Wired Leader on the Tech Figures Gracing Movie Screens: “They’re United By a Lack of Humanity”

Tech and entertainment have been converging for a while now, but they’re really hitting the bullseye this film season.

OpenAI takes center stage in upcoming Neon awards hopeful Artificial, Aaron Sorkin went back to the Zuckerberg well in The Social Reckoning and Alex Gibney was right on the money with Elon Musk influence in Musk. And then there’s that little niche picture about Elizabeth Holmes.

Perched watching it all? Wired and its global editorial director Katie Drummond. The editor and her publication have been breaking some of the biggest stories and plunging into the deepest dives on tech and politics in recent years; check out their recent bombshell on a massive ICE data leak. Lately they’re going in on entertainment too, with both their reporting (and Drummond and contributing editor Zoë Schiffer) featured prominently in Musk. The magazine also recently did a cover story with Nathan Fielder, co-director of said You Can See Everything, with Drummond interviewing the enigmatic auteur.

As the mag holds the first Wired World Fair in Miami this week and examines the future via personalities like the heads of Colossal and Hugging Face and even Nas (“we want to give people a little joy”) we sat down with Drummond just several days before the midterms to talk about how she sees the tech issues affecting media, Hollywood and the larger world.

Congrats on your starring role in Musk; [laughs] you can now add movie star to your extensive dossier. Seriously though, your reporting is so rich and so essential to this film. How do you think it and the movie can change how we view Elon Musk?

Most people have a sense that Elon Musk is a bad dude, and they know how wealthy he is, how much power he’s amassed, and he’s already not someone people trust. But I think what the film does so well is it really gets granular in speaking to his character. When you hear from someone like (ex) Justine Musk or (another ex) Ashley St. Clair or the actual cofounder of Tesla, for instance. Or when it speaks very specifically about what his companies have accomplished and what they have not — Tesla and self-driving cars and where that technology went lethally wrong. So as much as people say “I have a sense of Elon Musk,” what this movie does so effectively is building a case for Elon Musk the fraud, Elon Musk the con man, Elon Musk the mythmaker, using a specificity I don’t think we see enough of.

He’s so good at spinning and diverting attention and making you think he’s not what he actually is — he’s Teflon. Do you think he’ll escape this too, even after it airs widely on HBO in a few months?

I wish I could give you a more optimistic answer — that there’s a viable path to his wings being clipped, to him being held accountable in a meaningful way, to seeing that behind the Tesla flying car there is a lot of Machiavellian behavior. He has the keys to so much and the financial power that’s unmatched that it’s hard to imagine how we unravel ourselves from him. And it’s also difficult in even getting people to see the film because of the suppression we’ve seen, the censorship we’ve seen. But the journalism, every little bit, matters, and so this movie counts for a lot.

He also seems to be paying very close attention.

Absolutely. Journalism gets under his skin. He is incredibly bothered by this movie. He is bothered by Wired all the time. We have enough X posts from him to do a marketing campaign. To me that’s just more evidence that it matters. We should be getting under Elon Musk’s skin all the time.

Let’s pivot to You Can See Everything. Holmes is also someone who’s tried to pull the wool over our eyes. Are you happy that there’s this revival of interest in her?

I love the movie. It’s such great fun. But from talking to Nathan I think he views the film as much more of an interrogation of human nature, of honesty and deception, and how do we relate interpersonally in that way. And that’s not all there is here. The bottom line for anyone seeing the movie to remember is that Elizabeth Holmes is a fraud. She is a criminal and she had her hand on the steering wheel of that company and of conduct that costs people their lives. And as fascinating as these interrogations of truth and honesty and deception are I do think it’s important for anyone going to see the movie to remember just how malevolent an actor she was when she was running Theranos. And I think that can get a little lost as you’re watching the movie.

Something about both her and Billy seem reflective of a larger mindset — in a way she’s a stand-in for Silicon Valley and the VC world. This notion of you just come up with an idea, and even if it’s not actually true, even if it’s just “theoretically” true, as she basically admits in the film, it all doesn’t matter. It’s as good as being true. Or if you have a bad idea, even that bad idea cost lives and livelihoods, you just come back with the next one. Does she seem representative to you too?

I’ve been thinking about this because there is this VC culture in Silicon Valley that Elizabeth was very much a part of. You obfuscate, you exaggerate, you even lie — you fake it til you make it. And you do it all because you believe in your ideas and you want to get magazine covers and a billion-dollar valuation. It’s a story you’re selling. A story about what’s possible, not necessarily about what’s true in the moment. And Billy and Elizabeth are what happens when that culture spins to its nadir. When it hits rock bottom, you have grift and grifters. And their story in an example of taking it to the nth degree in really dangerous and damaging ways.

There was almost this unspoken vibe in Silicon Valley — you could feel it during the trial especially — to say that Elizabeth Homes is singular. That “this is one bad apple, and now we’ve gotten rid of her.” But she doesn’t seem that unique to me. She’s maybe just someone who got caught and disciplined.

I don’t think VC culture and grift need to be synonymous. But given how the culture is premised on big promises and big checks, I certainly think it can be a magnet for it. As it was with Elizabeth Holmes.

There’s that Wayne Gretzky line, which goes something to the effect of “there are no jerks in the NHL, we left them all behind in the minor leagues.” And I always thought, really? Is that true?

And that’s where you can connect Holmes to Elon Musk. She was drafted to the NHL and he’s, like, the CEO of the NHL.

He’s Connor McDavid.

You know? He’s running the NHL. And Alex Gibney makes a very compelling case he’s a con artist and a liar.

It’s interesting to see them in parallel, Musk and Holmes. Because they both tell stories very hucksterishly, stories that really aren’t very true. And yet one is a trillionaire and the other is picking daisies at a minimum-security facility in Texas. I’ve been trying after watching these films to really see the difference.

I think some of it is luck, some of it is gender. Some of it is, she picked a very deeply personal area, the intimate realm of human health. And Elon Musk built his career in a different away. I do think she’s a criminal and a fraud, but she’s also a young blue-eyed blond-haired woman, she drops out of college at 19, she makes a lot of mistakes and does terrible things. But I still think it’s different to operate in that world when you’re a woman than when you’re a man, I just do. Men get away with a lot more.

I know you haven’t seen The Social Reckoning or Artificial yet, but let’s extend out to our third and fourth movie characters this season, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. I mean, talk about selling a story…

Mark Zuckerberg is notoriously not thinking about how to make the world a better place. Yet he had this whole thing about connecting the world. It was a farce. They were selling our ads — they were collecting our data and selling ads. And similarly, Sam Altman selling ChatGPT as a technology that’s going to change our lives so we all have three-day workweeks.

Universal Basic Income, what billionaire doesn’t like giving his money away to all of us!

It’s just such a lie. Really they have callous disregard for human beings, and if they extract a little more profit by telling that lie they appear ready and willing to do that. That’s one reason I think they’re so compelling to Hollywood right now. These are real people, with great influence, who are villainous. And I think there’s a desire to understand these people better, to dig into their character.

I feel like one thing they have in common is that tech used to be about selling us a product. Sure, there was a lot of marketing and a lot of ways to ensnare us. But Steve Jobs with the Mac or the iPhone was ultimately trying to sell us a product. Now every one of these tech moguls make us the product. Now they’re selling us.

Absolutely. These are not Steve Jobs-ian figures anymore up there unveiling a beautiful phone on stage. That’s not what’s happening. They’re all united by a shared lack of humanity in every possible respect. And looking at humans as data, as cogs, as a product, means that you don’t think about your responsibility to them. To the 12-year-old old who’s getting bullied on Instagram or the self-driving feature that’s not ready for primetime. You don’t think about the people having psychologically damaging conversations with your product that ends in suicide, or makes people unable to communicate or learn.

I will say it does feel like the awareness of this is so much higher, even in just the past few months. I don’t know if it was Hugging Face or something else, but we seem to have turned a corner. I mean even look at the campaigning this election season and how much traction anti-data center ads got.

I do think public disdain and distrust of these executives is higher than it’s ever been. You see this disillusionment in those grassroots data center protests. They’re interesting because they’re a physical manifestation.

Like that David Jolly line about the “physical metaphor for how the power has shifted.”

I think that’s exactly what they are. And this public fury is reaching a boiling point. The question is how that translates into adoption. Because as much as everyone is angry, we’re still using the products — we still go to ChatGPT for recipe advice, we still follow Instagram feeds, we even do a Google search and we get an AI overview. It’s a weird juxtaposition.

It’s all a little crazy because I don’t think we feel much joy when we use them.

When social media came up these companies sold a good story and those products felt fun to use. And then we learned some lessons and continue to learn lessons and now I think that’s baked in to how we think about AI; that distrust was there from the beginning. Also I don’t think those companies tell good stories. What kind of story is it when you’re warning us that we may all die in ten years, or the tech might take all of or jobs? That’s a bad story!

I mean, they think it’s a good story! Theres a real disconnect between what they think will move us and what we actually want to hear. Or if it is what we might enjoy hearing it’s just obvious nonsense, like we’ll all sit under a tree and not work and pursue our hobbies all day long.

The problem of course a lot of it foisted on us, like AI Overview, or an employer mandating their employees use the product. That’s why we need government go come in and regulate. I am optimistic there are not only Democrats but some Republicans who are willing to break with Donald Trump, populists like Josh Hawley. But the regulatory process is flawed and it moves slowly, as we know. And companies don’t. They also of course won’t regulate themselves as Donald Trump seems to want them to.

I was struck by that Anthropic leak from a few weeks ago about their self-regulation plan — it was something like, “we only need to stop developing a model if it will cause a billion dollars in losses and 50 deaths.” “50.” How exactly are you supposed to prove that?! It was such a self-own that they don’t want regulation at all.

Anthropic is such a difficult company to parse. They come out so strongly in favor of regulations and position themselves so deliberately as a careful company but it’s really difficult to ascertain how much of what Dario says is marketing and how much is what he really thinks. I hope that if they go public we can at least understand them more. But the jury is still really out if they practice what they preach or they preach what they preach because it makes for good optics.

OK, let’s do a speed round on some of these companies and execs. Who’s more likely to be around and powerful in five years, Elon Musk or Sam Altman?

Elon Musk.

Why?

He has his hands in so many things. Sam Altman’s company could go under.

Not a believer in the IPO?

I think it’s a real open question if the company as we know it will continue to exist in a year.

So I guess now I’ll know what you say about Altman or Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, people poke a lot of holes in Meta but it’s important to remember this is a massive global company that has made serious progress on AI too.

What’s an AI company we’re not paying enough attention to?

I think just what’s happening in China. What they’re doing with open-source models where they basically reverse engineer closed American model s and give them away for free is an incredible threat to these companies.

One more reason to take Meta seriously as, unlike every other big American firm, they seem to get the appeal of open-source. Alright, so what’s the biggest tech story we’re not paying attention to now?

I don’t think the average person reading The New York Times is paying enough attention to AI’s ability to detect software bugs and hackers’ ability to exploit them.

So, PHP.

Yes. But also the tip of the iceberg. I don’t think people understand how precarious our infrastructure is. The internet as we know it could go down or just go away.

Which sounds great in a Miles Klee sort of way – until we realize aviation, health care and banking all rely on it.

Exactly.

Tell me a little about the Wired World Fair. I have to say, I got a contact high reading the program. You have people talking to dolphins. You look at what the future will be like in 2099 via the new Blade Runner series creators. You have robots. You have Nas.

The idea for the fair came out of really thinking about the fact that most publications’ events are really boring. Ours included. You watch someone get on stage and do an interview, you have your hummus-and-vegetable wrap, you have more people on stage, then you have a glass of wine and go home. It’s so copy-and-paste. And we think we have more of a sense of humor. As much as the news we cover is dystopian, we want to have fun and so have fun. So we want to give people a little joy and optimism, bring that side of the magazine to life.

I mean what’s the point of following tech if it’s just going to be 24-hour bleakness? We all began to care about this space because we were attracted to its sense of possibility.

There are a lot of battles to fight and many things to be angry and scared about but how are we going to have those fights if we can’t get through the day? If we don’t have ideas about a better future? We need that sometimes too.