The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve

Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.

“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.

The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy

David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.

“The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious,” Agus, a medical oncologist, recalls by phone from Los Angeles. “It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.”

Tech billionaires have raised more than $340m to defeat Prop 40, a one-time 5% wealth tax that will fund healthcare and education

Tech billionaires have been dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the fight against a wealth tax in California. They’ve raised more than $340m, and the campaign they’re funding is spending more than $1m a day to defeat the measure, according to state financial disclosures.

With the election less than a month away, those funds are being spent at a stepped-up pace. During the first 19 days of September, according to the most recent campaign filings, the opposition campaign plowed through at least $21.2m to fight the billionaire tax – surpassing $1m per day. Voters are being inundated with robotexts, mailers and advertisements that warn a tax on billionaires would “expose all Californians to higher taxes”, as one ad reads.