E/acc Cancel Culture?
Recently, Anthropic announced their half-hearted support for the amended SB 1047, California's anti-AI bill. As a response to this, the following tweet went viral.
I'll give you my gut reaction. I didn't like it. Of course I strongly disagree with Anthropic’s position and have articulated my opposition to SB 1047 from the start.
But when I saw this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the purity spirals that happen with many political issues. When social points are rewarded for persecution, whether it starts rightfully or wrongfully, it can really easily end in scapegoating people who did nothing wrong.
But I didn't find any way to word my reaction in a justifiable response. There’s a clear cause and effect here. Readers of this blog will know that I believe in economics and I believe in incentives. I think that in general the incentive should be not to support legislation like this. As Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan put it, “Your API customers are actively paying attention to how decelerationist your policy people make you.”
Garry's position I entirely endorse. There should be a direct link from the use of a company's product and the effect that company's political policies have on their ecosystem as a whole. The thing that I want to emphasize is that these incentives should be applied in specific and useful ways.
Here are a few examples of effective targets of boycotts or ostracization:
Whole companies such as Anthropic
Legislators such as Scott Wiener
Activists such as Dan Hendrycks
Funders such as Open Philanthropy/Dustin Moskovitz
Here are a few examples of ineffective targets:
People trying to stay out of commenting on politics
Anons
People posting on social media with no actual power
The biggest moral and strategic gray zone is dealing with employees of a company such as Anthropic. I've seen these company dynamics up close. There is no consensus position. People within these companies disagree, both on the facts and on the moral priorities. There is no deterministic procedure for settling these disagreements. And employees are often justified in prioritizing contributions to their work over taking a public political stand. So I would be extremely hesitant to be any more granular about people or groups at Anthropic other than pointing at their official positions as a whole company.
I definitely see the temptation of punishing those can be seen as contributing towards an entity, Anthropic, which as a whole is participating in a regulatory capture strategy. But there is a weight to these kinds of pressure campaigns that can easily backfire, which I’ve seen all too frequently as an observer of politics. Even if you disagree with me about this specific instance, I urge you to consider purity spirals past from an outsider’s lens.