Obama, the 'internet president,' makes his return

When former President Barack Obama takes the stage tonight at the Democratic National Convention, he’ll address a party that has done a major about-face on its relationship with technology since he left office.

Hailed as the first “internet president” for his campaign’s embrace of then-nascent social media and blogs, Obama’s rise was inextricable from that of the digital landscape we now take for granted. Often, that connection was explicit: Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes spearheaded Obama’s digital campaign blitz in 2008 , and the Obama White House populated its new digital jobs with numerous executives hired straight from Silicon Valley.

By the end of his time in office, Obama aides like David Plouffe and Jay Carney were themselves taking high-powered jobs at Uber and Amazon, and what at first seemed like the forward-looking embrace of an up-and-coming industry came to look like a flagrant revolving door .

Today Obama’s techno-optimism seems almost unthinkable to the Democratic base. He contrasted Big Tech favorably with George W. Bush-era oil and defense giants, spinning it positively as an industry that offered tools for personal empowerment and a stronger democracy . Today, many Americans see social media companies more as sinister vehicles for social control, and the 2024 Democratic platform warns they could be a hazard to mental health and even democracy itself.

“Tech’s position in American life changed from being this optimistic, positive thing to something with very serious costs,” Marshall Kosloff, media fellow at the right-leaning tech think tank the Foundation for American Innovation and host of the podcast “The Realignment,” told DFD.

"We are never going to get back to Obama-era techno-optimism, because tech just became like anything else in corporate America," he continued.

President Joe Biden’s administration pivoted accordingly into pessimism about Big Tech (although he did make a huge investment in tech manufacturing, through the CHIPS and Science Act). His AI executive order raised major concerns about safety and discrimination, and his top antitrust enforcers have particularly targeted the wealthy multinational tech giants. Obama-style coziness with Big Tech now seems more a liability than an asset, especially among the party’s progressive left.

But there are also signs of a shift, as Biden hands the party over to Vice President Kamala Harris. A tech policy forum featuring industry leaders is convening at the DNC today, and as a former senator from California with roots in the Bay Area, Harris has connections to Silicon Valley that run deep.

Not to mention, it’s not 2008 anymore: There are new kinds of technology to talk about. As powerful artificial intelligence tools, a growing space industry and advances in quantum computing loom on the horizon, the occasion of Obama’s speech tonight might serve as a subtle nudge to Democrats who remember when their party was unmistakably the one associated with progress and the future.

Obama’s pitch as techno-optimist-in-chief was a key part of his ascent to the presidency. In November 2007 he announced that if elected he would appoint a then-newfangled “federal chief technology officer,” a promise that inspired a parade of tech industry and regulatory veterans to acclaim him as “a true 21st century president.” His first executive order made the government’s digital footprint more accessible and transparent, and his administration aggressively pursued a policy of net neutrality that favored new-school online content platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the interests of oh-so-20th-century internet service providers.

While the Biden administration has supported net neutrality, its relationship with Silicon Valley has been otherwise far more hostile. It’s simply a different digital world than the one that existed during Obama’s two terms, not to mention a different analog one: When Obama called for a national CTO in 2007 it was before the age of the smartphone, much less digitally-augmented fake information going viral, the replacement of traditional mass media with personalized social media echo chambers or encrypted hangouts for political extremism.

Harris has yet to reveal the face she would show to Silicon Valley as president, having not yet released a comprehensive policy platform . There are, however, signs that she could take a softer approach than the Biden administration.

While Harris has been outspoken in calling for the regulation of powerful AI systems , she also has longstanding connections to Silicon Valley as a Bay Area politician. Earlier this month she rallied tech leaders in San Francisco, with California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis telling the New York Times “It is more natural that she would — with that deeper understanding and those relationships — also have a different outlook than” Biden. (Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer who just took a leave of absence to help the campaign , is also her brother-in-law.)

“A lot of people in tech are optimistic about the opportunity for a reset with Harris, and that she's not coming in with perhaps the same antipathy towards tech as Biden,” Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of the pro-tech Chamber of Progress, told DFD. “There’s an opportunity with Harris to rebalance the policy conversation.”

Even if those wishes come true, given the current political climate, a hypothetical Harris administration is unlikely to be quite as entwined with the tech industry as Obama’s, much less engage in the full-on public bear hug of the 1990s .

Still, by appearing onstage tonight, the 44th president will serve as a living reminder of the time when Democrats unquestionably held the mantle of the party of America’s capital-f Future — a contrast Harris can play up against former President Donald Trump much more easily than her predecessor on the ticket could.

“I think there's going to be an opening for the tech wing of the Democratic Party … to say, hey, we are a very useful part of this coalition and you need us to achieve your actual goals,” FAI’s Kosloff said. “There's going to be an actual value add for tech that just wasn’t clear during the more populist moment, from 2015 to around 2023.”