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Welcome back to Hackwatch! This week you’re getting a bonus installment in lieu of our regular newsletter on top of the next installment of our Technobabble Defense series on Friday! But we had an opening for this week’s newsletter and I had something I’ve been mulling over that I thought would be fun to write up, so here we are.
A couple of weeks ago, I had an essay in The New Republic wading back into the abundance cinematic universe that laid out the nexus between the abundance ecosystem and the AI industry. If you want a full breakdown, you can read it here. But suffice it to say that there is quite a lot of overlap between abundance world and tech tycoons’ spheres of personal influence. Among some of the more notable ties: the author of Trump’s AI Action Plan was a featured speaker at the Abundance 2025 conference; Inclusive Abundance described AI buildout as one of the five core pillars of abundance work; and the Abundance Institute pushed for federal preemption to block state-level regulation of AI products.
[Ed. Note: If you want some music to listen to while you read, I’d suggest “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, “Everything Old is New Again” by Barenaked Ladies, “Souls in the Machine” by The Goo Goo Dolls, “The Wrong Direction” by Passenger, “Power of Gold” by Dan Fogelberg, or “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” by Tracy Chapman.]
Unsurprisingly, the piece was not especially popular among the acolytes of abundance. I was a little surprised to have provoked a response from Jerusalem Demsas over at The Argument, though. What struck me about what Demsas wrote is that while it was (fittingly for its pugilistic publication) quite argumentative, I don’t actually think it was in tension with my point.
This, in particular, is the relevant section:
“In a piece published earlier this week in The New Republic, anti-abundance writer Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argued that “The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem.” The piece itself meanders through a series of criticisms but its core argument is that abundance liberals — including this magazine — are too cozy with the AI industry.
There are many counter-arguments I could devote this column to: From the fact that, unlike housing in America’s most supply-constrained cities, developers are actually not having much trouble building data centers and simply do not need a YIMBY-like movement to help them, to the fact that the legislation that core abundance groups are working on have nothing to do with data centers.
But I think much of this confusion stems from a more fundamental disbelief that anyone could sincerely be motivated by a concern about the boring regulations that prevent the development of housing, transit, and clean energy. So let’s just start there.”
To start, I think it is a little odd that Demsas felt the need to get defensive about my calling out her publication, mostly because the only time I mentioned them, it was to say that they had published some good writing about the boondoggle-side of AI: “fledgling abundance magazine The Argument (itself frequently techno-optimist and replete with Silicon Valley funding from Arnold, Collison, Open Philanthropy, and Emergent Ventures) has published several good articles that scrutinize the more boondogglish side of Silicon Valley’s latest obsession.”
There are basically two parts of the point I make right there: 1) That The Argument leans strongly pro-techno optimist and was seeded by Silicon Valley grants; and 2) that despite those facts, they have done a good job at times of cutting through the hype when it comes to writing about AI, especially around the implications for our critical thinking ability. Is Demsas too close to the AI industry? Probably for my taste, but that’s orthogonal to the point at hand, which is that it is possible even for elements of the abundance crowd that are cozy with Big Tech to keep from lapsing into Silicon Valley sycophancy.
As for the framing of my piece, perhaps my meandering is why Demsas didn’t catch that I already addressed both of the counterarguments she offered. First, there is an obvious surge in data center NIMBYism, often described as such. That’s why tens of billions of dollars in data center construction have been blocked or delayed. Second, what counts as a “core” abundance group is somewhat subjective, but I would think that Inclusive Abundance, which literally framed AI as more important to abundance policy than transit in their own report, and the Federation for American Innovation, whose alum Michael Kratsios is running the White House Office of Science and Technology and whose Senior Fellow Dean Ball literally wrote the Trumpian book on AI buildout, would qualify. Oh and here’s FAI’s infrastructure director testifying to Congress about why data centers need to not be subjected to environmental review. But again, for more examples, see my piece in The New Republic.
The final explicit rebuttal that I would offer is that I have no issue at all believing that many people sincerely are devoted to YIMBYism. I do have some difficulty believing that Silicon Valley is uniquely beneficent (other industries are not pouring remotely as much money into funding abundance organizations) and that so many billionaires and tech companies are motivated primarily by their desire to lower the rents paid by working class Americans. There were two literal trade groups representing Big Tech companies that sponsored Abundance 2025: Chamber of Progress (members include a16z, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, OpenAI, Midjourney) and New American Industrial Alliance (members include Palantir, Anduril, a16z, Meta, and California Forever, the project for a billionaire-led techno-libertarian “charter city” between Sacramento and San Francisco). So do I believe that some people are all about housing? Absolutely. But is it plausible that everyone in the abundance ecosystem has no other motivations? No, they literally say they do. Like all the time.
More to the point, I had no role in inviting the author of Trump’s AI plan to be a featured speaker at their conference, or in Inclusive Abundance identifying AI as a priority, or in getting Ezra Klein to go on a bunch of podcasts to talk about how the book was about being pro-tech, or Klein and Thompson presenting abundance as the road to an AI-powered utopia in the intro to their book Abundance, etc. Like I’ve said before, I wish the abundance movement that existed was the one envisioned when you listen to Paul Williams or Ned Resnikoff where it is about residential zoning. But if Demsas wants it to be that, I think I’m less of a barrier than the people inside their tent who keep hawking AI.
I try to be precise when I’m critiquing abundance (or anything else, for that matter). The reason my criticism has not been about housing is that I broadly agree with them on a lot of the housing policy. I had no problem with residential YIMBYism, but the abundance rebrand transformed the movement into a political vehicle meant to deregulate large-scale development processes well beyond housing. Again, don’t take it from me: the Niskanen Center wrote a manifesto about how to create an abundance faction was part of a power struggle against progressive influence in the Democratic Party.
To her credit, Demsas did notice this issue, and implored “Don’t make abundance the moderate omnicause.” But abundance is an omnicause. The book Abundance is not limited to housing. From the first use of “abundance agenda” as a political rallying cry, it has included an array of policy areas (including, incidentally, medicine, which I think is actually one of the best candidates for an abundance approach because of the restrictive IP rights that create monopoly and stifle innovation, but that gets comparatively less attention, including in the book’s discussion of pharmaceuticals). It’s entirely possible that the version of abundance that Demsas wants to champion is all about housing affordability—I think she deserves props for taking Marc Andreessen to task over his hypocrisy here—but the real question is whether abundance as a movement is going to insist upon the importance of prioritizing solving the housing crisis, or whether it allows itself to be hijacked in the interest of Silicon Valley bigwigs like Andreessen. Right now, the housing purists are losing control of the coalition. (And notably opposition to exclusionary zoning way predates the modern “YIMBY” movement, see this article or read about this famous New Jersey Supreme Court case.)
There’s a very easy solution to the problem of abundance being deployed as a trojan horse for Silicon Valley capital investments: denounce it. Stop handing the conferences over to speakers from Nvidia and the Trump administration. Talk about why community input meetings and NIMBYism towards data centers is qualitatively different from blocking residential housing density. But right now, communities are making good use of the types of mechanisms abundance is attacking and showing exactly why they can be essential when the “building” in question is not for humans, but (the best “this is not all a bubble” case?) is being built to take jobs away from people.
Admittedly, arguing with me is a much lower lift.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible
Trump’s Fed Regulators Rewrite the History of the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse
Gas Prices Really Are Trump’s Fault, Just Not for the Reason People Think
The Spy-Tech Insider Running Homeland Security’s Biometric Dragnet
Data Centers in My Backyard with Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
Image credit: “New Amazon data center” by xcorex is licensed under CC BY 2.0.