Tech Legal Brief #14 – Positive News in the End Times
Some encouraging tech legal news in dark times.
“I hope everyone had a nice break. And welcome back to the end of the world”
So starts a recorded lecture by Jiang Xueqin given to high school students in Beijing. I think of Xueqin as China’s Jordan Peterson.
Xueqin teaches “secret history”, geopolitical strategy, and how to use game theory to make probable predictions about future events (Predictive History on Substack). He has recently achieved a meteoric rise of fame on social media, among other things for predicting in a lecture from May 2024 that 1) Trump would be re-elected, 2) go to war with Iran, and 3) lose the war against Iran with catastrophic consequences (link).
Xueqin’s lectures on YouTube and Substack posts are sweet candyfloss to the ears of conspiracy theorists and doomers. His claims should be consumed with a pinch of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism. There is a razor-thin edge between genius and insanity. Too much light is blinding; too much truth is maddening. Maddening and depressive as it is, Xueqin has an extraordinary and enviable ability to connect dots and poke at a deeper level of truth beneath the noise, even if his viewpoints are dystopian and sometimes deeply controversial.
When reading the daily stream of news, the only logical conclusion to draw must be that we are living through the end times of the Pax American world order. Those who were supposed to prevent this from happening are too busy humblebragging and virtue-signaling on LinkedIn or getting high on American endorphin on X. How will the war in Iran affect the US economy and the tech billionaires’ human-replacement-and-surveillance project, also known as AI? It will meet hard physical constraints and the stakes are extremely high.
My bold prediction for 2026 is that this year will not be “the year of the AI agent” – something boosters have predicted each year since 2023. Instead, the AI bubble pops. If not this year, then in 2027. Sooner or later, it is bound to happen, not gradually, but suddenly and violently. This shock will give tech billionaires and average Trump voters alike a much-needed reality check, and vindicate tech ethicists like myself. The hype and expectations surrounding AI are simply not sustainable, and neither are the energy demands and environmental strains. If my prediction holds true, I don’t expect the same level of online fame as Xueqin, but some credit must be due.
Anyways, onto the positive news of today’s post. The EU Parliament has very sensibly voted to protect copyrighted work and its creative sector in the age of AI. A new opinion piece in the award-winning publication AdExchanger admits that the targeted advertisement industry has made some serious mistakes. A new survey of privacy practitioners in the EU shows what kind of measures that could be adopted to revise the GDPR in a meaningful way (contrary to the Digital Omnibus proposal). Meta currently faces a lawsuit in California and an investigation in the UK after a Swedish newspaper exposed creepy privacy violations related to its AI smart glasses. Last, but not least, it looks like the controversial chat control proposal is finally approaching its grave.
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