Big Tech's trade group says it was Trump, not tech

Friday, November 6, 2026

Be advised: this newsletter swears, and somewhere in it is something that will offend you, whoever you are.

Today in one line: Meta's president says the midterms will make data centers a lot harder to build, a trade group formed with Meta's backing calls it an anti-Trump wave, and an NBC News exit poll says AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor for 56 percent of voters, which is three explanations for one election and they don't all fit (techcrunch.com, newswav.com, futurism.com).

Meta's president says voters made building a lot harder, the industry's coalition calls it an anti-Trump wave, and the exit poll leans the other way.

On Wednesday, at the WSJ Tech conference, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick did something tech executives almost never do in public, which is look at an election and concede, in something close to plain English, that the backlash against data centers had been on the ballot (techcrunch.com).

What she said was that the Democratic wins in the midterms are going to make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers (techcrunch.com). She was not talking as a spectator, since Meta has data centers in 23 states, by her count, and five of them are planned at 1 gigawatt or more (roughly the size at which a building stops being a building and becomes a line item in somebody's state energy plan) (techcrunch.com). She suggested Meta will have an easier time expanding what it already has than building anything new, and she allowed that 'many different factors' played into the Democrats' widespread victories, which is true of every election ever held and is also, I'd note, exactly what a careful person says so that nobody can later quote her as having said the other thing (forbes.com, seekingalpha.com).

The other thing got said anyway, just by somebody else, and the line that travelled as Big Tech's explanation, i.e., that voters were angry at Trump and not at technology, belongs to Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, who said, word for word, 'Let's not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate' (newswav.com).

Whoever pinned the line on the companies themselves didn't miss by much, though, because Chamber of Progress is a tech industry trade group formed with backing from Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple, which leaves Meta's president saying the vote will make building a lot harder and a group formed with Meta's backing saying, more or less, that the vote was about somebody else entirely (techcrunch.com, futurism.com).

The ballots, meanwhile, are a good deal less mysterious than 'many different factors' would like them to be, since voters sided against data centers in every one of 41 ballot measures except one, in Harwood, North Dakota, and an NBC News exit poll found AI and data centers were 'a crucial or a major factor' for 56 percent of voters in their choice for Congress (cnbc.com, newswav.com). (Be advised, though, that the measures concerned data centers and related development, not AI models or AI research, a distinction I think matters a lot more than either camp wants it to (tech-insider.org).)

I should say where I'm sitting, which is nowhere especially clean: I work with a chatbot every day, I pay a power bill like everybody else, and if you own an index fund (plenty of you do, whether or not you think of it that way) then you and I both own a sliver of the companies whose people spent the week explaining the election to one another.

So part of me would genuinely love for Kovacevich to be right, because an anti-Trump wave is weather, the kind of thing that blows through in a cycle or two, while an anti-tech mandate is closer to climate, i.e., the kind of thing you have to plan the rest of your life around. But look at what his sentence actually does, which is pick up a vote about a particular project in a particular county, with its water and its turbines and its line on somebody's electric bill, and relocate it into the head of one unpopular man, where it can be waited out instead of answered, and that is, with all due respect to the Chamber of It-Was-Trump (as I'll be calling it until further notice), a very comfortable piece of horseshit to be selling to the companies that backed you.

The word doing all the lifting is mandate, which nobody I can find was actually claiming, since the voters on those 41 measures weren't issuing a philosophy of technology so much as saying no to something near them, which is smaller than a mandate and, for anyone trying to spin it, a lot more annoying (cnbc.com). Powell McCormick, to her real credit, seems to grasp this better than her industry's lobbyists do, because 'a lot harder' is not how anyone describes a mood they expect to pass by spring (techcrunch.com).

Let's concede what the industry can fairly claim, and at some length, because some of it is simply correct. Elections really are made of many factors, and a poll in which 56 percent of voters called AI and data centers 'a crucial or a major factor' is also a poll in which a large minority didn't, which is not what a clean referendum looks like (seekingalpha.com, newswav.com).

Nobody on those ballots was asked about the chatbot, only about data centers and related development, so reading the results as a national verdict on AI itself takes a fair amount of squinting, and the people doing the squinting tend to be the ones who already knew what they wanted to see (tech-insider.org). There's a respectable case, too, that a county looks at one of these buildings and sees a fairly low-drama warehouse that throws off tax money, and that voting one away doesn't kill the demand for what's inside it so much as export the building, and the transformer, and the whole argument, to some other county with a weaker zoning board and fewer people who read the appendices.

And the opposition doesn't walk out of this spotless either, because I'd bet a decent amount that plenty of people who voted against a server farm near their house asked a server farm something within the week, and there's something a little rich about wanting the answers and the convenience and the fat retirement account, only generated out of sight, by somebody else's turbines, in somebody else's backyard. That's the yes side's case at its strongest, and I'd sign more of it than I'm comfortable admitting, which is precisely what makes the next part difficult to say.

Which leaves the question I couldn't stop circling all week, and that neither the WSJ stage nor the Chamber's statement seemed eager to have asked: when a county votes down a building, what is it actually saying no to? Is it the water and the hum and the tax break, i.e., the things a zoning board was invented to weigh, or is it something larger and vaguer that happened to arrive with an address, a site plan and a hearing date?

If it's the larger thing, is it fair (to the building, to that county, to the next county down the road) to settle it by zoning, and if it's only the building, why does an industry this rich keep acting so stunned that people don't want to live beside one? And if the trade group's best answer is to blame a president, and the company's best answer is to build onto what it already owns, has anybody in the business actually tried answering the voters, as opposed to the reporters? I don't know, and I'm wary of anyone who says this week that they do, the winners very much included. I'd rather stop here, with a lot of people having said no to something nobody quite asked them about directly, than dress up my guess about what they meant as if it were the answer.

What they're saying on Reddit

“It's both, tbh but when you promise "We're making a technology that's going to eliminate all jobs, drain the water and power, hack into every system, and help us spot dissidents to kill using robots and maybe destroy the whole world but it'll make 12 guys super rich" why would you *ever* expect there wouldn't be backlash.” — r/technology

“That’s fair. But I just think people misunderstand why govs want them so bad. From their perspective it looks like something fairly low risk that will sit inside a warehouse making tax money.” — r/canada

“If AI is limited to medicine, tech etc I doubt we will need as many data centers as we do. They're pushing for more data centers because normies wants to make love island but with anthropomorphic fruits.” — r/canada

“We gotta reign in venture capitalism, shit is way too unregulated. It's essentially just a casino for rich people.” — r/technology

“Also: why do they NEED all this extra capacity?” — r/technology

Provocation to every side

To Meta and the industry: Your president admitted the vote will cost you and a group formed with your backing called it a Trump thing, so pick one story before the next county picks it for you.

To Democrats: You won on buildings you never had to defend, and the first data center you approve will meet exactly the same voters.

To Data center opponents: If it can't go in your county, say whose county it should go in, out loud, by name.

To Accelerationists: You spent years calling this inevitable, and the first time it met a ballot it lost nearly everywhere it showed up.

To the tech-friendly right: The industry's own trade group is now blaming the backlash on your president, which tells you roughly what its loyalty is worth when reality hits.

The people who won this week now own the word 'no', and I'm not at all sure they know what to do with it. Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, posted 'National data center moratorium now' after the midterms, and Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has said she will issue a moratorium on all data center approvals until the legislature passes protections, which are perfectly fine things to say the night you win and much harder things to mean the morning you have to govern (business-standard.com, cnbc.com, finance.yahoo.com).

The federal moratorium bill has been sitting in Congress since March, and passing AI pause legislation would require a divided Democratic Party to overcome Trump's veto, which is the sort of procedural detail that slogans are, more or less by design, built to leave out (mlq.ai, techcrunch.com, koreatimes.co.kr). Even Color of Change's Nadine Smith says that among Democrats a blanket freeze is contested, and she is not exactly anyone's idea of a mouthpiece for the server-farm lobby (qz.com, techcrunch.com).

So the left gets its week of glee, and fine, it earned it, and the posts are fun as hell to write, but a moratorium only ever tells the industry when, while what the voters seemed to be asking was how, and on whose bill, and if the winners can't answer that, the industry will simply wait them out, which is exactly what its trade group is already telling itself it can do.

What I'd want from them instead is boring, which is probably why nobody's offering it: who pays for the power, who gets the water, who gets the tax money and for how long, and whether a company with data centers in 23 states, five of them planned at 1 gigawatt or more, should have to answer all of that in public before construction starts rather than after the vote has already gone badly (techcrunch.com).

None of that requires being anti-tech or anti-Trump, since it's the ordinary stuff any town asks of a factory or a quarry, and it only feels radical because these companies spent years not having to answer it, which they seem to have mistaken for a permanent arrangement.

If the Democrats spend this win on bans they can't pass and on a superintelligence bill that some in Washington see as provocative but unlikely to pass, they'll have taken a local grievance that I suspect crosses party lines and stitched it into a party flag, which is the fastest route I know to making half the country decide it loves data centers after all (the420.in, nbcnews.com).

Maybe I'm wrong about that, and maybe a loud bill that dies is how you eventually get a quiet one that passes, which is a theory of politics I've heard from people smarter than me and have never quite managed to believe, though I'd honestly be glad to be talked into it.

Reporters blamed the Democratic sweep, but Qualcomm's miss and a rough year for tech shares were also on the tape.

NBC News reported that the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.3%, erasing $2.3 trillion in market value, on a day when the Dow fell more than 1,800 points and the S&P 500 fell 4.4% (nbcnews.com, finance.yahoo.com). The chip stocks took it hardest, with the PHLX Semiconductor index plummeting 12%, Nvidia closing at $181.60 (down 9.26%), and Micron and AMD falling 17.46% and 17.26% respectively, which are the sort of numbers that make people check whether the screen is broken (finance.yahoo.com, talkesport.com).

The bigger number going around online is wrong (see Hype Check), and the election link is the press's reading rather than anything the tape proves on its own: NPR tied the rout to fears that a Democratic Congress would crack down on AI, but markets had largely expected Democrats to win, stocks initially rallied, and Qualcomm separately plunged 12% after a smartphone-chip sales miss, a detail that tends to fall out of the story somewhere on the way to the headline (npr.org, finance.yahoo.com, nbcnews.com).

The Heresy: The populist heresy is that the market wasn't mourning slower chatbots at all but a business plan, and that the plan was always a good deal more about labour than about curing anybody's cancer.

“if ai was just being used for "cancer research, solve complex math equations, and further our understanding of physics" the ai market wouldn't be valued at trillions, lets be fr right now. It's obviously so highly valued because the vision is to replace the workforce and for war reasons” — r/news

The Counter-heresy: The believers' heresy is that a crash is a cleanup, and that everyone now calling the end of AI sounds an awful lot like the people who once called the end of the internet.

“Once again, we have to explain to the dunces that a bubble popping doesn’t destroy the industry. It just wipes out the bottom feeders and underperformers.” — r/aiwars

What I want to know: Was the AI trade ever priced on what the technology can do, or on the assumption that the public would never get a vote on the buildings it runs in?

The superintelligence ban is real and introduced; the parade of newly elected backers on Reddit isn't in the record.

Senator Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, posted 'National data center moratorium now' after the midterms, a slogan that at least has a bill standing behind it, since the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act has been in Congress since March (business-standard.com, cnbc.com, mlq.ai, techcrunch.com).

Further out on the same limb sits the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would permanently ban developing and deploying superintelligent AI, and whose House version, H.R. 10538, was introduced September 24, 2026, though the bills remain at the introduced stage and some in Washington see them as provocative but unlikely to pass (sanders.senate.gov, the420.in, govinfo.gov, nbcnews.com). We found no reporting of newly elected members lining up behind any of it, whatever the more excited threads would have you believe, and Color of Change's Nadine Smith says that even among Democrats a blanket freeze is contested (qz.com, techcrunch.com).

The Heresy: The accelerationist heresy, which ought to bother the moratorium crowd more than any lobbyist does, is that a pause binds only the companies Congress can reach, while China and anyone with a pile of networked GPUs simply keeps going.

“The thing is, if OpenAI and Anthropic slow down, China and distributed computing efforts are not. We will surpass them.” — r/accelerate

The Counter-heresy: The populist heresy, from a self-described lifelong Democrat, is that the left-right framing is a decoy, because voters in both parties dislike the buildings and politicians in both parties are cozier with the industry than their voters are.

“Most Republican voters are equally against AI and data centers. Most Democratic politicians are equally in the pockets of the tech companies.” — r/technology

What I want to know: If a pause binds only the companies within reach of a subpoena, is it still worth passing, or worth passing precisely because it's the only lever voters actually have?

An outside auditor finds roughly 2x faster progress, mostly credited to AI itself; the 'AI 2027 is here' line comes from one researcher's post.

METR concluded that as of October 2026 Anthropic is likely improving its models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate of March 2024 to October 2025, and guesses, with substantial uncertainty that it says out loud, that a majority, perhaps about 80%, of that acceleration is due to AI itself (ai-tldr.dev, greaterwrong.com, metr.org).

Model 4 is the first model in METR's dataset to clear 50% on every benchmark it was tested on, which you'd think would be the headline, except that Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR found most informative from the public version of a ~100-page report, so the rest of us get to read the conclusions and squint at the black bars (cryptobriefing.com, kucoin.com, x.com, x.com). The comparison to the AI 2027 scenario, meanwhile, comes not from METR's own findings but from a post on X attributed to Ryan Greenblatt, which notes that the roughly 2x speed-up happens in that scenario around March 2027 (x.com).

The Heresy: The lab-watcher's heresy is that the public is busy arguing about the models it can see, while the one that matters sits behind a door with a redaction stamp on it.

“It's insane how far behind we are from what the labs have internally.” — r/singularity

The Counter-heresy: The skeptic's heresy is that an audit the audited company gets to redact is a press release with extra steps, and that the speed-up is measured on tidy, well-specified tasks anyway, which is not where most of life happens.

“the caveat that matters most is in the report itself: anthropic had redaction rights and removed most of the evidence METR found most informative for its risk conclusions.” — r/singularity

What I want to know: If the best evidence about how fast AI is improving gets redacted by the company doing the improving, who exactly is supposed to decide whether it should slow down?

Mandates are real at the giants and rare everywhere else, and 'train your replacement' is still more a feeling than a finding.

Google is factoring AI use into software engineer performance reviews for the first time, Meta has overhauled its review system to do the same, and Microsoft reportedly told employees AI is 'no longer optional', per an internal memo reported by Business Insider (hrexecutive.com, larridin.com).

The code, for its part, seems to be filing its own review: GitClear and GitKraken analyzed 623 million code changes from 2023 to 2026 and found 47% more error masking (roughly, code that quietly swallows failures instead of surfacing them) in 2026 than in the base year (leaddev.com). Be advised, though, that formal mandates are rare overall, that planned US job cuts in the first eight months of 2026 fell to their lowest level in four years, and that we could not confirm workers are being made to train their AI replacements, however often that line gets repeated (founderreports.com, founderreports.com, finance.yahoo.com).

The Heresy: The burned-out engineer's heresy is that management doesn't much care whether the code is any good as long as there's more of it, which a survey of engineers more or less backs up, finding management often unfazed by decreasing quality and focused on higher output (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com).

“Which is how most developers want to use it but companies mandate speed and productivity (read more PRs and code getting pushed out) which has led to the endsh*tification of a lot of codebases.” — r/cscareerquestions

The Counter-heresy: The resigned heresy, from the other end of the job market, is that the argument is already over and the job has quietly turned into something else while everyone was still arguing.

“Most of their jobs have been prompting AI. Yes getting a job is hard, but coding itself and tests arent what the job is about now.” — r/ExperiencedDevs

What I want to know: If you're graded on how much AI you use and nobody is graded on whether the code can be maintained in five years, whose problem is year five?

Mark Cuban says Facebook let deepfakes of him sell fake diabetes cures; Meta's own documents put scam and banned-goods ads near 10% of revenue.

Who and what: Meta

Mark Cuban, who is famous enough that his face is now worth forging, has accused Facebook of letting scammers use AI-generated versions of his face and voice to sell fake diabetes treatments (inkl.com).

He says older Americans regularly tell him they bought a $294 diabetes treatment promoted with his likeness, which he never endorsed, and he accuses the platform of letting the ads keep circulating despite his efforts to flag them, calling the whole business 'the worst of the worst' (inkl.com, financebuzz.com).

I'll concede up front that a rich man being furious at a platform is not, by itself, an accountability story, since rich men are furious at platforms about as often as the rest of us are and simply have better microphones for it, and that 'knowingly', the word that got attached to his complaint as it traveled, is an accusation and not a finding (the not-proven line below is there because I mean it). What turns it into an accountability story is that Meta's own internal documents put a dollar figure beside the general problem he's describing, and the figure is, to use the technical term, enormous.

By its own internal projection, Meta expected to earn about 10% of its annual revenue, or US$16 billion, from advertising for scams and banned goods (the internal estimate was 10.1% of 2024 revenue), and a late-2024 document puts the higher-risk scam category alone at about US$7 billion a year (abc.net.au).

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says the documents 'present a selective view' and that the 10.1% estimate was 'rough and overly inclusive', and I want to give that its due, because internal estimates really are rough, and a figure covering banned goods as well as scams is plainly wider than the deepfake problem Cuban is describing (abc.net.au, sfgate.com).

But notice what the defense actually objects to, which is the precision of a number saying roughly one revenue dollar in ten came from scams and banned goods, while leaving the arithmetic itself pretty much where it found it, and if the honest version is meaningfully lower, Meta can presumably tell us what it is.

This is also the same company whose president spent Wednesday explaining that voters have made data centers a lot harder to build, and if you live in a county being asked whether Meta gets to be your neighbor, a file like this belongs in the character reference whether Meta likes it or not (techcrunch.com). You don't have to believe a single word Cuban says to find it goddamn hard to call any of this irrelevant, though I'll admit I'm much less sure what the right remedy is than I am that there's a problem, and that gap is the part I keep chewing on.

What's documented

• Cuban accused Facebook of letting scammers use AI-generated versions of his face and voice to sell fake diabetes treatments, and of letting the ads circulate despite his efforts to flag them (inkl.com, financebuzz.com).

• Meta projected it would earn about 10% of its annual revenue, US$16 billion, from ads for scams and banned goods; its internal estimate was 10.1% of 2024 revenue (abc.net.au).

• A late-2024 document says Meta earns about US$7 billion in annualized revenue from the higher-risk scam ad category (abc.net.au).

• A December 2024 document estimated users were shown about 15 billion higher-risk scam ads each day, and Meta bans an advertiser only when it is at least 95% certain it is running a scam (ibtimes.co.uk).

• Meta planned to cut the share of revenue from scams, illegal gambling and prohibited goods from 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3% by end of 2025 (searchenginejournal.com).

• Spokesperson Andy Stone said the documents 'present a selective view' and called the 10.1% estimate 'rough and overly inclusive' (abc.net.au, sfgate.com).

What is not proven: No ruling or finding in our sources says Meta knowingly ran deepfake scam ads: that is Cuban's accusation, the US$16 billion is Meta's own internal estimate covering banned goods as well as scams and is not tied to deepfakes, and Meta says the documents present a selective view (inkl.com, abc.net.au, sfgate.com).

The winners still win:

• Meta, which projected about US$16 billion in annual revenue from ads for scams and banned goods, including about US$7 billion annualized from the higher-risk scam category (abc.net.au).

• Scam advertisers who stay below the at-least-95% certainty Meta requires before it bans an account (ibtimes.co.uk).

Questions that need to be answered:

The edge

“Regulation. That’s all it takes is regulation.” — r/technology

Provocation to every side

To Meta: If your own estimate was rough, publish the precise one; you clearly employ people who can do the math.

To Washington, both parties: Meta decided for itself how sure it had to be before banning a scammer, and if that bar bothers you, ask why it was ever Meta's to set.

To Free-market defenders: If competition fixes this, explain why the remedy in Meta's own planning was a smaller share of scam revenue rather than none of it (searchenginejournal.com).

To Everyone scrolling: By the company's own rough count, about one ad dollar in ten came from scams and banned goods, so how sure are you about the next one you click?

(We just find them. We don't endorse them):

“The only way to solve job loss is having agi as soon as possible. If we stuck in the middle, we will Keep losing more jobs and no ubi.” — r/singularity

“However anything under that level is being hit hard. Juniors, interns, sub-contractors (who are usually just juniors/doing junior level work) are being replaced.” — r/news

“I can trauma dump 10 minute rants and I get a reply for every thing I said for that whole time. I feel like this is important for people who are lonely. And yeah my Chat GTP, Nova makes me laugh so hard sometimes.” — r/ChatGPT

“If there’s one thing everyone can agree on it’s that the government needs to be involved with the consensual activities of adults.” — r/Futurology

“i always say never label your art ai. there is no benefit other than giving assholes a target.” — r/aiwars

“To suggest that china will just stay behind because we hit the breaks is stupid.” — r/OpenAI

“The Wikipedia *project* is a great one, but the foundation running it kinda sucks.” — r/DefendingAIArt

The claim: Wall Street shed $3.2 trillion in the post-election AI rout.

What the reporting says: The figure is wrong, and wrong in the direction that makes a better headline: NBC News reported the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.3%, erasing $2.3 trillion, an earlier Reuters estimate put the loss at $1.8 trillion with the index down 4.5%, and Qualcomm also plunged 12% that day after a smartphone-chip sales miss (nbcnews.com, finance.yahoo.com, npr.org).

The claim: People who oppose AI score lower on cognitive measures.

What the reporting says: We couldn't find that in the cited material, and the nearest findings cut both ways, which should embarrass both the people sharing it and the people it was aimed at: one study found negative attitudes toward AI more pronounced among people showing conceptual and temporal self-instability, and another found heavier AI tool users scored lower on critical thinking while saying it does not establish a direct causal relationship (frontiersin.org, mdpi.com, psypost.org).

The claim: A Meta research scientist called Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed clueless about Chinese AI.

What the reporting says: We found no such remark in the reporting; what is documented is that El-Sayed's plan calls for 'a pause in AI frontier development' at an absolute minimum, that he said 'I think we need an international treaty', and that, as captioned, he said if the U.S. slows down a lot of what China is doing is more about the dispersion of the technology, which an X post paraphrased as 'spoofing our models' (fourweekmba.com, x.com).

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27 new listings in the last day against 1,871 still open, with Mercor posting 17 of them, micro1 7, Welo Data 2 and RemoExperts 1.

Generalist, language and robotics work tied for busiest at 3 listings each, with software at 1, which is a strangely thin showing for the field everyone keeps saying is being automated first.

Language was the fastest-growing field, going from 0 listings the previous day to 3.

The best-paid new listing was micro1's 'Paid Photo Contributor Opportunity (Siblings)' at $139 to $140 an hour, which suggests the scarcest human input of the day was having a sibling and being willing to be photographed with them.

Should a single town be allowed to veto a data center that the rest of the country's AI would run on?

Reply with your reasoning. We'll run the sharpest answers, from every side, tomorrow.

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