Avoidance

In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the “faith ecosystem” – think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support.

The former CEO’s career pivot is taking place as the US tech industry returns to the political realm as a major revenue stream. Some of its most prominent present-day leaders have funded Donald Trump’s re-election and renewed their pursuit of government contracts as the second Trump administration has revitalized religious conservatism in Washington DC.

Now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology (who’s largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110m. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.

At the tail end of 2023 I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how the U.S. government, for the first time ever, had openly acknowledged that U.S. broadband had a rich history of race and class discrimination.

Data had shown for decades how giant regional phone and cable monopolies had not only refused to upgrade poor and minority communities to better broadband (despite untold billions in taxpayer subsidies), reporters found they actually charged poor minority people higher prices for shittier service.

Why? One, because broadband deployment discrimination mirrors structural discrimination in other sectors (like electrical power). And because a generation of unchecked corruption and corporate consolidation had hollowed out U.S. regulators like a cheap Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.

Velvet Goldmine (1998) dir. Todd Haynes