{"id":600333,"date":"2026-08-30T05:54:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T05:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/600333\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T05:54:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T05:54:31","slug":"the-viral-leftist-teens-of-campaign-2020-work-for-openai-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/600333\/","title":{"rendered":"The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n On May 25, 2019, the Twitter account belonging to the long-retired Alaska senator Mike Gravel posted<\/a>, \u201cThe wealthiest 10% of Americans control 70% of the nation\u2019s total wealth – and almost everyone telling you inequality doesn\u2019t \u2018really matter\u2019 comes from that bracket.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Gravel, who had just turned 89, didn\u2019t write the post himself. It was the work of a pair of teenagers, Henry Williams<\/a> and David Oks<\/a>, who had recruited Gravel to lend his name and his online presence to an outsider, leftist presidential campaign \u2014 a stunt that became an internet phenomenon, channeling youthful 21st century anti-establishment messages through the persona of someone old enough to have helped expose the Pentagon Papers.\n <\/p>\n

\n This month, Williams and Oks posted a different set of messages on X: they announced they were going to work on OpenAI\u2019s Strategic Futures team \u201cto help prepare the world for transformative AI,\u201d as Oks put it<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Seven years after denouncing the destructive effects of inequality and runaway corporate power, the duo formerly known as the \u201cGravel Teens\u201d has signed on with a Silicon Valley behemoth with a valuation of more than $850 billion and a goal of fundamentally upending labor and everyday life. In 2025, OpenAI\u2019s billionaire co-founder, Sam Altman, predicted that AI technology meant that certain types of jobs like customer service will be \u201ctotally, totally gone.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Williams and Oks will be working, they wrote, under Dean W. Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a veteran of the right-wing think-tank world. Ball described Strategic Futures as a place where his team would \u201cthink about the long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Ball said he was impressed with Oks\u2019 and Williams\u2019 analytical acumen, and hired them specifically as a duo.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think David and Henry are a fantastically capable pair of writer and editor,\u201d Ball said. \u201cI had some conversations with them that made me really excited, and thus far, it\u2019s played out wonderfully. They have hit the ground running. They are dedicated, and they care quite a lot about what they\u2019re doing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Dean<\/p>\n

\n How did progressive gadflies go from attempting to push mainstream Democratic politics to the left to joining a polarizing AI company under the guidance of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative like Ball? Alongside a small army of software engineers and researchers, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring writers, philosophers, ethicists and physicists at the same speed they\u2019re ingesting rare books. \u201cI hire smart people, that\u2019s what it comes down to. I hire the right people for the job,\u201d Ball said. \u201cI don\u2019t care about their politics.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The Gravel Teens originally grabbed attention by taking over Gravel\u2019s social media accounts and creating a campaign website with a detailed slate of progressive policy proposals. The effort was never meant to compete for the presidency, they said, but rather to pillory what they saw as the ineffective, focus-grouped messaging beloved by centrist Democrats and to channel the frustration many on the left had into something approaching real change.\n <\/p>\n

\n They used the irony-soaked and often disaffected language of lefty Twitter and podcasts like \u201cChapo Trap House\u201d to try and embarrass mainstream politicians. \u201c[I]f you want a vision of the future under Cory Booker, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. and every once in a while it stops for an inspirational lecture on how we should never stop dreaming,\u201d one post from May 2019 read<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n But they also spoke of their earnest desire to make the world better. \u201c\u2018Chapo Trap House\u2019 is great catharsis. But it doesn\u2019t make me happy. It doesn\u2019t make me feel like anything can change,\u201d Williams told the New York Times in 2019<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n When Gravel\u2019s candidacy ended, Oks, Williams and their friend Henry Magowan set up the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit meant to serve as a counterweight to conservative educational sites like PragerU. The Gravel Institute created videos hosted by a lineup of progressive figures like former labor secretary Robert Reich, who discussed the myths of the minimum wage discourse, and People\u2019s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig, who talked about oil company profits and gas prices. (Oks and Williams provided written responses through an OpenAI spokesperson. Magowan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)\n <\/p>\n

\"Oks<\/p>\n

\n Despite several hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, recurring financial support from Patreon subscribers and a full production studio in Brooklyn, the Gravel Institute was short-lived. Several left-wing luminaries the institute had touted as speakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cornel West, never appeared in any videos.\n <\/p>\n

\n Tymon Brown, the Gravel Institute\u2019s head of production, said that the nonprofit\u2019s dissolution was never explained to him or the rest of the organization. He said the institute fired its entire staff save for one animator in April of 2022; the last video posted on its YouTube page is from August 2022. \u201cWe were still paying the rent for the studio, but over the course of a weekend it went from everything feeling lush to, all of a sudden, things are dire and they decided to lay everybody off,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThey caught lightning in a bottle with this political campaign and then this media company,\u201d said Alex Dooley, who says he worked with Oks and Williams on both the presidential campaign and the Gravel Institute. \u201cBut then they had their eyes opened to where the real power in the world was and they followed the money. Institutional venture capital investors have a lot more of it than poor leftists.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n When asked about the Gravel Institute\u2019s abrupt closure, as well as accusations of hypocrisy and their motives, Oks and Williams said in a joint statement that \u201cWe have always acted from earnest conviction and our best estimation of how we could better the world. It has become clear that contributing to mitigating the risk of misaligned superintelligence and ensuring transformative AI benefits all of humanity is the most valuable work that we can do towards that end.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Brown said that Williams and Oks ignored requests for payment from people who had done work for the institute before they officially shuttered operations in the summer of 2023. According to financial records, the institute continued receiving donations via the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue until September 2024. Oks and Williams, through an OpenAI spokesperson, denied withholding vendor payments and said the organization had stopped collecting donations when operations stopped.\n <\/p>\n

\"As<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI got the sense that they enjoyed feeling like they were at the vanguard of something,\u201d Brown said, \u201cthat they enjoyed being able to become educated in something, and they were willing to do the work as long as it didn\u2019t spook them.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Nathan Tankus, a journalist and economics commentator who founded the media company Notes on the Crises, became friends with Oks and Williams in their Gravel era. \u201cThe politics of the Gravel Institute was itself a partially ironic performance for them,\u201d he said. \u201cSo getting rid of it didn\u2019t cost them anything they valued.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n After the Gravel Institute closed, both Oks and Williams entrenched themselves in business and, eventually, Silicon Valley. After graduating from Columbia University, Williams worked at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland and an AI startup in San Francisco. He was also a fellow at Interact, a nonprofit aimed at connecting \u201cyoung technologists\u201d to the wider tech industry. As late as January 2023, Williams\u2019 LinkedIn page was headlined by his work at the Gravel Institute. By 2025, his profile did not mention the nonprofit or his work there.\n <\/p>\n

\n Oks, who attended Oxford University, worked for a hedge fund and became a journalist and writer. In 2022, he started writing for a San Francisco-based outlet called Palladium and eventually became a correspondent. Palladium is a quarterly publication whose founders were active in online neo-reactionary circles.\n <\/p>\n

\"Both<\/p>\n

\n In 2025, Oks and Williams both joined the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as \u201ca16z.\u201d It\u2019s one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most influential institutions, and in recent years the firm\u2019s billionaire co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has become a powerful voice in reactionary politics.\n <\/p>\n

\n In 2023, Andreessen wrote what he called \u201cThe Techno-Optimist Manifesto<\/a>\u201d which argued in favor of tech advancing as fast as possible with minimal intervention from the government. \u201cWe believe in accelerationism \u2013 the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development \u2013 to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTo ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cEffective accelerationism\u201d\u2014 known in tech circles as \u201ce\/acc\u201d\u2014 is a popular concept among tech promoters like Andreessen, who think that advanced AI models will unleash a new utopian epoch and that therefore the only morally acceptable mission is to make it happen as soon as possible.\n <\/p>\n

\n Andreessen also has crusaded against what he considered liberal suppression of social media activity, including Twitter\u2019s ban of Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which he called \u201cillegal censorship\u201d after Trump\u2019s 2024 election win. Back in 2021, when Twitter removed Trump\u2019s account, the Gravel account posted, \u201cYou can believe both that tech companies have far too much power and that Trump getting banned is a very good thing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Oks and Williams joined a16z\u2019s New Media team in 2025. A16z New Media is an organization that bills itself as \u201ca single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brandbuilding [sic], expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Both Williams and Oks seem to share their employers\u2019 enthusiasm for the transformative power of AI. In a Substack post from February titled \u201cWhy I\u2019m not worried about AI job loss,\u201d Oks wrote that he believes AI \u201cwill end up being at least as important as the discovery of electricity or the steam engine, and there\u2019s a good chance it\u2019s the most important thing that humans ever invent\u201d but that the \u201cactual impacts of AI in the real world will be a lot slower and more uneven\u201d than its doomiest prophets seem to think. \u201cEven in the outsourced customer service sector, the lowest-hanging fruit on the automation tree, we\u2019re just not yet seeing mass layoffs due to AI,\u201d Oks wrote. (Bloomberg reported last month<\/a> that there have been widespread customer service center layoffs due to AI.)\n <\/p>\n

\n Oks was also upbeat about the current \u201ccyborg\u201d era of work, where humans and AI tools are supposed to work in tandem to boost productivity.\n <\/p>\n

\"OpenAI's<\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s an argument for AI as an empowering, rather than destructive, force \u2014 a pivot the industry has taken this year after previously hyping its technology\u2019s ability to bring about apocalyptic levels of disruption. Along with Altman\u2019s predictions that AI would wipe out sectors of employment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May 2025<\/a> that AI had the potential to destroy 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs and increase unemployment to 20%.\n <\/p>\n

\n In recent months, Altman and Amodei have offered more measured rhetoric about the impact that AI will have on the labor force. Altman even went so far as to say he was \u201cpretty wrong on the social and economic implications\u201d in a May 2026 interview with a bank CEO. Instead, both men have focused on rehabilitating AI\u2019s image into something that exists in harmony with humanity. Hiring figures like Oks and Williams, then, is an attempt to project a more optimistic vision of AI\u2019s future that transcends political affiliations, according to Ball.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that our current political map, our current political dividing lines in partisan American politics bolt on very well to AI at all,\u201d Ball said. \u201cI think the politics of AI are not going to fall along traditional partisan lines, or might create new types of dividing lines.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n But where Ball sees the advent of AI as something bigger than politics, Tankus sees two young men with more personal ambitions. He said that Williams and Oks remind him of the French philosopher Michel Foucault\u2019s idea that the neoliberal world order has created the \u201centrepreneur of the self\u201d where people are more likely to act like businesses than members of society.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cPeople are just supposed to shape themselves to the needs of the market and David and Henry have done that very well,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the \u2018market\u2019 is just a contrived symbol in this dance; what we\u2019re really talking about is shaping themselves to the needs of power.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Correction:
\n An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote from a former Gravel presidential campaign and Gravel Institute employee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On May 25, 2019, the Twitter account belonging to the long-retired Alaska senator Mike Gravel posted, \u201cThe wealthiest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,49305,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-600333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ctt","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}