their efforts aren’t buying the political capital they’d hoped for.
Trump did get elected by “AI money” and they all celebrated on stage with him, you know.
Midterms? Yeah, when you are an indisputably shitty President who has broken every campaign promise and is openly deranged, you will likely lose the midterms no matter how much you try to pump Republicans. Diminishing returns.
Usually the “winning” party only holds power for a couple terms, then, after their incompetence has disgusted yet another generation of voters, they lose, only to be replaced by the other party that will repeat the process.
bOtH sIdEs, YeS, oH My
I vote in every election, and you should too. Because it’s funny
incompetence
mighty generous of you
Capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
I don’t think they plan on voters being an insurmountable problem.
That’s the unsettling part. When billionaires spend fortunes shaping elections, it’s reasonable to ask whether they see voters as citizens to persuade or obstacles to manage. Democracy becomes a lot less inconvenient when you can fund the candidates, influence the platforms hosting the debate, and lobby the people writing the rules. All perfectly legal, of course.
Y’all should stop using the word lobby and call it what it is. Bribery. The only reason your country isn’t stupid corrupt at face value is because you legalized bribery.
Annoyingly it also turned the word “lobby” into a contaminated dirty word, even though lobbying is a healthy and important part of a functional democracy.
Any group collectively arguing in favour of their interest to the government is a lobby. That group can be anything from employers, to unions, to civil rights advocates.
The problematic part is the bribery, not the fact that there is interest groups lobbying the government.
We’re so fucking dumb, our very first amendment to the Constitution gives us the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” We should amend that so people wanting to band together for a given cause can get bent. How about that?
The tolerance paradox had yet to materialise when that was written. Yes we should amend that to specify people, not corporations.
And ‘grievances’ such as “I want all the money and yet I don’t have it. Please fix this. Thx” should not be allowed to be lobbied for.
Most of the constitution needs major work.
Which billionaires aren’t flooding money into politics to influence elections? They were doing it long before all the AI drama.
Tbh, probably GabeN
Turns out telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined. Imagine spending hundreds of millions buying political influence, only to discover voters don’t enjoy being treated like obsolete hardware.
telling people your technology will replace their jobs, devour their electricity, and possibly end civilization isn’t the winning sales pitch billionaires imagined.
“but what you guys aren’t getting is the fact that it’ll make me a lot more money.”
AI is still not viable business. All that fear mongering is to create an alternative revenue sources.
“look, I created a monster that can destroy us all. Please give me money to contain and tame it. We can’t destroy it because our enemies are creating their own monsters.”
They recognised that actual sales revenue pales in comparison to inflated stock prices (Teslas model) and to-big-to-fail government bailouts (2008).
You forgot to cite Patrick Boyle here ;)
I can only hope this is true. Most voters aren’t paying a bit of attention to where the money comes from.
They’re using AI. They think it’s wonderful, they’ve barely heard about the controversy around data centers, and think “data centers are where the internet it, yOU lIkE thE inTErNeT, Don’T yoU?”
The Top 10 AI Uses in 2025 (none of which it does very well):
- Therapy and companionship
- Organizing my life
- Finding purpose
- Enhanced learning
- Summarizing content
- Generating ideas
- Generating code (for professionals)
- Improving code (for professionals)
- Creativity
- Visual art and design
My thoughts exactly. I know two folks who are going all in with AI and haven’t even considered any controversy. Feels like they live on another planet. Hell, one of the guys was even showing off his pervert glasses and when I called them pervert glasses he laughed and said he hadn’t heard that before.
I really hope those folks are in the minority.
Dang. Their online filter bubble must be strong. Likely the kind of person who also doesn’t care about surveillance capitalism because “it’ll recommend good things to buy.”
Quite right! When they email me for advice it’s often AI generated, too. I always come across as the insane person telling them not to trust AI (why even ask me for advice if you’re just going to vibe coded your site anyway…)
You’d be surprised. Data centers seem like a big issue. My boomer parents hate data centers, as do a lot of rural voters who have them nearby or proposals nearby. But to your point, I also see a lot of people who are aware of problems around ai/data centers/billionaires still using ai.
The problems with data centers are not the data centers, it’s missing regulation about where and how to build data centers.
It’s a very American problem.
Its the scale. You cant build GW datacenters without messing with everyone nearby.
Very true. A regulation that not only regards the interests of capitalists but also of the people and the environment living there could fix that.
We’re having similar problems in Aus https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-21/west-footscray-data-centre-delays-nextdc-value-asx-vic/107291744
Australia? Isn’t that the other side of the world, where people live upside down and don’t even notice it?
Yeah that’s right. At least our toilets flush in the right direction though.
I sleep at night by telling myself they’re the minority
So, you also cannot discern the difference in traditional DCs and AI DCs? I feel like you know and I’m missing something.
Scale. Older data centers fit in the “light industrial” zoned parts of town and required some minor grid upgrades to the local electrical distribution.
Planned data centers require as much power as an entire rural state and are the size of a small town and get buit too fast to wait for any new power generation to be added to the grid.
Expect bipartisan legislation to increase the anonymity of PAC money before the year is over.
I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of democrats would be ok to give republicans more power so that they can squash progressive wing of democrats who are making people realize how useless half of democrat party is.
Definitely half the Senate; they’ve been there the longest, and seem more interested in internal party structures and hierarchies than governing. Some of them seem genuinely shook by the way Trump has upended Democratic norms, but even then they seem like they just want to get back to business as usual.
The good news is that I don’t think the current leadership is long for power. Schumer came across like such a weak imbecile in the shutdown negotiations that even centrists want him gone. Jefferies might hold on for another term because he kept the caucus together during the shutdown, but he’s heavily tied to AIPAC, and that is now deeply toxic to most Democratic voters.
By backfiring you mean they have nearly total control then yes. Those losers, it has totally backfired on them and now they are richer and more powerful than ever!
All Dems have to do is run with Data Center Prohibition as their main issue, and they would win EVERY election, and destroy the MAGA movement. Even Republicans hate Data Centers, and ALL MAGA candidates LOVE them. No MAGA candidate cans say anything against them. Florida MAGA candidates are trying to ease it by claiming that they’ll make sure that citizens won’t pay the costs, but everybody knows they’re lying. That’s about the most opposition they’re putting.
MAGA is the party of UNLIMITED Data Centers. Just slam that over and over, and NOBODY will vote MAGA.
Both sides are taking data center money, though.
Here in Michigan, Governor Whitmer (Dem) is all-in on AI, even doing photo ops at (extremely locally unpopular) data center groundbreakings. “Think of all the local jobs” is the supposed upside. (spoiler: there are no local jobs being created)
Would the promise require dems to actually do something about data centers?
Election race promises are not legally binding unfortunately
Give us each $100,000 and I’ll consider it.
I thought someone did the math and said if all US billionaires were slaughtered and the money divided amongst US population, we’d all get like $400k+.
IF the billionaires are really worth their money.
Unluckily the billionaires are only theoretically worth their money since it depends on the value of their shares in the companies, shares value that is only supposed.$400k in shares is still more than I have
$400K in shares is theoretically more than what you have.
There is no guarantee that this is what you will be paid once you sell the shares.I guarantee it would still be more than I have
I always wondered if it would’ve been cheaper in Iraq and Afghanistan to just pay everyone to hand over their weapons and leave.
That was literally the case for Vietnam. They already hated the Chinese, we just needed to invest in industry for them and they would have been our allies.
The only problem was that France didn’t want that. They were too busy throwing a tantrum over losing their colony
Hell, we trained Ho Chi Minh in guerilla combat against the Japanese. The US was sympathetic to the independence of the old European colonies after the war. If it wasn’t for the cold war and trying to woo France into NATO we likely would’ve sided with Vietnam.
AI Billionaires Are Flooding Money Into Politicsare flooding politics with money, or pouring money into politics.This is grade school stuff, FFS!
Odds are þe title was written by AI
Hello Americans! Please vote! Sincerely, everyone else.
I’m not trusting the US voting system anymore. I think it’s going to be rigged and they won’t get over the republicans. I still hope that midterms will change the way USA behave, but I’m not going to hold my breath for it.
Yeah. Rigged or not it’s not going to be the landslide everyone is waiting for.
Trump’s claims of election rigging as so dumb because they can’t even come up with a plausible way it could have happened. We have 90,000 polling places, across 50 states, all of whom run elections their own way. There’s no central database to hackerman. Best anyone could possibly do is maybe sway the local dog catcher election. Maybe.
Well, all of our politicians are and that’s the problem
I’m sick of all the shiny shoes and the posturing. I need a serious person with substance.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Futurism articles are just written by AI tbh…
Low bar journalism and reporting.
Troll Musk. Vote Democrat.
should also campaign for third option so there are options and idiot party could be left to wither. Current situation leads to slow and inevitable fall as stagnation is the very best that can happen.
Anything that makes republicans weaker is a win for your country.
Or, and hear me out:
Troll Musk by voting Democrat.
