Marc Benioff’s turn to the Dark Side completes a frightening picture.
I haven’t written about it before because, as I admitted after the election, I was wrong about so much in American history. It doesn’t lean toward liberty, or anything else. It is what we make it, and all people are flawed. It’s democracy’s genius that it gives us the flexibility to change in the face of madness.
The history of America is a business story. Industries rise, they dominate, and they fall in generational arcs. They rule when they deliver productivity and prosperity. They fall when a better economic model takes its place.
Like oil, like manufacturing, and like utilities, computing came to power in 2008 when Americans saw the previous industry couldn’t deliver growth. Like railroads, like farming, the computer industry promised a grand new era, one open to all.
AI has made computing turn inward. Its leaders now see democracy as an impediment to their ambitions and frankly reject it. This is not new. Farmers did this through the slave power, railroads through their destruction of farmers. Utilities crushed railroads with regulation and manufacturers replaced regulation with mass production. Oil came to power when manufacturing couldn’t deliver growth, computing when oil couldn’t deliver it.
In all these cases, the new economic order was celebrated as a political triumph. Jefferson led the farmers. Lincoln led the railroad men. Theodore Roosevelt enabled regulated utilities and Franklin Roosevelt drove on manufacturers. Reagan became the symbol of oil’s power. It was only later we saw the dark side of all these “progressive” industrial achievements, after those industries turned on the people. It’s then that politics became a sideshow and political leaders disposable clowns. Millard Fillmore. Warren Harding. Donald Trump.
Benioff’s Dream
By that standard, the Age of AI shouldn’t be a surprise. It was, to me, because I spent my life buying the story that computing would be different, that it needed everyone to be educated, and comfortable, and free to succeed.
It’s the industry that has changed. Benioff’s Dream only has room for big machines that make big decisions. He insists they’ll be programmed by people of compassion and vision, but will they? We’ll be free when that work is done, he insists, eternally free and eternally young. His utopia is our dystopia.
The World of AI is not a beautiful world. It only has room for those few who control its shares. Benioff’s Dream doesn’t even include the armies of coders who built the platform on which AI rests.
Benioff’s Nightmare
AI may not even have room for Benioff. Salesforce.com ruled the world of SaaS. Its databases, built on open standards, were at the heart of the tech stack. At one time, and not long ago. Benioff was worth more than arch-rival Larry Ellison of Oracle, from whose proprietary loins the open Salesforce had sprung.
Now Ellison has left Benioff behind. AI is a game of huge numbers that hold unimaginable power. Ellison found his way into that world by building data centers whose business Benioff once helped build. Salesforce is not a Cloud Czar, it only rode on the coattails of czars like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Ellison has made Oracle a Cloud Czar. Ellison used Oracle as Musk used Tesla, as a cash flow machine that would make him a God.
The Cloud Czars don’t need Benioff anymore. The first thing AI means to do is replace custom database apps built by Salesforce with direct queries to ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Grok, and Gemini.
That’s what has turned Benioff’s politics. It’s not people who rule in the AI stack, or it’s not the team with the most skilled, educated people that rules there. It’s money, capital, and cash flow. AI systems are built by small teams, working from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days per week. It’s now about having one genius at the top, with a tiny team of scientific athletes dedicated to their glory, not a vast organized team of more modest talents.
In the AI world, you’re a superstar or you’re garbage. Benioff is becoming garbage. Salesforce is being disposed of, like so many companies in technology’s past, like Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment, and even once-omnipotent IBM.
My Dinner with Dennis
I have told this story many times before.
About 35 years ago I had dinner with Dennis Hayes. Back then, he was on top of the world. Hayes Microcomputer Products made the best modems out there, and modems were everything.
Dennis knew that would change. He told me that he had a plan to ride the wave. He told me he would ride it on the back of the phone companies, with something called the Integrated Services Digital Network, or ISDN. Hayes would use exclusive contracts with the carriers to sell billions of digital modems. He was already building them.
It didn’t happen. The carriers didn’t place the orders, and Hayes went under. Technology is a cruel, cruel business. Like Benioff, Hayes turned to the dark side.
If computing can destroy Hayes, it can destroy Benioff, and it can destroy you, too. Benioff’s turn is a symptom of software eating the world, and unless the monster is tamed, it will destroy us all.
What’s Next?
What can possibly replace computing at the top of our industrial world?
There are two candidates for that honor. One is renewable energy, green technology, because we need to achieve more than Net Zero if we’re to survive as a species, we need to become net negative, and in an all-fire hurry, or your grandchildren are doomed.
Back at the dawn of the COVID pandemic I wrote a short story called The Coffee Man. I imagined a Turtledove Machine, something that sucked energy right out of the air, that created Global Cooling. I saw it leading to a world of ice. Much as AI is leading to a world without men.
The second possibility is one my son is now exploring. Biochemistry. Our power to transform ourselves and our world through DNA is far beyond our power to understand through AI. The fortunes to be made through this transformation put those of AI to shame. They will be built, not on the backs of a few men, but on the backs of thousands, millions of dedicated scientists like my son, who will use AI as computing has used oil and manufacturing, possibly creating immortality, or something close to it.
Or maybe not.
Frankly I don’t know what will replace computing. I know I won’t be around long enough to see it. I’ve had my run, as Benioff has had his run. While he rejects freedom and democracy as not in his interest, I know these remain the only forces in the world that can deliver the flexibility we need to move forward.
