BFCTC.
Listen, the world is a scary place right now. Our news outlets are increasingly privately owned and consolidated, and public funding for broadcast channels many of us rely on is constantly being cut or threatened. Censorship is real, and what editors are allowing out the door can differ significantly from what reporters are writing in so many areas. This is driving more and more people to Substack, Drop Site, independent small news outlets, and, of course, social media, which is... terrifying. Governments all over the world invest millions of dollars in propaganda and influence campaigns designed to bolster public opinion of their actions. So how do we know what to believe?
And if an increasingly small and extraordinarily wealthy group of people owns and/or influences so much of the media we consume, moves in the same circles as the people making decisions about our government and economy, and is increasingly connected to the companies controlling the AI infrastructure that scrapes enormous amounts of our data and aggregates responses to our search queries based on all of this information, then what does that mean for us in terms of determining what's real, what's not, and what we need to do to come together?
I don't think you need to believe in some grand coordinated conspiracy to be concerned about this. Concentrated power doesn't have to be coordinated to be consequential. When the same relatively small group of people has a beyond-outsized ability to influence what information gets funded, distributed, amplified, summarized, and ultimately believed, that's a problem.
This was bubbling up for me as I listened to NPR and Leila Fadel speaking to Bernie Sanders' political advisor Faiz Shakir, who is also the executive director of More Perfect Union. She was asking about the future of the Democratic Party, and how democratic socialists and other progressive candidates are going to appeal to and sway more moderate Democrats in order to defeat Republicans in upcoming election cycles, retake the House and Senate, and so on and so forth. Regardless of your political leanings, her framing was skipping over something important. DSA candidates are gaining traction, and in many cases winning, because much of what they're talking about represents what voters want. And when they win or lose, often by much smaller margins than pre-election polling predicted in either direction, we should all be talking about the spend against them. Enormous amounts of money are spent trying to defeat candidates who threaten powerful economic interests. And who is spending that money? Many of the same extraordinarily wealthy people and interests who already hold disproportionate economic and political power (and increasingly consolidated control over our media and social media channels).
Which is how I get from Bernie Sanders and campaign spending to AI, and back to my internal constant conversation, that you are now intimately privy to, about who gets to own things, who gets to make decisions, and what happens when we allow enormous amounts of power to accumulate without asking what the public is entitled to in return.
We see OpenAI and Anthropic making significant monetary commitments to nonprofits and philanthropy while also talking openly about the reality that AI is on track to impact a massive share, something like 40%, of jobs worldwide, and about the need to support workers and communities through that transition. I work adjacent to philanthropy every day and see what those dollars make possible, particularly for communities and organizations that markets and government consistently fail to prioritize. I want AI companies investing in nonprofits, workforce development, community resilience, experimentation, and all of the other things we're going to need as this technology reshapes the economy. In fact, we need much more of that, please. AND, philanthropy should not be the only mechanism we can imagine for communities to participate in the upside of what is being built.
And this is where I am back now to my Bernie Sanders sovereign wealth fund stan, because many of the ideas in his proposed legislation aren't actually that far-fetched if we, the people, decide they're the right way forward. Maybe 50% public ownership of major AI companies is the right answer and maybe it isn't, but the underlying idea that the public could have a direct financial stake and resulting benefit from the enormous wealth created by AI is worth taking seriously. This type of profit sharing model exists in Alaska with their Permanent Fund and Macao’s Wealth Partaking Scheme, and in community reinvestment vs. direct to individual payments via Singapore’s GIC/Temasek/reserves and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global.
There is an immediate version of this ownership question playing out in communities right now.
We often think about companies as B2B, B2G, or B2C, or B2B2C. B2B is business to business, so think a pure profit-driven CRM like HubSpot, or a company like AidKit, where I get to see firsthand what it looks like when a for-profit company is built around serving organizations doing public benefit work and continually investing in software and features intended to make that work more accessible. Yes, shout out to my workplace, but also an important distinction here: being a for-profit company (or a nonprofit for that matter) does not automatically tell you what a company values, who benefits from what it builds, or what it chooses to do with the resources it generates. But I digress. Back to my alphabet soup: B2G is business to government, the consulting services of the world for one, B2C is business to consumer, so any clothing or product company that you, the consumer, buy from directly. And then B2B2C is business to business to consumer, where one business provides a product or service through an intermediary business to reach the final consumer. Think DoorDash, Instacart, or OpenTable.
So how do we think about AI? This model is weird. We the people are paying Anthropic and OpenAI for access to systems whose value is built on enormous bodies of human, aka. "us"-created, knowledge, data, writing, art, code, ideas, feedback, inputs, and creativity. We contribute more inputs and feedback as we use them, they learn how to make increasingly useful products, and then they sell access to those products back to us. So is that business from customer to customer? BFCTC.
And maybe that's part of why I keep coming back to this question of ownership. Not because philanthropy is bad or companies shouldn't get to decide where they invest their own money, but because philanthropy is only one way for the wealth created by AI to move back into communities, and there are other models we should be exploring at the same time.
Data centers coming to town? Hard to stomach, but the buildout is already happening at enormous scale. It might not be in Menomonie, Wisconsin or El Paso, Texas, but they are being built, and in many poor, under-resourced, and rural areas, it's happening faster than local organizing can prevent or meaningfully shape.
Brookings recently called what's happening an "infrastructure wealth gap." Investors financing data center projects capture most of the long-term upside, while the communities providing the land, electricity, water, infrastructure, and approvals are often left absorbing mostly negative impact against meager long term tax earnings. But all of those things investors and companies need to stand up these new data centers are actually community leverage. Technology companies need places to build their centers and the enormous amounts of power, water, permits, infrastructure, cooperation from local and state governments, and communities willing to host them. Communities have something incredibly valuable to negotiate with, before any deal is inked.
Brookings calls this a "shared prosperity" model, and moves the conversation beyond philanthropic investment into ownership and wealth building. They propose communities co-investing in data center real estate, putting equity into community endowments and empowering community members to share in the financial returns when those projects succeed. So yes, this definitely is not the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, but it is a start.
If communities are being asked to absorb massive energy and water demands, infrastructure needs, land use, and environmental consequences, why shouldn't those communities be organizing around what they want in return, including an opportunity to co-profit from the wealth being generated there? And how different might these negotiations look if residents, local government, community organizations, schools, utilities, workforce organizations, and economic development groups had a playbook before a project was already halfway through the approval process? What resources does the project require from the community? What are the short and long-term costs? What tax incentives or public infrastructure is the company receiving? How many of the promised jobs are permanent? What happens to water and utility rates? What protections need to be negotiated? And is there a structure through which the community can participate financially in the value this project creates over the next 10, 20, or 30 years?
This is happening, in somewhat of an ad hoc manner, right now, through community benefit agreements. Many of us have heard of them in some capacity, but to my knowledge, we haven’t seen one that aggregates community power in such a way that it actually yields long term meaningful ownership results.
This is where philanthropy could have an incredibly powerful role. Fund the organizers, lawyers, financial advisors, independent economic and environmental analysis, and technical assistance that allow a small or rural community to sit across the table from a trillion-dollar company with its own experts. Fund the development of the playbook so the 100th community negotiating a data center deal doesn't have to start from zero because the first 99 did. Fund the infrastructure that makes community equity or revenue sharing administratively possible. There is an enormous difference between philanthropy being the only way communities share in the wealth created by AI and philanthropy helping communities build the capacity to negotiate for their own durable share of that wealth.
And if you are already working on this, have figured out safe and secure ways to distribute dividends or shared revenue to community members, know how one of these ownership structures could work, are sitting in a community where a data center is being proposed, or want to help build this playbook, my meeting link is here.
Maybe someday we decide that a national sovereign wealth fund is the way to go and that taxpayers should own 50% of major AI companies. In the meantime, data centers are being proposed and built right now, communities have leverage right now, and deals are being negotiated right now that will determine who benefits from this infrastructure for decades. If we're going to build this future together, communities should be written into the upside from the beginning.
