Obama, the ‘internet president,’ makes his return

When former President Barack Obama takes the stage 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.