01:43 Speaker 14 What's happening in labor? You know, what is happening with these companies that are going to be contracted out to build these fabs? Are these people going to be allowed to unionize? Are they going to have benefits? Is this a way for them to actually provide for their families for the next generation, for the next 10 years? And so I would be more glued. To seeing how Intel, how all these contracting companies that build these things are treating workers, right? And whether or not, you know, once these fabs are built, where do the workers go next? Are they going to go build another fab? What are they going to do? That's my main concern. If we're talking about tech hubs, I think that's fairly predictable in being like, there's money, they'll go, people will work on stuff. If it's successful, it's successful, they'll receive more money, blah, blah, blah. But I have an eye towards labor.
1:02:28 Speaker 02 Okay. And that also seems like a more immediate thing, because I think part of what you're saying, right? Is that like, the challenge with all of this is measuring success is going to take a really long time. Like, it takes a long time to build buildings, especially large ones that can make very tiny microchips. Like, it takes a long time. The labor stuff is going to be one way we start to see how this is all going to go down much sooner. Are there other kind of early measures that you or the government are looking at to figure out how this is going to work? Or are we going to get to 2035 and everybody's going to be like, well, we spent a lot of money, did it, what happened?
1:02:59 Speaker 14 So you got to look at like, the last thing that the administration did, I think it was the Commerce Department, a couple of weeks ago. They issued a new rule restricting import of like Chinese goods or like export of American goods. And of course, to China, when it comes to like semiconductor manufacturing purposes. And that sounds like kind of silly, but China's become like really good at the, you know, basic low-level consumer product semiconductor manufacturing. Like, they can do a lot of that on their own, but when it comes to the more advanced, like, artificial intelligence stuff, GPUs, those more powerful things, they need American devices and they need American tech and patents and things.
1:03:41 Speaker 14 So I think I would pay more attention to how that's going to cripple, you know, China's military, China's ability to, you know, invest in advanced manufacturing, tech manufacturing. Of course, that'll play out, God, how does America work, right? It'll play out in the military sense and the global dominance, you know, American-Chinese hegemony sense, probably before we see much for American people.
1:04:03 Speaker 02 Right. Which is, you just brought us to the final stage of this, right? Which is like massive global geopolitics, right? Like, this is now- There are like World War III questions baked into Intel building fabs in Ohio, which is like insane, but seems actually true. And right, everybody talks about national security and it's like that we're starting to think about chips politically as people think have thought about weapons for a long time. And it's like, it's just this, this has all gotten so much bigger and so much more high stakes than just like cars and fridges. And how much that's really true now and how much that is like useful political posturing in order to get stuff like this done is hard to tell, but it seems like we're certainly headed in that direction. And like this is political warfare as much as it is anything else.
1:04:46 Speaker 14 Right. I mean, the thing that I keep thinking of is in 10 years, is TSMC going to be viewed as the Boeing, right? That manufactures all of these fighter jets that are really important to the American military now today and like starting, you know, decades ago? Or is Intel going to be Boeing? You know, these other, you know, companies you think about in the DMV area that manufacture fighter jets, that manufacture military equipment and ballistics, is that going to be Chinese companies that people rely on? Or is that going to be US companies? And now, you know, when it comes to even visualizing aerodynamic stuff for these, you know, Boeing jets or whatever, like it's getting to the point where you need artificial intelligence to model these things. It's so wild to think,
1:05:30 Speaker 14 like, man, why can't I think of the company name right now? But all of the, you know, American military companies, you know, that create these ballistics and stuff, that's what I imagine like Intel and Micron being in like 20 years, which is crazy.
1:05:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:42 Speaker 14 I don't want to talk about the morality of it. I have no idea. But that seems to be, you know, where the government is pushing, you know, the next stage of, you know, national security stuff.
1:05:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, 100%. So now that this bill is done, what's the mood around it? Is everybody like, well, we didn't, it's not perfect, but we're glad we got it done. Is everybody, are we still fighting about it? Is everybody thrilled and like waving flags around and throwing microchips at each other? Like what's, what's the mood?
1:06:05 Speaker 14 I think the mood right now is it's over.
1:06:09 Speaker 14 To be honest with you, it's been so many years. I think people are just like, it's over. Thank God. And everyone's kind of focused on like the next two years, the Biden administration and what that looks like. And then the tweaks that could be made are going to happen through, you know, the federal agencies and like government bureaucrats and Commerce Department, DOD, et cetera. So that's where I kind of be looking at. They, Congress put their foot in, they did the money, they did the thing. Now it's like the rest of the administration's problem to solve.
1:06:35 Speaker 15 Whenever we invest in science, it pays off. We invested in NIH and it created the largest pharmaceutical and most advanced pharmaceutical industry in the world. We invested in NSF and DARPA and it created the most advanced tech industry in the world. Tens of millions of new jobs, direct and indirect, came out because of these. Chips is the next chapter in that book, and it's going to help America for generations.
1:07:03 Speaker 02 Fair enough. All right, McKenna, thank you. I appreciate it.
1:07:06 Speaker 14 Yeah, no problem. Thanks, folks.
1:07:08 Speaker 02 All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you, as always, for listening. As always, there is tons more on everything we talked about on theverge.com, especially in case you're wondering, the Elon Musk Twitter saga keeps being nuts. We're still covering it on the site and we're going to have lots more to say about it on Friday. So stay tuned. You can also follow all of us on Twitter, at least for now. Who knows where that's going? Addy is the dextrarchy, McKenna is Kelly McKenna, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or mystical orbs that can see into the future, you can always email us at [email protected] .
1:07:51 Speaker 02 And if you have questions, call the hotline. It's 866-VERGE11. And we want to hear all your big thoughts and questions about all things technology. We'll be back on Friday to discuss Elon and Twitter, T-Mobile's broadband plans, Zoom's plan to take over movie theaters, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
1:08:17 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
1:08:38 Speaker 10 We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.
1:09:03 Nilay Patel? This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.
1:09:19 Speaker 16 Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/bots.
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