Tina Nguyen is a Senior Reporter for The Verge and author of Regulator , covering the second Trump administration, political influencers, tech lobbying and Big Tech vs. Big Government.
Hello and welcome to Regulator. If you’re here via a link and would like to read more, The Verge is running a very good subscription sale this month: $4 for a month and $35 for the year, for full access to the entire site. That’s right: you can read about political horseshoe theory in action AND get our live coverage of the Apple iPhone 17 launch!
Last week, two conferences drew the attention of all of Washington’s policy nerds, though your excitement really depended on where you fell on the political spectrum. On the right, at the Westin DC Downtown: NatCon, a gathering of Trump officials and allies calling for the persecution of AI developers and the expulsion of the “insufficiently American.” On the left, at the Salamander Hotel on the waterfront: the Abundance Conference, whose annoyingly optimistic proponents envision an American techno-utopia, which could be realized if governments just stopped regulating so damn much.
Most journalists and attendees went to either one or the other — my report from NatCon is here, where I uncovered a brewing MAGA Butlerian jihad against Big Tech — but there were a few who were masochistic enough to try attending both. And one of those was Gaby Del Valle, a Verge policy reporter, who managed to catch the last day of NatCon before going to Abundance for a separate project. (Gaby is on book leave but, as she put it, came to DC “for the love of the game.”)
On her first day in town, as we were charging our phones in some hotel lobby, Gaby floated a theory: even though Abundance and NatCon were completely ideologically opposed to each other, the conferences were asking the exact same thing. “If Abundance is, like, We have all these people and we have to provide for them,” she proposed, “NatCon is like, We have these many resources and they are only for Americans — so who’s an American?”
We promised to check in with each other once we both recovered, and I guarantee you, this will be the only article in political news where both sides are truly represented. Before that, here’s the latest we’ve published…
This week at The Verge:
“Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring” Josh Dsieza’s latest feature is a deep dive into the Wikipedia moderator community’s fight to survive the rise of international authoritarianism.
“Sal Khan is hopeful that AI won’t destroy education”: The web education pioneer talks to guest host Hank Green for this week’s Decoder.
“The tech antitrust renaissance may already be over” It was nice while it lasted, but as Lauren Feiner reports, the courts are demonstrating an aversion to breaking up big companies like Google.
... continue reading