I needed to talk to Dave Karpf.
My dreams have been haunted by images of chatbots devouring our polity, our country, and our brains. Are we so deep into the world of Blade Runner—minus the cool flying cars—that the Tyrells of our age can program a robot to seduce our votes into tech fascism?
The good news is that Karpf, a professional and avocational worrier, isn’t too worried about that. The bad news? He’s deeply concerned about lower-tech disenfranchisement.
For instance:
Polling sites cut, early voting choked off
Legitimate votes tossed after the fact
A Supreme Court that won’t stop any of it
Billionaire money, already reactivated
Even possibly gun-toting J-6ers at polling places
Karpf is a political scientist at George Washington University, author of two books on digital organizing written as the art and theory of finding votes online evolved in what can only be called real time. His new book,Vaporware, Inc. How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present, is out in January. Here’s why you should pre-order it.
I needed to speak to Dave because of what I’ve started calling the Karpf Conjecture, a simple thesis that explains how our media ecosystem is collapsing in a way very few people seem to recognize, let alone understand.
Ten years ago, reaching the political class meant posting on Twitter, while standard voter outreach lived on Facebook. Karpf’s core insight is that those audiences didn’t voluntarily relocate when the platforms degraded—they thinned out and were quietly replaced by chatbots, bot networks, and algorithmic noise.
Dave put my sci-fi panic about my particular version of democratic collapse to rest, at least for this cycle. The bad news? He replaced it with a far more grounded set of structural horrors. In an era like this, our best hope isn’t fewer anxieties. It’s learning how to worry better.
Some other Karpfisms:
1. On why the internet’s audience didn’t relocate, it disappeared. “It seems like the audience has both fractured and then also gotten replaced with just either chatbots or, you know, swarms of things that are clicking on links and sharing up links.”
2. On what should actually scare you this election. Ranked in order: attacks on whether legally cast ballots get counted, then billionaire spending, then AI-generated misinformation, in that order. “That is deeply anti-democratic, but we have a Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to care.”
3. On why broken tech promises never cost anything. “When Elon Musk or Sam Altman... makes a bold promise and it doesn’t come true, they don’t have to give the money back.” He calls it conditional futurism: make the promise, collect the investment it unlocks, pay nothing when the promise quietly dies.
4. On Sam Altman’s actual credentials. “Sam Altman doesn’t know shit about physics. He also doesn’t really know shit about coding.” Said plainly, without the usual hedge.
5. On why ten years is the sweet spot for a con. “Fifty years is science fictional. Nobody could imagine 2020 in the 1970s. Whereas if you’re saying ten years out, nobody can really imagine ten years out, but everybody imagines that they can imagine it.”
6. On what a hundred billion dollars in debt actually buys you. “When you owe a million dollars, it’s your problem. When you owe billions, it’s the bank’s problem.”
7. On money getting mistaken for genius. “Once you have all of those billions of dollars, then you’ve decided you know something that the rest of the world doesn’t, and you have all the money to create havoc for everyone else.”
8. On Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman living under different laws. Swartz downloaded JSTOR and the government tried to send him to prison for 35 years. “Sam Altman’s company is like, yeah, no, we’re just gonna take everything, maybe destroy some rare books along the way. Ha ha ha, what are you gonna do about it. And it’s worth trillions.”
9. On who Silicon Valley actually wanted to be, before the money changed the answer. “Everybody wants to be Woz, because that’s the genius who built this stuff.” Then Y Combinator picked Sam Altman over Aaron Swartz, and the whole industry followed.
10. On the only honest instruction left for a campaign trying to find voters. “The old rule still follows: you gotta meet voters where they are. And then the question is, okay, where the hell are they?”
Dave Karpf’s newsletter is The Future Now and Then, on Beehiiv. Pre-order Vaporware Inc.: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present.
