European MP Alexandra Geese says AI must serve people, not billionaires, while Europe resists tech bros, deregulation, and U.S.-style inequality.
Summary
Tech must serve people. Alexandra Geese, a German Green Party member of the European Parliament, delivers a clear warning: AI is not merely a technology; it is an infrastructure of power. The conversation exposes how U.S. tech billionaires sell deregulation as innovation while extracting public knowledge, exploiting creators, pressuring Europe to weaken protections, and accelerating a model that burns energy, water, jobs, and democracy. She makes the case for a people-centered European alternative rooted in privacy, worker dignity, public goods, renewable energy, universal healthcare, and democratic control. humanity, not billionaires, monopolies, surveillance capitalism, or authoritarian politics.
- Europe must reject the failed U.S. model that enriches elites while leaving working people without universal healthcare, stable jobs, affordable housing, or strong public infrastructure.
- Creators, journalists, artists, and publishers deserve protection and compensation when AI companies train on and monetize their work.
- Social media platforms must stop rewarding hate, racism, polarization, and violence through engagement-based algorithms.
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Progressive movements on both sides of the Atlantic must build common narratives around safe jobs, public schools, universal healthcare, climate action, online safety, and democratic technology.
The interview insists that regulation is not the enemy of innovation. Corporate theft is. A democratic society must decide what technology does, who benefits, and who pays the cost. Europe and the United States can build a shared progressive future only if people—not tech oligarchs—control the infrastructure shaping work, media, healthcare, energy, and democracy.
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Alexandra Geese’s message lands with the force of moral clarity: AI is not neutral, AI is not magic, and AI is not automatically progress. AI is an infrastructure of power. The question is not whether society will use artificial intelligence. The question is whether workers, creators, journalists, patients, students, and communities will control the technology—or whether a small group of billionaire tech bosses will use it to concentrate wealth, flatten labor, steal content, manipulate public discourse, and weaken democracy.
That frame matters because the dominant American tech narrative has already done real damage. Silicon Valley executives and their political allies keep repeating the same tired claim: regulation kills innovation. But what they call innovation often looks like extraction. They take journalists’ writing, artists’ music, actors’ work, local newspapers’ reporting, ordinary people’s data, and the knowledge built by society over generations. Then they package it, monetize it, and sell it back to the very people whose labor made it possible. That is not genius. That is theft at scale.
Geese makes that point with precision. Policymakers cannot stop at the philosophical question of whether AI can be “owned.” They must build enforceable structures that protect creators and confront power asymmetry. A local newspaper may know that a tech giant scraped its reporting, but one local newsroom cannot out-litigate Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, or any other giant with armies of lawyers. That is why democratic government must act. Markets do not correct this imbalance. Markets reward the predator unless the public sets rules.
Europe has already built a stronger foundation than the United States in several areas. The European Commission describes data protection as a fundamental right under EU law, with GDPR serving as a central pillar of that framework. The EU AI Act entered into force on August 1, 2024, and the European Commission presents it as a risk-based framework for artificial intelligence, with full application scheduled for August 2, 2026, alongside some earlier obligations. That does not make Europe perfect. Geese says Europe still struggles to define a full democratic vision for AI. But Europe at least recognizes that public rules, rights, and safeguards belong at the center of technological development.
The United States, by contrast, too often lets the billionaires write the rules and then calls the resulting chaos “freedom.” That has failed in healthcare, in public infrastructure, in housing, in labor protections, and now threatens to fail in technology. Geese exposes the fantasy sold to European elites: America has high productivity, powerful tech firms, glamorous innovation, and a model worth copying. But those elites do not visit the people working multiple jobs, skipping healthcare, drowning in rent, and living with collapsing public systems. They see Silicon Valley campuses, investor conferences, five-star hotels, and carefully curated success stories.
The reality tells a different story. OECD data show that the United States has a lower life expectancy than many wealthy peer nations, with the United States grouped below the 80-year threshold while many OECD countries exceed it. OECD working-hours data also shows American workers put in substantially more annual hours than German workers. So when elites brag about productivity, they often hide exploitation behind averages. Working people pay with time, health, family life, and community stability.
Geese’s critique of AI also connects directly to climate. Large language models consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, while data centers strain already fragile grids. The same corporations that tell governments to deregulate also demand public energy infrastructure, water resources, tax incentives, and favorable treatment. They privatize the gains and socialize the costs. That is the old capitalist trick in a new digital suit.
Germany’s renewable energy experience offers a useful counterpoint. Fraunhofer ISE reported that renewable sources covered more than 60 percent of German electricity consumption for the first time in 2024, with net public renewable electricity generation reaching 62.7 percent. That undermines right-wing claims that Germany “failed” because it invested in renewables. The actual challenge is not that renewable energy failed. The challenge is grid capacity, transmission, storage, and political will. That means society must invest in public infrastructure instead of letting fossil fuel interests and tech giants dictate energy policy.
The interview also makes an essential argument about democracy. Social media platforms amplify the most hateful, polarizing, violent, and racist content because engagement-based algorithms reward outrage. That is not an accident. It is a business model. If democracy depends on shared reality and civic dialogue, then platforms designed to maximize rage become anti-democratic infrastructure. Geese’s call for alternative social media platforms—spaces that protect creators, support real conversation, and stop handing discourse to monopoly platforms—deserves serious attention.
The progressive project must treat tech policy as economic, labor, climate, media, and democracy policy. AI will shape who works, who profits, who gets heard, who gets erased, who gets surveilled, and who controls public knowledge. That means progressives cannot leave the debate to venture capitalists, CEOs, lobbyists, and captured politicians.
The right answer is not technophobia. The answer is democratic control. AI can help medical research, improve energy efficiency, support engineering, and serve public goals. But society must choose smaller, targeted, accountable systems over extractive mega-models that devour the commons. Society must protect workers from displacement, creators from theft, children from manipulative platforms, and democracies from algorithmic chaos.
The United States and Europe need each other in this fight. Europe can show Americans that universal healthcare, public schools, stronger labor protections, privacy rules, and public-interest regulation are not fantasies. Americans can show Europe the power of grassroots organizing, multiracial coalitions, and movement politics. Together, progressive movements can reject a billionaire tech empire and build technology that serves ordinary people.
That is the real choice: AI as a weapon for oligarchy or AI as a tool for democracy. The answer must be people, planet, and public power.
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