I don’t know if Jon Stewart is listening to his persnickety, dim-witted critics, but his Monday-night hosting stints on “The Daily Show” are gradually evolving. No longer is he trying to achieve a state of Maximal Lampoon Equilibrium; the days of mocking Joe Biden and Donald Trump in equal measure are over. Nor is he trying to heal the world with comedy by proposing chuckle-ready solutions to immensely complex geopolitical conflicts.
No amount of media training, it seems, can keep a tech titan from saying the insulting part out loud.
Instead, the “The Daily Show” features new (and better) targets, and new goals, too. In his latest episode, Stewart set his sights on the tech industry and the harm it inflicts upon most Americans. If clowning around has a system of ethics, Stewart abided by its sacred first commandment: Deride powerful people who do great harm to the majority. To wit, deride or die!
Highlighting Monday night’s installment was a lengthy interview with Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. During the discussion, Stewart revealed that Apple had asked him not to talk to her when his previous show and podcast were overseen by the company.
In a segment about AI, Stewart sighed: “We’ve been through technological advances before and they have all promised a utopian life without drudgery. And the reality is, they come for our jobs.”
The tech moguls, of course, beg to differ. Stewart lined up clip after clip of cocksure and clueless CEOs promising to deliver redemption for the species. AI, they implied, will solve our most intractable problems. AI will cure diseases and solve climate change. AI will be our benign assistant in the labor of human perfection.
No amount of media training, it seems, can keep a tech titan from saying the insulting part out loud. The CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, likened AI technologies to “labor-replacing tools.”
“Did that guy,” Stewart screamed, “just call us tools?”
Another CEO, Suumit Shah, of Dukaan, conceded that AI’s implications for workers — many of which he had just laid off — are “brutal, if you think like a, uh, human.”
But the highlight of the show, and maybe the season so far, was the interview with Khan. Stewart’s interviews this season have been uneven at best. Policy-oriented interviews are incredibly difficult to pull off on comedy shows (HBO’s Bill Maher, I think, is probably the most skilled practitioner of this complex craft).
Why is it so hard? The guests are often long-winded wonks and not always camera ready. The audiences, for their part, expect laughs at every turn. They don’t receive them because the wonks aren’t professional comedians like Stewart. The time constraints on these segments usually result in superficial discourse served over a cold bed of clenched, studio-audience silence.
But Stewart interviewed Khan expertly. He granted her some 25 minutes to help viewers understand what she does and why it is so important. The manner in which monopolies, like Amazon, hurt both consumers and sellers was clearly explicated. Some small businesses, Khan relayed, are yielding 50% of their earnings to Amazon. (Seizing the moment, Stewart described its chairman, Jeff Bezos, as “a jacked Lex Luther type.”)
Stewart asked, “Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”
After noting that tech companies out-lawyer the FTC by a ratio of 10 to 1, Khan reminded us that “monopolies harm Americans in all sorts of ways.” The hands-off, “wait and see” approach that characterized the government’s treatment of social media companies in the aughts, she warned, should not be applied to AI. In other words, the government must regulate AI aggressively. Only in this way can it protect its citizens — and maybe the earth itself —from the boundless avarice of Silicon Valley.
After mentioning that Apple had discouraged him from speaking to Khan, Stewart asked, “Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”
Khan’s response was clear and astute (professors and public intellectuals, please take note — this is how you share your expertise with laypersons):
“I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies. Going back all the way to the founding, there was a recognition that in the same way that you need the Constitution to create checks and balances in our political sphere, you also needed the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to safeguard against concentration of economic power. Because you don’t want an autocrat of trade in the same way that you don’t want a monarch.”
So score one for Comedy Central and “The Daily Show,” which finally recognized that it’s better to mock would-be autocrats than to achieve Lampoon Equilibrium. Comedy can’t save democracy, but it can help identify its enemies.
Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University.