Alix: Hi there. Welcome to Computer Says Maybe Live Stream. This is the first time we've done these on just the internet. I'm your host Alix Dunn, and we are here today to talk about a people's first policy on AI. And I have three wonderful guests who are gonna look at this challenge from different angles.

And hopefully by the end of this hour you will feel a lot more empowered and a little bit more nuanced about how you're understanding the possibilities of policy in this AI era. I wanna start us off a little bit with some context. Right now, AI companies are showing us their true selves. I think, whether it's the way they're participating in illegal wars, or in the way that they are digging their claws in deeper into the working people of the United States and exploiting them in ways that sometimes we can't see. It's not as visible as airstrikes, but it can be just as painful for societies. So today I am joined by a regulator, a litigator, and an organizer who all look at this challenge from different perspectives and we are gonna unpack this together.

I wanted to start a little bit with each of you introducing yourselves and sharing a little bit about the work that you do and kind of how you got into it. Which of you wants to go first? Alvaro, I see a, a smile.

Alvaro: So, hey everyone, I'm Alvaro Bedoya. Until March of last year, I was a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, which is the federal government's agency charged with protecting against fraud and, uh, protecting you from monopolists.

Nowadays, I think a lot about a couple problems that we have in trying to protect people against the kinds of companies that are putting out these AI systems that are starting to pervade our lives. Basically, if the government hurts you, so if the government tries to take away your voting rights, if the government tries to deport you illegally, which it is doing to an awful lot of people nowadays, we have a lot of public interest [00:02:00] lawyers out there who will go to court with you for free to fight for you.

But if it is Jeff Bezos, who does that to you, if it's John Deere. Who does that to you? If it's Walmart, who does that to you? If it's open ai, who does that to you? There are actually very, very few law firms, and I'm lucky that we have someone here from one of the best, that is David Saligman, Colorado's next Attorney General, but other than David and a handful of other firms, we don't really have other folks to fight those fights, and so I'm trying to figure out how to build that field and that involves a lot of thinking and a lot of money, and so it is a slow process.

The other thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is how to get regular people, the knowhow and the tools to fight these monopolists and oligarchs. How to create popular education modules in Spanish and English to teach people their rights against these companies. How to just literally get people in a room so that they see that, you know, we may.[00:03:00]

Look different. We may have different religions, we may even come from different political parties. But when it comes to fighting these massive, you know, mega billionaire corporations, I think that's one of the few things that cuts across almost everything that can unite us. So that's a lot of what I spend my time thinking about, and those are the kind of problems I try to solve.

It's

Alix: amazing. That's great. Um, okay, well I feel like maybe David, since your name was invoked, you can go next and tell us a little bit

David: about your

Alvaro: right of, right of response.

Alix: Yeah,

David: and I'll, and I'll, I'll invoke El'Bo's name, which I'm always happy to, always very happy to do. First off, thanks so much for convening this conversation.

What a terrific group to come together to chat about these issues. So, I'm David Seligman. I'm a worker's rights, I'm civil rights and anti-monopoly lawyer. I'm the executive director of a nonprofit legal organization. Based in Colorado that fights for working people in Colorado and across the country called Towards Justice.

And I am also now a candidate for [00:04:00] Attorney General in Colorado. And you know, campaigning on a lot of the, the same issues that I'm fighting on in my day job. You know, how we can sort of take on this very often rigged system where, where the elite play by a different set of rules and very often that is happening through abuses of these technologies.

I'll say that, you know, I didn't come into this work thinking that I would be like a tech accountability lawyer, right? My first cases, like in the first cases that we did it towards justice were wage theft cases for immigrant workers. For example, construction workers. Like my first big class action was 2014 on behalf of 200 construction workers in Denver who weren't paid their wages over the Christmas holidays when they hung drywall for 80 hours a week, you know?

Um, and then I think what we started to see. Over time is that this work, the work of helping working people to confront corporate abuse increasingly involves helping them to confront abuses of these technologies. I'm so happy that my dear friend El'Bo is here [00:05:00] from Colorado, independent Drivers United because rideshare drivers.

In my mind were the canaries in the coal mine of a lot of these problems. So 20 16, 20 17, 20 18. You know, I'm reading the work, for example, of my like dear friend and professor Vina Dall, who has written a lot about the challenges confronting rideshare drivers and then talking to rideshare drivers in Colorado and across the country who are explaining to us, for example, about how they're getting different wage offers, not based on the sort of standard, you know, number of miles that they're supposed to drive or anything like that, but based on sort of individualized considerations about them, and they see how the algorithms on the smartphones in their pockets or manipulating them in various ways.

Right. I remember, you know, when I spoke to a rideshare driver who told me that he felt like he had a boss. The boss was just the algorithm on the smartphone in his pocket. Then increasingly we've seen those systems expand out over time. So you know, we're fighting for Amazon drivers subject to like minute by minute [00:06:00] surveillance and urinating in bottles in order to meet Jeff Bezos.

Impossible quotas. And then seeing how AI systems are now being used to screen people for jobs. We just filed a really important case I'd love to talk about last month against a massive AI company that screens potentially millions of job applicants and scores them based on hidden considerations from zero to five based on their likelihood of success on the job.

Many of our fights, many of these fights have also taken us into the legislature, uh, and been really fortunate to have some big wins in Colorado and also a long way to go still, and also really fortunate and in a lot of those fights in Colorado, we've had rideshare drivers by our side, including the folks from Colorado, independent Drivers United fighting, not just for rights for rideshare drivers, but really rates for working people in the face of these algorithms and AI systems.

Alix: Amazing. Thank you. All right, El'Bo, you've been teed up. All

El'Bo: right,

Alix: cool. Um, tell us a little bit about your work.

El'Bo: Alright, cool. Well, my name is Elliott “El’Bo” Awatt I am with Colorado Independent [00:07:00] Drivers United. We are a unit inside of CWA 7 7, 7 7, affectionately known as Quad seven. We are a fighting local. We stay at the Capitol House.

So, but, um, a lot of my work just involves helping drivers to understand, you know, what rights that they do have and how to work around some of these challenges. For instance. These algorithms can fire you. Can you imagine getting fired by an app? Now these people came through and they crushed the whole taxi industry and forced everybody onto the app.

And now an algorithm makes a decision on who gets to work and who does not get to work. And those sorts of things are very unfair. Also, these algorithms make decisions on who gets paid what. I could have the same car as the guy next to me, and, uh, we can get different pay for the same ride based on who knows what.

And that's what we're trying to get down to the bottom of is how do they come up with these sorts of things. [00:08:00] So most of my work just involves advocacy for drivers at the capitol and also helping drivers when they do get in trouble and they, they, you know, their livelihood is threatened. So yeah, in a nutshell.

Alix: Amazing. Well, I feel like part of the idea of bringing the three of you into this conversation is that you all look at this challenge with different lenses. You know, you're, you're doing different kinds of work, but it's all ideally rolling up together into some meaningful accountability for corporate power tech, corporate power.

But I'm thinking maybe we could focus specifically on gig economy issues, given where we are and, and how this conversation is going. And I'm kind of wondering, and I feel like El'Bo, maybe this is a question to you to sort of kick us off, like, how has it changed being a driver or someone working in the gig economy from let's say 2016 to now?

Like how has it evolved? 'cause I think if we can unpack a little bit how the systems have changed, it gets clear on what challenge we're looking at and where there might be opportunities sort of push [00:09:00] back on these things.

El'Bo: So the biggest difference between then and now is the pay back when it was still, I guess you could say, private.

And they were, you know, burning the investor money. It was really good. And they, they did everything they could to get us on the apps and they paid us way better than now. And what we've seen over time, in particular in the Denver area, we've seen our pay as drivers go down by like 40%. But we've also, in that same time, seen customers pay up to three times more.

This doesn't make any sense. How are they paying more and we're getting less. And what they end up doing is they gamify the app. They always come with these, if you do this many rides, we'll give you this bonus, we'll give you that bonus. And if you fall into that loop, you'll see declining pay because they know that you're, you're a little bit.

More thirsty or hungry. We also see like differences. Um, we feel like different groups get targeted. You know, they can tell if you're, um, [00:10:00] an immigrant or not. And you know, the taxi cab industry is traditionally in immigrant dominated field. You know, there's more immigrants than the typical American, right?

And they know that. And they, like you organizing at the airport, you will see different groups. One year it will be dominant with this particular group of immigrants. The next year it'll be this group of immigrants. And if you just keep your mind on the news and you hear what's going on in the news, if they're talking about 'em in the news, it seems like AI or Uber is targeting them to come and work.

You know? And they know that they can burn through people, so they don't have any incentive to keep you around if you're complaining.

Alix: Interesting. And I feel like, um, Alvaro or David, either from a litigation perspective or a regulatory perspective, how have you seen the landscape change? Like have there been either lawsuits you've seen, David, that you feel like are shaping things in a particular way, or Alvaro regulatory controls that are coming in to stop some of this?

Or is it kind of, I don't know. Has it been all downhill [00:11:00] in the last 10 years?

David: I mean, a couple things. So one key point to flag here is that. The whole business model for a, like a lot of these companies and I really just think like Rideshare is just so illustrative of it. The whole business model for a lot of these companies very often involves trying to exercise as much control as they can over people, over consumers, over drivers, exercising as much control as they can without being accountable to them.

So manipulating both sides of the marketplace and then trying to like vanish into the background. And one of the ways in which they're able to do that, which is, this is a roundabout way of answering your question about litigation, is through the use of forced arbitration, which is something that we've talked about before, Alex, which I think is like, is actually we, something we shouldn't, we can't lose track of in broader conversations about tech accountability, which is the fact that many of these companies that have direct relationship with consumers and workers hide in their fine print terms written by corporate lawyers that say that you can't sue them in court, you can't ever sue them in a class action.

That makes it really hard to [00:12:00] challenge a lot of this conduct, even conduct that, that on its face. Seems likely illegal. So, you know, one of the cases that we've talked about is a case we brought in California a couple of years ago against Uber and Lyft for price fixing because they assert that their drivers are totally independent entities.

And if that is indeed the case, if their drivers really are independent entities to whom they owe no duties to provide minimum wages or to allow them the right to organize into labor unions, if they are really independent entities, then under California law, California Antitrust Law, black Letter, California antitrust Law, Uber and Lyft shouldn't.

Be allowed to fix the prices that those independent businesses charge their consumers. We brought that case a few years ago now, and it, I, I think, presents a, a really transformative understanding of how these companies operate. You know, their effort to sort of have it both ways to control without being accountable.

And that case ends up being compelled into arbitration because our clients in that case, although they opted out of their arbitration agreements, [00:13:00] opted out of many of their arbitration agreements, hadn't apparently opted out of all their arbitration agreements because they get new terms and conditions sometimes every couple of months.

Right? El'Bo, you get like a, a new set of contracts that you need to sign and that you're forced to sign if you want to continue working for the company. So there has not been, there's some exception to this, but really has not been, I think as much enforcement as in this space as we. Would have expected.

And that's in large part because we're not seeing it as much on the private side due to forced arbitration. And then frankly, I think that, you know, on the public enforcement side, there are of course resource challenges in bringing these cases. But also we have, uh, I think too often we've seen public enforcers that don't appear to have the courage to take on these kinds of fights.

And, you know, I think that that has, has meant that, you know, a lot of this conduct hasn't, hasn't really been scrutinized by the courts to the extent that you would expect.

Alix: I feel like this is a good segue, Alvaro, um, as someone that was largely responsible to try and identify systemic remedy to these issues that can't be resolved in an individual [00:14:00] who is exploited by a company taking that company to court because of the dynamics that both David and El'Bo have just described.

Um, do you wanna say a little bit about what has happened in terms of regulatory pressure or regulator pressure from the federal government or from public actors that might play a role in these kind of systems?

Alvaro: Absolutely. So the FTC. Did both things. It litigated and it tried to institute rules while we were there.

Although, one of the biggest things I want to communicate to the folks listening is some of the most exciting work to enact those rules is occurring at the state level. Like for example, in the work that David and El'Bo are pushing forward in the Colorado State legislature. But before I get into it, I wanna talk about why regulation as in like just putting rules in place is so important because there's a couple slides of hand, couple tricks, a bunch of weird tricks that the tech industry uses to just pull some fast ones on people.

So El'Bo mentioned a couple of these. One is to [00:15:00] say to the customer, oh, you, you're gonna pay $50. And then you say to the driver, oh, this is a $12 fare. If this were occurring in real life, that would not happen. I mean, the customer would get out a $50 bill, and it's not like the $38 would evaporate before it reached the driver's hand.

Here's another example. We sued a company called care.com, and basically they arrange for babysitters and nannies for families who need them, and they, as you might expect, hire a lot of very hardworking people who work in childcare. And what they were doing is that when you went on the platform to try to hire someone, it made you make a job posting, but you couldn't access the site without creating a job posting.

And so people would create all these dummy job, job postings to just get, get through to see who was there. And then they would take that information and dangle it in front of the people who were trying to work saying, oh, we have 10 million jobs available. Right. And again, [00:16:00] if this were in meat space, right?

If this were in brick and mortar land where people exist and walk around. You'd go to this nanny place and there'd be, you know, crickets and a bunch of dust, you know, and no one would be there. He'd be like, there's, there's no jobs here. There's like maybe one job here, two jobs here. But no, they would trick all these people into getting accounts, enhancing their accounts, right?

Paying extra so that they'd be noticed by those 10 million employers. And so, by the way, all those were allegations that we made at the ftc. We sued them. You see example after example of. Situations where tech companies should be subject to more transparency and more scrutiny than brick and mortar business.

'cause they hold all of the cards in their hands. And yet, what do you hear from these fancy lobbyists? You hear, oh, we're new and innovative. Like, oh, you gotta cut this red tape. We're not a taxi company, we're a tech company. We're not a hotel company, we're a tech company. These old rules don't apply to us when [00:17:00] actually it should be like two x or three x.

The rule should apply to you because there's no transparency into this situation. And so here's another trick that we don't talk about enough, which is that these people have lots of money. They literally have billions of dollars. They spend those billions of dollars to lobby people in Congress and to donate to their campaigns so that they're invited to their kids' parties and they're invited to the, to the barbecue for 4th of July.

And, and they, you know, naturally insinuate themselves and these elected officials lives. And when it comes time to pay the bills for this place that I used to work, the FTC, they'll say, oh, well, why We don't need to increase it this year. Why don't we do a 5% cut? Why don't we do a 1% cut? And occasionally they'll take a big ax to it and say, oh, 50% cut.

Right? The end result is that the agencies that are tasked in law with protecting working people, small business owners against these kinds of frauds [00:18:00] are completely under-resourced. You're set up to lose. You don't have the amount of resources to go after these cases one by one. And so what do you want to do?

You want to put a rule in place. That says, oh look, I'm not gonna have to play Whack-a-Mole. And every time one of you guys tries to do some more illegal stuff, I just gotta whack you. 'cause every one of those waxes, literally years of work, right? Years of teams of lawyers and paralegals on taxpayers dimes having to be like, no, Mr.

Babson, you did break the law. Look right here, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then they'll appeal, et cetera. What you want are clear rules of the road. And so a couple of the things we tried to do was do that. So we had a rule on junk fees. This thing where you show up at a hotel and they're like, oh yeah, you know it's gonna be $250 and there's a $75 resort fee.

And you're like, this isn't even resort. This is like Ramada Inn. Like what are you, what are you talking about? You're like, oh, no, no, but it's not, it's not optional. It's [00:19:00] mandatory, right? Like we tried to ban those in hotels and in ticketing, we tried to ban non-compete agreements where they would tell everyone from.

Folks who make sandwiches at, you know, fast casual restaurants all the way to pediatricians, they need a job. And so they'll agree that like, oh, okay, I won't work as a pediatrician for like within a radius of 300 miles, or I won't make sandwiches within a radius of 300 miles, which completely ruins people's lives and tears them apart.

We try to ban those and some of those rules survived, right? But a lot of 'em were struck down by this massive apparatus of corporate America, chamber of Commerce and all its fronts. And so this is why I think the state laws that. El'Bo David, their colleagues in Colorado, friends in California, friends elsewhere are passing are so important because it's a little bit easier to say to a federal agency, oh, you're overstepping the bounds of your authority.

We're bananas. The [00:20:00] argument that we are, I mean, you should read some of the transcripts of the people who created the FTC, how pissed they were, honestly at what business was doing in their time. But, um, I think the clearest path forward for me is legislation and frankly legislation at the state level.

El'Bo: So we passed the Transparency Act a couple of years back, um, with the help of David Seligman and towards Justice Family.

And, um, part of what the Transparency Act does is it shows the driver. What the customer paid and it shows the customer what the driver paid because there's this psychological game that they play because they see all the information from the customer. They see all the information from the driver, they play the customer and the driver against each other with the rating system.

So we'll never really understand each other. A guy pays a hundred dollars to go from downtown Denver to the airport. He really thinks that the driver just made like 85, 90 bucks. There's no way that he would ever believe that an app would take more than $10 of his money. But thanks to this transparency law, [00:21:00] he can see that now and you know, start to get on our side and start to understand that we're stronger together, the consumer and the person providing the ride.

Like if you think about it, I'm a member of the community. This person that needs the ride is a member of the community. Why does 70% of this transaction need to leave my community?

Alix: That's something that I really took away from our conversation. Like I know maybe like a year ago, David, where you were describing this attempt to pit workers against consumers and that that is one of the pivotal sort of ways that essentially political power is being kind of put against itself.

Um, and that if we could sort of see that dynamic and reject it and step into sort of a space of solidarity essentially, and say like, actually neither of these groups is the problem here and allow and encourage big tech to sort of surface from this background setting that they really enjoy that. That is the path towards finding political power that might subvert some [00:22:00] of this corporate control.

That seems like a fantastic example where that's being codified into law. That transparency basically is sort of showing. That those are two groups that are both kind of being screwed and that maybe they didn't know. And also it it, yeah. I can see that kind of awakening a consciousness of shared challenge.

Are there other laws that you all are seeing that you feel like get at that dimension of worker versus consumer?

David: The care.com case that borough talked about sort of gets at a lot of the same challenge there. I mean, the point is that if you're going in. So try to find work through care.com. You're thinking about this as this, as if it's just some sort of like neutral marketplace.

If care.com isn't like doing anything here, it turns out that care.com is manipulating the marketplace in all kinds of ways, right? And that's, that's a, a sort of a ma mistake and impression of how the market works puts you in tension with people on the other side of the marketplace. I think we see versions of that all the time and very often it, it, it is just a matter of, and I don't think this like solves the problem entirely.

I don't think [00:23:00] transparency solves the problem entirely, but it is just a matter of forcing the platform to reveal itself. And then once the platform reveals itself, I think it does awaken a different sort of political understanding of how we are all. Situated with respect to one another. It's, I mean, there's so many examples of this that, that I've seen throughout my work that are just like so deeply tragic on a human level of just like how I have these platforms, these tech companies just try to like disappear into the background.

And I remember I shared one example with you. You know that a time I saw an Instacart worker getting in a fight with a grocery worker at a grocery store. And I think about that example all the time. But the other ones that come up very often is, you know, for example, I remember several years ago I was helping a DoorDash driver try to call DoorDash and get.

A fair that somehow had hadn't gotten to him. And it's impossible to get someone on the phone. And finally, ultimately, when we get somebody on the phone, it seems to be a call center worker who's in South Asia, and this call center worker from South Asia is getting [00:24:00] in this a fight with this immigrant worker in Colorado about what happened to this worker's money here.

And neither of them, neither of them can get DoorDash on the phone. Like DoorDash is just gone, right? And we're talking about people like at opposite sides of the planet, fighting with each other in tension with one another because this platform has tried to just recede into the background. Um, so I think that, that, I guess it's a long way of saying, yeah, I think that one of the most important things we can do to help spur the political awakening that we're hoping for here is just to, to force this stuff.

Out into the open. Right. Just to like to, to require some of the transparency here. And that does, I think like, and I totally agree with Oliver, I agree with El'Bo that is going to have to happen through regulation very often. I still think it is. Also, it can be the work of litigation. So this case that towards Justice filed earlier this year against an AI company that screens people's job applications, in many cases, these are folks who have applied through [00:25:00] the internet for a job, are rejected for some reason that they're totally unaware of.

And it turns out that the employer behind the scenes has contracted with this AI company that screens their job applications, scrapes information about them from the internet. Wheel edge and then scores them, as I said, from zero to five. And we, we filed that lawsuit under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which is a law that's been on the books for decades and decades.

And one of the themes I think of this conversation is that one of the most important things we can do to hold tech accountable is just make sure that the laws that have been there and been on the books apply to big tech. But one of the, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that, in this case, the job applicant be made aware that they're being screened in these ways and that they have an opportunity to dispute whatever sort of assessment is made about them.

So it doesn't, you know, necessarily it's, it's not like we're making the use of a AI illegal in these contexts, but we are at least forcing it to the surface, right? So people understand, I applied for this job and AI was being used to screen me [00:26:00] to evaluate me, and that's why I didn't get this job that I desperately needed, forcing the stuff to the surface and, and exposing it as opposed to allowing people to sort of be intention with one another.

And the ways we often see in the marketplace is really essential.

Alix: I feel like one thing I also wanted to draw out from you all is the way that these issues are connected to lots of other issues and how tech is showing up in kind of villainous ways, because I think it might transition to thinking about how that public awakening might be assisted by how obvious the con is getting, um, and how the, how, how much worse the bedfellows are getting also.

So I think seeing the ways that big tech companies are willing to partner with the Trump administration, for example, to do things that I think. Are universally considered to be bad. Um, feels like an interesting opportunity to get people to better understand and pull those companies to the fore. 'cause I think David, that vision of making them come from that background position to to the foreground feels like the challenge right [00:27:00] now.

So do you all have reflections on when you think about these issues, when you think about corporate power and exploitation and a lack of accountability within these spaces, are there other issues that you connect this to that you feel like are useful for understanding what the overall challenges? And feel free anybody can jump in on this one.

El'Bo: I mean, I think about public safety and then I think about Waymo and its impact on the ride share drivers that are already out and. And then I also think about labor and outsourcing jobs, and I can link all three by simply saying that we went to a protest in San Francisco in front of the Uber headquarters and in front of the Lyft headquarters with some of our United Front partners a couple of years back.

And we got into a Waymo just to see, you know, some Colorado organizers way before these things were gonna be here. Let's see what's coming our way. I mean, the thing was making a lot of freaking mistakes and one of my fellow [00:28:00] organizers was like, there's somebody driving this car, it's not driving itself.

And we were just like, yeah, that's a nice conspiracy theory. And maybe it does because there's drones, there's all sorts of technology. And then here recently, Waymo just admitted that they have drivers in the Philippines that will log into the car and get it out of tight situations, they say. But the problem with public safety is, is when the Waymo hits somebody that it hasn't been trained to recognize, or when the Waymo runs a school bus stop sign, who gets the ticket?

I had to get a driver's license. Somebody else somewhere else that has a whole different standard of driving is able to operate a vehicle on a road here. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like, it's

Alix: who does get the ticket? I feel like we've got enough legal expertise in this room. Who does get the tickets on happens.

David: I mean, um, I actually, I don't know how it works in this context, but I mean, Waymo ought to, I mean, Waymo should be on, on the hook. I think that's a beautiful [00:29:00] example. Elbo. I mean, the other, the thing that immediately came to mind for me, Alex, when you, with your question is data centers. I think that data centers are.

Just such a visible and tangible manifestation of the expansion of these technologies and in ways that are really harming people. So I was at a hearing in Denver last week about the effort to build out a new day-to-day center here in a marginalized community that has already hosts, you know, oil refineries that are, you know, polluting there and making families and kids sick.

And there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people there who were just enraged, enraged that we would try to build a data center right now in Colorado when we have like hardly any snow and we're facing a really dangerous, like, life-threatening drought. And these data centers are guzzling like almost a million gallons of water a day.

It was really interesting to hear some of the folks there [00:30:00] question why we needed it, right? It wasn't so much like, well this data center takes so much water. It's also like, why do we need. A data center to build robots to decide how much a rideshare driver is going to get paid to make sure the rideshare driver gets paid as little as possible so that Uber can make as much money as possible.

I mean, it's just, it's wild, right? Why do we need more robots to decide who gets access to healthcare? And I thought that conversation was so powerful because, I mean, precisely to your point, like it really is forcing to the surface, I think a, a kind of political reckoning that we often don't have when we allow these technologies to gradually just sort of proliferate across our, across our lives in sort of invisible, in hidden ways.

Alix: That's a great example. Alvar, are there issues or sort of ways that you see tech company malfeasance, um, rising to the surface in a way that feels palpable

Alvaro: everywhere? It's, it's, it's honestly hard to, to pin one, um, [00:31:00] one thing down. For me, it's less. A specific instance of malfeasance and more this sense they create around themselves of inevitability and progress.

And just like either you're with us or you're an insane kind of crackpot Luddite. And I think that one of the most important things we can do is just call them out on their shit. And also, I mean, you're, you're seeing this right now with this rhetoric around firing people and these mass layoffs. And by the way, one thing you'll consistently notice is.

That these firings coincide with completely separate things occurring in the industry. So, for example, block, [00:32:00] which used to be Square, just laid off thousands upon thousands of people. And Jack Dorsey comes on and says, Hey, I just gotta be honest with you, you know, I could have done this slowly or kind of ripped off the bandaid.

And you know, we, we did this 'cause we're so excited about ai and no one, no one says, buddy, you're way invested in Bitcoin and Bitcoin, you know, just collapsed. Maybe it has to do with the collapse of the whole reason you change your name from Square to block like Blockchain. But let's set that aside. I think it's really important to have a reaction to it, which is you don't accept anything as a given and you are equally bold in your demands of these companies as they are of what they have taken from us.

And so. One thing that we learned from the labor movement is, if you look back, so one of the things I did when I was at FTC is I, I like went and looked at the legislative histories. So I looked at [00:33:00] newspapers, I looked at the debates in Congress, and the stories are completely insane. You know, you've got like 15 year olds working 12 hour days often they would work six days a week or something like that, and the labor movement came in and first in, in the uk and then in the us we're gonna have a five day work week, and we're gonna have a 40 hour work week, eight hours a day, right?

Eight hours to work. Eight hours. There's a beautiful saying, eight hours to rest. Eight hours to do what we will, right? We need to have a similar response to this when there's all these AI companies that are literally just trying to become the first trillionaire. Why isn't anyone saying, great, we're moving to a four day work week.

Over time, kicks in at 32 hours, number one, number two. Great healthcare is gonna be subsidized by you, vocational school, college subsidized by you. And because what they're doing is they're literally taking. The fruit of generations in terms of [00:34:00] their minds and their labor. They're just taking it right.

And they apologize later. Like, oh yeah, it was copyrighted. Oh, it was fair use, you know, or, oh, actually we just needed to do this to innovate. So, right. You know, let's have a similarly bold response to 'em and say, great, love it. Actually don't love it. We're gonna sue you, et cetera. But like you're gonna, you know, because what they wanna do is they wanna take everything, they wanna become trillionaires, and then they wanna say like, oh, we're just gonna do universal basic income.

Everyone's gonna get a sweet thousand $500 a month. You know, like we're some kind of surf sucking at their teets. And really what it should be is like. Okay. If you're gonna do that, then you're gonna pay for healthcare. You're gonna pay for vocational school and college and trade school, and we're gonna move to a, a four day work week.

So there's all these just baseline assumptions in, in what they do and how they do it. And I think that particularly some people on the left, I think the ones that went to law school, not people like David who still has this fight in him, but like you get [00:35:00] read into the system of like, technology is good and, and if you're opposed to it, it's progress.

And oh, maybe you get some tax breaks in there. You know, maybe you get some special rebate programs in there. Um, but people need to be just as bold as they are. Aggressive.

Alix: I think the UBI thing is a really interesting example because it's almost always coupled with the idea of destroying the administrative state.

So like, we'll give you this $1,500 check. Yes.

David: Like,

Alix: and that's it. Yeah. And then we'll just, yeah. No labor

David: unions.

Alix: Yeah.

David: Yes.

Alix: Right. Yeah. And I think they're trying to make the compromise so much smaller than it needs to be to be able to be at, at the right size based on the value they're extracting. And I think there's just this negotiation is happening, but we're kind of pretending like it's not as though they're just making these kind of interesting suggestions that are like UBI, I don't know.

Totally. I feel like, David, you're about to jump in on UBI. Um,

David: well, no, I mean, I've got lots of thoughts about, about UBI and share some of the, [00:36:00] share some of your concerns here. I mean, I just think part of the, not to talk even more shit about lawyers, I mean, Oliver sort sort of teed us off a little bit here, but like, I mean, lawyers are, yeah, lawyers are big, are a big part of the problem.

Um, I mean part of it is just this, like the, the sense. They like to cultivate that somehow they are the wild west. That there are no rules here. Right? So you often, the way that this comes up in our legislative fights in Colorado and El'Bo's use this all the time, is like, you know, you'll be on the other side of the table from lobbyists who with furrow brows will tell you, well, there's no law here.

So what really? You're right, we need to be regulated a little, a little bit. And you're like, no, there are tons of laws here. There are all the labor laws, there are all the consumer protection laws, right? And just because you got a lot of venture capital money doesn't mean that the law, you've got some like weird new name like square, like you've got some weird mono syllabic name.

You know, it doesn't mean that the law don't apply to you. You know? And that's, I like that I think is very often the fight that we also end up in here. Right? Or the, the laws

Alix: aren't cool, [00:37:00] David.

David: Like they're extracting all this value saying that they're doing something, doing something new and special and they've got, like, there's a new word to describe what they're doing and therefore there are no laws here and we really should, ought to be really careful about laws because laws will create all kinds of, you know, unintended consequences.

Alix: When you talk about laws, I think it's really within consumer protection. It feels like there are less. Clear than in, let's say government use of technology. Like it feels like, and this is where the Anthropic case or where, um, uh, certain hints of how Palantir or Google is being used by ice or other kind of, obviously illegal things.

And you would expect there to be a much, I mean, maybe not more clear because the law is the law, but there might be more appetite to actually take legal action to stop the use cases that we're seeing and strike at the heart of some of the inevitability narrative that Alro was talking about. Connecting that to another issue where I feel like people can start seeing the real big tech.

Um, it feels like there's violence being perpetrated by [00:38:00] the government that is being enabled by these tech companies. Are there laws there that you wish there was more enforcement of or that you feel like there's possible sort of traction to be built up in public consciousness on that?

El'Bo: I mean, personally, something that me and my organizer buddies like to talk about is an independent contractor Bill of Rights.

You know, I, I don't know exactly what it would look like, but it's something similar to, you know, how Alvaro was saying about the 8, 8, 8, because what, what we find, um, is you'll go out one week and you may make 1200 bucks in 40 hours, but the next week it may take 60 or 70 or 80 to get to that same amount of money.

You know what I mean? So that's part of the gamification of the system too, running it through the phones and the apps and everything. So I think that one of the biggest things that we could start to focus on now is, okay, you want to make everybody an independent contractor, but here's what you can and can't [00:39:00] do to an independent contractor.

David: Yeah. Yeah. And that's another, another thing, Alex, that. I don't wanna lose track of this discussion of the connection between the government, um, and government overreach and AI and AI surveillance, which I think is becoming like an increasingly salient issue in people's lives. It's so interesting, you know, now, you know, El'Bo and I have been talking about surveillance wages and prices for a long time.

Like the use of these technologies to spy on us, to charge us more, to pay us less. Now, like when I'm talking about those issues, like when I'm out sort of campaigning about these issues, immediately people ask me about flock cameras, people ask me about Palantir. They're drawing these connections. We're starting to see the sort of breakdown of the divide between private surveillance, corporate surveillance, and government surveillance.

And I think that that is a, I agree that we should be extremely worried about these, this trend. And I, I do think that there are some of the frameworks that we can use from. The government surveillance [00:40:00] context is a way to think about sort of private side surveillance. I'll, but I'll tell you, we're seeing a ton of under enforcement in the government surveillance space, right?

I mean, so there's a bill, there's a big fight in Colorado this year over a terrific piece of legislation called the Fourth Amendment Not For Sale, that would require law enforcement agencies to seek a warrant before they obtained surveillance information from the private sector. Interestingly, some of the pushback that the advocates of that bill have gotten from law enforcement is that getting a warrant is just too complicated and it takes too long, and why should we have to get a warrant where we could just buy the information from a third party?

And it's like, look, I mean this is, this is a sacred right in this country. A warrant being too difficult. That's part of the point here. You need to have a basis in order to, to obtain this kind of information. You know, we can't lose track of what's happening with flock. We're now, there are millions of data points in many in, in Colorado for example, we're collecting millions of data points on people.

You know, we're analyzing that data and AI systems, private [00:41:00] databases that could be shared with other law enforcement agencies. And then I think there's another problem here, which goes back to again, how these systems are trained on like all of human experience, which is, I don't think we, we really know yet how much of these.

AI systems are trained on public data, on government data, on private data. So Palantir as just one example, has access to one of the most valuable data sources in the history of the world, which is like all of the information about all of us when it's training, its AI systems on the data. What's it doing with those AI systems?

Those AI systems could be potentially extremely valuable in setting prices and wages. Is it using them in those ways? There's still a lot for us to learn. This is creepy stuff and it's something that I think is really salient in a lot of people's minds. It's something that we ought to be doing more to regulate and doing more to scrutinize.

Alix: I wanna make sure we get towards what you guys are excited about in terms of, uh, where there might be traction. 'cause I think it can get dark quickly when we think [00:42:00] about all the different ways that these companies are. It's getting all up in there. When you think about the work that you do, I'd love to hear from each of you, like what are you seeing that excites you in terms of things that have traction and momentum to turn the tide and any reflections on what you would suggest someone do.

Like if there's a particular action that you might suggest people take, even if it's just to learn more about X or get in touch with y organization. Um, and then we'll take questions. So something you're excited about or feel like you're seeing traction or momentum with tactically or, um, if there's particular examples that you're excited about and then something that you would encourage people to do to make.

Meaningful change in work on these issues.

El'Bo: So something that I'm really excited about is thanks to the, uh, transparency law, we now operate, uh, DSO as we call it, which is a driver support organization. And we're able to help drivers through the process of arbitration when they are wrongfully deactivated.

And I'm also excited [00:43:00] about what I've seen since I've gotten into this activist space is, in particular with the ride share and the ification of the economy. This is turning into a global struggle. Last Mayday, we participated with several different organizations from the UK to Nigeria, to Paraguay, just all across the globe because it's become apparently clear that this is a global struggle.

The same struggle that we're having in America. It's the same struggle that they're having in India. And we were able to actually send a representative to an ILO conference about this issue. And what we found is, is people everywhere are ready to fight the ification of their life. And so if we could just continue to get the general public to understand what's at stake, I think that we're on the verge that David says, a canary in the coal mine, but we're not gonna die.

We're gonna fly. You know what I'm saying? [00:44:00] We're on the verge of having some sort of a new deal type moment. For this moment when it comes to the ification of everything and people getting paid fairly, and even what you guys are saying about universal basic income and shortening up these hours and stuff, we are like this close to all of that because everybody understands it's starting to understand what's at stake.

So that gives me hope.

Alix: That's wonderful. Is there one thing you would want someone that's listening to do, um, whether it's learn more about your organization or,

El'Bo: yeah. Well, I would say if you're in Colorado and you're, you're down to fight, you know, find Colorado independent drivers United, um, C-I-D-U-C-W-A 7 7 7 7.

Dot org is our website. Join, get involved. Um, if you're in Colorado, if you're not in Colorado, join an organization right now with everything that's going on in the world. Like I could speak for hours on everything, but to me the [00:45:00] solution is to get organized. You have to join an organization and there are plenty of groups that are out doing the work.

And if you don't find something that fits your liking or isn't going after the specific issue that you want, then start another organization. But that's what it's gonna take to survive in this time, is for people to organize no shortcuts.

Alix: David, we'll go as you go.

David: Um, I, I have so much, uh, optimism and, you know, I think there's so many reasons to be hopeful in what we're seeing in organizing, like here in Colorado and what we're seeing in organizing across the country.

And I've seen this sort of for a couple of years actually, in Colorado, independent Drivers United is a perfect example of this. You know, I remember several years ago, although, I dunno if you remember this a couple of years ago, you know, we were leading in action and I, and I remember that there was some concern going in that we were gonna have these hundreds of rideshare drivers show up, and there was concern going in that they wouldn't understand what an algorithm was, what algorithms were, you know, it turns out that they understand algorithms like better than anybody, you know, and we're, [00:46:00] we're chanting on the steps of the capitol about no more algorithmic bosses, right?

I mean, people get it. The people living in this world, in this like weird broken, algorithmically mediated and distorted world, they get it and they're fired up about it. And I think that, that we just need to like find different ways to organize around it. What I'll also tell you, and this is I guess the call to action here is.

There are lots of opportunities to channel that organizing into local and state level work and action. You know, that can be in place in Colorado where we're working on legislation, for example, this year, to prohibit surveillance wages and prices to ensure that companies can't spy on you, to charge you more and to pay you less.

You can get involved in that kind of fight. But even if you're not in a state where that type of legislation is being pushed, you can get involved in a local fight to beat back data center developments or in a local fight to protect kids from all the ways in which these technologies are, [00:47:00] uh, manipulating them and putting them at risk.

There are lots of opportunities to, to be involved at the state and local level. And this, uh, new, new deal, as El'Bo has highlighted, it's gonna start from the states, right? Like, we're gonna, we, we need to get going on this project right now. Like that's where the, that's where this wave is gonna come from right now.

And hopefully we'll have an opportunity, I think in, in 2028, um, to like make some more of this happen at the federal level. But, but we can't wait for that, that's for sure. And, um, I think there's some really exciting opportunities at the state level and the local level. In the meantime,

Alvaro: I agree with so much of what El'Bo and David said, and, and it's because it's true.

So El'Bo. Focused on the fact that these problems are not just occurring in Denver or Greeley or other cities and towns in the United States. They're occurring across the globe and people are slowly starting to get organized and waking up to the fact [00:48:00] that if we get organized, if we unite, we can create power and exert that power to help ourselves.

I think it's really important to look back at American history and see what happened. The last time there was this kind of inequality, which was the Gilded Age. What happened was there was a massive movement of farmers, of labor, of small business to check what back then were called the trust. Nowadays we would call them corporations.

We passed all these laws, but also it was, it was a great unifying moment where the farm alliance. Organized coalitions between farmers who were small business owners and labor unionists in the cities. White farmers in the south tried to organize and break bread and and joint arms with black farmers, sharecroppers in the [00:49:00] south.

They failed a lot, but they succeeded sometimes. And this was a moment when industry was just crushing people and people broke ranks, so to speak, across these lines that that divided people of, oh, you're a business owner versus you're a worker and the small business owner. And the worker actually had more in common than that line normally would suggest, oh, you're a white farmer, you're a black farmer.

And boy were those lines real sharp. In the late 18 hundreds, but still some people broke rank and they unified to fight this money power that was dominating their lives. I think we're in one of those moments again, and, and I think that, that there is very much a world where we have another moment like we did in 18 90, 19 14, and in the years that followed where the, this power was checked.

David said something tremendously important, which is, it's not gonna start at the federal level. Alex, you started with a sobering reminder that we are in the middle of a new war. [00:50:00] We are in. I can't even count what war in of my lifetime, another needless war in which people will be killed. This started with 150 school girls being killed.

Now I think there's six service members being killed, American service members being killed. God knows how many people around the globe are being killed. The leaders of the opposition party can't bring themselves to forcefully oppose this war. What we're getting are these like 16 paragraph essays saying, oh, this guy was really bad.

And so it's good that we're going at 'em, but they didn't brief us and they didn't take the right vote. And so for 16 paragraphs, that is what the leaders of the opposition party can do, right? That is not the spirit we see right now in the states. What's happening. And I'm not talking about the, the dialogue and the war in the state legislatures.

I have not tracked that. But what I see is they say, oh, you're trying to fix my rent with an [00:51:00] algorithm. Forget that we're gonna ban that. You're trying to set the price of my groceries with an algorithm. No sir. We're gonna ban that too. You're seeing red line laws being passed that just flat out ban these practices that Congress has consistently been proven to be incapable of passing.

And so if we get more folks like El'Bo and David and their colleagues in Colorado, and we get more of these folks passing these laws elsewhere in the country. I think you're gonna see Congress, you know, learn some bravery here. That would be my hope. I am hopeful for that reason. I'm hopeful for this coming together that you described El'Bo and for the bravery that you're seeing at the state level.

And for this dissatisfaction with the, the normal answers of like, oh, don't ask for too much. Maybe you get a little tax break. Or maybe, you know, okay, well maybe next time they go to another illegal war, maybe when we try to invade Cuba, oh, that time they'll go, they'll go to a vote, you know, uh, before Congress and we'll do it right next [00:52:00] time.

No, I don't want any more illegal wars. I don't want any more landlords setting my rent by colluding with the other landlords. I don't want my groceries set by some robot, owned by some trillionaire who lives in, you know, some bunker and visits all kinds of islands, right? Like, no, I, I just want this stuff to be over.

And that is the energy you have at the states. And that's why people should be excited.

David: And who's drinking all my water to build the robots to do it right. I mean, it's like people are fed up with the scrap.

Alvaro: Yeah.

El'Bo: And that 16 page response was probably written by ai. Right.

Alvaro: It's, it's like, it's not, it's not a, it's

David: a

Alvaro: humor.

Try to

Alix: use a chat bot. I doubt it. Um,

David: somebody did. Somebody

Alix: does. Yeah, somebody does. Um, I think these are all really great examples and a really nice kind of note of focus to end on. 'cause I hear, what I'm also hearing is that when we get stuck in thinking in the abstract, um, and getting [00:53:00] overwhelmed and like letting it feel vague, uh, this kind of negative, um, energy and momentum of big tech companies, I think you then get.

Disempowered and people disconnect from a lot of it. But when you get specific about not just material conditions, but also opportunities, um, where things are moving vaguely and politically, where there are places to actually, to El'Bo's point, like meet other people that are working towards the same goals that like, and like touch grass, that feels, um, really important, um, to actually make change right now.

Um, because otherwise you just end up doom scrolling and kind of spinning your wheels.

David: The solution is gonna come in three dimensions. Uh, that's actually like something that, that an organizer reminded me the other day. The solution's gonna come in three dimensions, live our life in three dimensions, you know, um, an organized there too.

Alix: Yeah, I think this is great. I'm gonna jump in and see if we have questions. I saw some stuff coming through. We don't, we are o already over time, so I might just pull one. So tech lobbyists have millions slash billions of dollars to throw out making [00:54:00] governments bend to their will. What's our strongest counter currency?

Does anybody wanna take this one? I mean, I'm already feeling from the energy of these most recent responses, um, what you all think about this one. But counter currency, what do we have?

El'Bo: I'll go ahead and go simply, and then I'll let these guys dig deep into it. But the counter currency is people power.

It's people power. It's that simple. I used to be a guy that sidelined and was just like, oh my God, they don't ever do this. They don't ever do that. You know, and I had good reasons for feeling like that. But then when I joined CIDU and I got to actually see what the sausage was made of, one of the core things that they showed me right away is politicians are feeble.

Politicians are feeble. And I just gotta say that when we show up to the capitol and we're in our clad, uh, flannel, that one of the newspapers said about us, that, I mean, you know, it's the difference between your representative walking off and being like, Hey, I gotta run to this, or, okay, that sounds good.

[00:55:00] Call me. Let's meet, let's get some coffee. And when you understand that you can actually reach out to these people. They're just people just like you. It takes a lot of that down. And you know, you just show up with your crew though, because they respect numbers. But I'll leave it right there 'cause I can go on and on and on.

Interestingly enough, I was on a call just, uh, yesterday with some, with a rideshare group in Atlanta that is just getting started and they wanna accomplish some of the things that we have. So I'm in preacher mode because I was inspiring

David: them. It's awesome. For

El'Bo: two hours yesterday.

David: That's beautiful. That's so beautiful, man.

Yeah, I mean, I like, I fundamentally agree with El'Bo. I mean, that's the, I, and I love your point, like politicians are feeble. It just like at the state and local level, it just doesn't take much. Like show up a little bit. Right. Show up a little bit and it can make eight. A really, you know, freaking massive difference.

Politicians at the state and local level, they're afraid. They're afraid that tech companies are gonna come in, they're gonna spend a bunch of money against them, they're not gonna be able to keep their job. I don't know, [00:56:00] sometimes I think a lot of those fears are totally unwarranted, but that's seemingly where the fears are coming from.

But it also just doesn't take that many people to. Balance, you know, to just show up a little bit and to like remind people and to remind lawmakers that this is, this is really happening right there. You know, in people's lives, in people's lives, in their, in their districts. I also just don't wanna lose track of the importance of the labor movement and labor unions in this fight.

Right? I think that like we are just gonna need to find every mechanism of collective action that we can all the time that's gonna be essential to building this. I think what all of us agree is a new movement, a sort of a transformative movement, like the kind that ended the gilded age, like the kind that ended the great depression.

That's the sort of movement we need. We're gonna need every possible mechanism of collective power to do it. And granted. A lot of these technologies have been used and exploited and we talked about Amazon earlier, to squash unions actually to like an Uber, right, built out technologies to exercise control without being accountable through unions.

I [00:57:00] think that like, that's a heightens the importance of lawmakers and enforcers doing everything we can to fight for collective worker power and union power. So I always come back in Colorado to the Worker Protection Act, which is a law that the governor vetoed last year, which have made it easier for workers to unionize, which is just totally freaking astonishing.

The example I always give is, you know, uh, Minnesota was able to pull off something that looked like a general strike, right? In order to resist an ice insurgents, they shut down the economy, which is remarkable. They've got twice the union density of Colorado, and you know, it's in large part 'cause the governor here reviewed our Worker protection Act.

So I think that it's absolutely essential unions, collective power, all of those things, absolutely essential in fighting to hold tech accountable and also in holding fascism accountable too.

Alix: Amazing. Al anything to add before we close

Alvaro: out? Albo said it. People power. That's, that's what people have. That's the power they have.

David: Show up.

Alix: Show up. Yeah. Show up somewhere and get [00:58:00] focused on Show up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, cool. Care about

El'Bo: your neighbor, care about your community. Care about more than just your general circle. And understand that we're all rowing in the same boat. You know, if this thing sinks, it's not gonna be good for any of us, no matter where you are.

So, you know. What do, what do we like to say, man? A closed mouth doesn't get fed, so you gotta show up, you gotta make some noise, you gotta get involved. Um, I was talking with a representative just the other day and I was telling her about some problems that some the Tennessee driver's Union was facing, and she didn't understand that I was talking about Tennessee.

She's like, oh my God, y'all gotta tell somebody this is really happening. And I'm like, no, it's happening in Tennessee, not here because we're, we're busy addressing those things here, you know? And not that the guys in Tennessee aren't busy, they just don't have the type of support that we've been able to find here in Colorado.

So this is definitely a unique situation.

Alix: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. [00:59:00] This was fantastic. Thank you to the three of you for doing exactly what I was hoping. Thank you. You would do, um, it's like a wonderful 360 to sort of think about it, these issues from each of your vantage points. So thank you for sharing, also sharing some of these very specific anecdotes that I think get into the specific dynamics that are very useful for helping people understand what's going on, especially when you're in that kind of abstraction feeling.

Thank you to Kush Dev on our side, Marian Wellington and Zoe Crouch for putting this together. Um, and also you for joining. Thank you and uh, we will see you next time.

El'Bo: Thanks everybody. Bye. Have a good night. What kind of power? People power.

Alvaro: Amen.

Alix: Thank you so much to guests, El'Bo Awatt, David Seligman, and Alpha Oya for giving us really concrete examples of how we got into this mess and how big tech companies are taking advantage of it, but also some really hopeful directions for where we might go next. Thanks so much to Zoe Trout, Kalev and Marian Wellington from the [01:00:00] maybe team for producing and, uh, as ever, Georgie Yabu and Sarah Miles for producing on the audio feed.

Uh, and we will see you next week.

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