On the bright, clear morning of Nov. 5 in Washington, D.C., the anti-fascist hordes gather near the base of the Washington Monument. Many are gray haired and kind of frail looking; few are wearing all black, and almost none are masked. Some dance around in inflatable animal costumes, and a contingent dressed as handmaids in dark-red robes and white bonnets carry signs that read “Shame.”
Milling through the crowd near a stage on the south side of the monument is Sunsara Taylor, exuding the slightly frantic air of someone who’s just arrived at her own party. Taylor is a leader and co-founder of Refuse Fascism, the group that organized today’s protest and the march through the streets of the capital that will follow. If you’re thinking it might be an unnerving moment to be the most visible representative of an organization that spells out its anti-fascist intentions right there in its name, you wouldn’t be wrong.
In late September, about six weeks before the protest at the Washington Monument and two weeks after the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration released a National Security Presidential Memorandum it claimed was intended to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence. The memo, known as NSPM-7, laid the blame for Kirk’s killing, as well as other occurrences — including a shooting at an ICE facility in Texas, a supposed spate of “anti-police” riots, and attempts on the lives of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump himself — on “violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’”
Here at the Washington Monument, they look somewhat less fearsome than advertised.
NSPM-7 is hardly the only example of the administration blaming a host of evils both real and imagined on anti-fascism, or “antifa.” There have been executive orders, a televised roundtable discussion at the White House, congressional hearings, and countless media appearances during which the president, his Cabinet members, staff, and surrogates have conjured the phantom menace of antifa as the greatest threat to American freedom and security. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in early January, the administration immediately labeled the unarmed mother a “domestic terrorist,” and the FBI began probing her past of so-called activist ties.
“It’s a strange time,” Taylor tells me. “That they’re seizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to further demonize and criminalize any opposition is totally out of the fascist playbook. The fact that the stakes just went higher doesn’t make us less determined. It makes us more determined.”
Taylor has dark-brown hair and owlish glasses, but she’s more fiery than bookish. We’re standing about 20 yards from a podium where, in the next hour, several speakers will address the rally, including National Organization of Women President Kim Villanueva; Michael Fanone, an ex-police officer who was attacked by pro-Trump rioters while defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; and Taylor herself. The crowd today will grow to somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people, decent numbers for midday on a Wednesday, but not exactly what Taylor was hoping for.
“We were aiming for hundreds of thousands or millions,” she says. “No Kings showed there’s that reservoir of people.”
Sunsara Taylor (right, with Michelle Xai) is a leader and co-founder of Refuse Fascism.Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
In mid-October, more than 2,500 coordinated No Kings rallies drew an estimated 7 million nationwide, and the vibe today — simultaneously festive and angry — echoes those events. But there are important differences.
For one, while No Kings’ turnout was impressive, its somewhat hazy goals — electing more Democrats in the 2026 midterms, promoting future rallies — struck some as insufficient. Refuse Fascism, on the other hand, has a clear, easily articulated aim, which is chanted by the attendees today and plastered everywhere including the orange T-shirts Taylor and most of the group’s volunteers wear: “Trump Must Go Now!” Today’s events are a launch for what Refuse Fascism’s leaders envision as a persistent siege of the nation’s capital featuring near-daily protests, which they hope will create a political earthquake that leads to Trump’s impeachment, resignation, or removal via the 25th Amendment.
“There’s no other solution than driving this regime from power nonviolently,” says Sam Goldman, who’s the emcee today and also hosts Refuse Fascism’s podcast. “No Kings didn’t have that demand.”
There’s something else that makes Refuse Fascism unique, which is a little harder to discern at first. When Taylor takes the stage, she opens by condemning the administration’s recent trampling of the rule of law, efforts to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights, and war on immigrants. Then comes a line you might miss if you’re not paying attention.
“The revolutionary leader that I follow, the architect of the new communism, Bob Avakian, has been warning of the rise of fascism in this country for decades,” she says. “If only people had listened.”
Refuse Fascism was first launched in late 2016, in part by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group still active today that’s sometimes known as the RCP or the RevComs. Avakian, a former 1960s radical, is the RCP’s enigmatic 82-year-old founder and leader. Depending on who you talk to, the RCP is either the vanguard party that will one day lead the proletarian overthrow of the U.S. government, or it’s a moribund cult of leftist cranks grafting onto progressive causes in order to attract new recruits. In turn, Refuse Fascism’s diehards believe its RCP roots provide its leaders with the vision and audacity to label Trump a fascist and demand his removal. Detractors see the group’s connection to the RevComs as an albatross around its neck, hampering its ambitious agenda. Of course, the truth is likely not so binary.
Bob Avakian (pictured in 2014), who founded the Revolutionary Communist Party, has ties to Refuse Racism.Courtesy of The Bob Avakian Institute“You don’t have to be a communist, a revolutionary, a follower of Bob Avakian, or even someone who’s engaged his work to see there are horrific atrocities being carried out by Trump,” Taylor says. “Your vision of the future may be different than what I want, but none of our visions are going to happen if we don’t come together to prevent a fascist America.”
IT’D BE EASY TO DISMISS Refuse Fascism’s goals as unrealistic — and many do — but their strategy has worked before. The group’s leaders frequently cite the Arab Spring revolutions as well as protests in South Korea that resulted in the removal of two presidents during the past decade. As recently as December, mass demonstrations in Bulgaria led to the fall of the government there. But in all of those cases, overwhelming numbers were required. Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at Harvard who has studied protest movements, formulated that if a nonviolent movement can draw 3.5 percent of the population, it’s likely to succeed. In the U.S., that translates to around 12 million people. No Kings’ numbers may provide hope for Refuse Fascism, but scaling up has challenges.
“How do you get the millions who came out for a one-day Saturday protest to come to the nation’s capital again and again?” Goldman asks.
The administration’s continued fearmongering about anti-fascism may be depressing participation. Victor Rivera, executive director of Beyond the Ballot, a Gen Z-led group that partnered with Refuse Fascism for the Nov. 5 protest, has noticed a number of young people support their goals but won’t share their names or contact info.
“There’s definitely a chilling effect,” he says. “Ordinary people are a little scared to exercise their constitutional rights.”
Refuse Fascism doesn’t conform to many of the shadowy antifa stereotypes. It’s aboveground with a well-designed website and active social media accounts. When the group organizes a rally, permits are procured. Supporters don’t arrive in so-called black-bloc formation. During the speeches at the Washington Monument, nearly every speaker emphasizes a commitment to nonviolence.
“The irony for us is that some of the groups who call themselves antifa actually have been attacking Refuse Fascism over the years,” says Andy Zee, another Refuse Fascism co-founder and leader. “All we can do is be true to our principles.”
Refuse Fascism began agitating to remove Trump from office before he was even inaugurated the first time. After 2016, the group organized its own protests and consistently showed up at others’. The group’s persistence attracted attention along with public support from, among others, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D, Gloria Steinem, and Alex Winter.
Members of the Revolutionary Communist Party march from the South End to Boston Common during May Day in Boston, May 1, 1980.Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesOnce Biden won in 2020, the group was largely mothballed, though it kept running its website and podcast. When Trump returned to office, Refuse Fascism came roaring back, and as the litany of his abuses of power swelled, their warnings began to look prescient.
Taylor and Zee both credit Avakian. As Zee puts it to me the week after the D.C. rally, “There isn’t another organization that has the analysis that this is a fascist regime, it’s consolidating very rapidly, that you can’t count on the normal processes of how this country is governed to redress this. Bob Avakian made that analysis. There wouldn’t have been a Refuse Fascism without that analysis.”
Avakian rarely makes public appearances these days or gives interviews, but he’s been a prolific writer, publishing more than a dozen books. In the 1960s, Avakian was active in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society and worked alongside the Black Panthers. He founded the RCP in 1975, and by 1976, an FBI report labeled them “a threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude.” After getting arrested at a protest of Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 meeting with then-President Jimmy Carter, Avakian was charged with felony assault of a police officer. The following year, he fled the country and applied for political asylum in France. That application was denied, and although the charges were eventually dropped, Avakian has lived in a sort of self-imposed semi-exile ever since. (I made multiple requests to interview Avakian and was told by his publisher that Avakian appreciated the interest but was unavailable.)
The RCP claims Avakian has synthesized a new, more scientific version of communism that represents nothing less than a “whole new framework for human emancipation.” He believes the country’s bitter partisan politics could soon create the conditions for a communist revolution led by the RevComs.
Refuse Fascism’s ties to the RevComs aren’t some deep, dark secret I’ve uncovered. Avakian features prominently on Refuse Fascism’s website. At one point during the Nov. 5 rally, one speaker, Noche Diaz, talks passionately about Avakian’s significance and the discomfort it causes other activists: “There’s people who say, ‘Oh, the RevComs, Bob Avakian, don’t work with them. They’re scary. They have a motive.’ I’ll tell you our motive: We’re going to defeat fascism.”
The issue some on the far left have with Avakian isn’t so much his ideas or motives, which overlap those of many communist organizations, but rather the way the RevComs deify him. The party’s website calls Avakian “the most important political thinker and leader in the world today,” and declares that “being a communist today means following Bob Avakian and the new path he has forged.”
Activists with RevComs held the protest near MacArthur Park in December 2024 ahead of President-elect Trump’s planned wave of migrant deportations.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesSeveral socialist and communist organizers I speak to are dismissive of the RCP. “The RCP, as a group, is somewhere between a sect and a cult,” says Max Elbaum, a longtime Marxist organizer and author of the book Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. “Most of the left just ignores them.” As another veteran of the radical left puts it, “A lot of leftists tend to view rank-and-file members more generously, but in terms of the organization as a whole, there’s an avowed cult of personality around Bob Avakian.”
Zee has heard this criticism before. “People say ‘It’s a cult. You just worship him.’ Nobody worships him. That’s in violation of everything he’s had to say. It’s not about worship. It’s about objectively making an analysis, then acting on that analysis, testing it in practice the way any good scientist would.”
When I ask Taylor about the cult-of-personality charges, she doesn’t exactly deny them: “There was a cult around Obama. There’s a cult around Bernie. The only reason people get freaked out that there’s promotion of Bob Avakian is because he’s not of this system.”
Avakian himself, in a memoir published in 2005, recalls being pressed by someone who once asked him, “’Is there a personality cult around Bob Avakian?’” he writes. “And I replied: ‘I certainly hope so — we’ve been working very hard to create one.’” His point was that having a charismatic, visionary leader “is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Not all of Refuse Fascism’s leaders are RevComs like Taylor and Zee.
“I’m not a follower of Bob Avakian,” Goldman says. “That doesn’t mean I don’t respect the 30 years of warning against the rise of fascism. We need a lot more of that.”
Although Refuse Fascism’s leaders are upfront about their ties to Avakian and the RevComs, they can get touchy about it.
“How much of this article is going to be about Bob Avakian and the RevComs?” Zee asks. “I’m not hesitating to answer because there’s nothing nefarious. Everything is aboveboard.”
Their sensitivities are understandable. Refuse Fascism has sometimes been portrayed as part of a bait-and-switch being pulled on Trump-hating progressives to lure them into the cult of Bob. It’s not that. The Refuse Fascism organizers I meet are sincere in their desperation to oust Trump. Those who are RevComs mostly come off as smart, well-meaning, and sensible, as long as they’re not talking about Avakian.
Refuse Fascism protestors hold a rally around the Washington Monument on November 5, 2025.Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty ImagesThe question for Refuse Fascism is whether ties to Avakian are scaring off potential allies. Beyond the Ballot’s Rivera is convinced it has an impact.
“It did give us some pause,” he says. “We definitely don’t support everything they stand for, but on their main mission of combating the Trump administration, we share that goal.”
Fanone says that when Zee reached out to him this fall to ask if he’d work with Refuse Fascism, he agreed to for pragmatic reasons. “If you ask probably 75 or 80 percent of volunteers at these events, they don’t even know who the fuck Bob Avakian is. I literally just learned about Bob Avakian yesterday,” he says. “Listen, dude, some of these guys are a little strange. But they’re trying. They’re making tremendous sacrifices, standing out in the hot and cold all day, holding a fucking sign while the world walks past and looks at you maybe a half-step above a homeless person. But they’re willing to because they believe in what they’re doing.”
Zee acknowledges that Refuse Fascism’s connection to the RCP has been an ongoing concern. “I get calls all the time from people saying, ‘We could work with you — you’ve just got to dissociate from the RevComs.’”
In early December, Taylor posts a video to her Instagram account, decrying what she sees as a “concerted wrecking campaign against Refuse Fascism.” She describes “a cabal of haters and opportunists” trash-talking the organization, vilifying Avakian and the RevComs. She concedes it’s having an effect. Several people recently told her they’re “going to take a step back” from working with Refuse Fascism.
Everyone I speak to with Refuse Fascism endorse the organization’s big-tent approach to countering Trump. “Uniting all who can be united” is the phrase that’s repeated frequently. And certainly, Refuse Fascism’s more radical, more confrontational approach resonates for many frustrated progressives. So, if you believe they’re right about Trump and serious about getting rid of him, should their peculiar affection for an aging communist radical really matter?
IN MID-NOVEMBER, REFUSE FASCISM THEATRICALLY unspooled a roll of yellow crime-scene tape outside of the White House for the roughly 250 people there to hold. Zee tells me, “We didn’t have quite the number of people we needed.”
On Dec. 13, they try it again. The numbers are about the same. When Taylor addresses the crowd in the early evening, she’s dressed again in the orange T-shirt she wore at the Washington Monument the previous month, but this time it’s pulled over a heavy coat protecting against the encroaching winter chill.
“We do not have enough people right now — we know this,” she tells the crowd. Still, she believes in the strategy, believes in the movement, and has faith Refuse Fascism is showing people the best way, the only way, to defeat Trump’s fascist regime. In the coming weeks, as more evidence of the administration’s lawlessness and despotism piles up — the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the brazen killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis — Refuse Fascism will stage or join more protests, hoping to build the critical mass needed to finally achieve the long-sought goal spelled out on Taylor’s shirt.
As she tells the crowd in D.C., “There’s no guarantee we can win, but it is guaranteed that the biggest chance we have is directly, positively affected by the fact that we have been out here and we will continue to be out here.”
The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy
On Jan. 11, 1994, I drove to UCLA’s Royce Hall to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver the keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. I was in the early stages of building Intertainer, which would become one of the first video-on-demand companies. The 2,000 people crowded into that auditorium did not know it, but they were crossing a threshold. The roster of speakers read like a who’s who of industrial power: TCI’s John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, Sony’s Michael Schulhof, Barry Diller of QVC. These were among the richest and most commanding figures in American communications. Today, their combined force and fortunes are a rounding error beside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreessen. The world the Hollywood moguls walked back out into would not, in any meaningful sense, be the world they had left.
Gore’s UCLA speech now reads like a confident moment in the early‑Clinton fantasia of managed modernization: the assumption that a lightly guided market, properly “incentivized,” could be coaxed into building a new civic commons. He framed the whole project as a public utility constructed with private capital, insisting that “the nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment.” What is striking, in retrospect, is not the technophilia but the blithe certainty that “competition” would safeguard pluralism and access, that state‑designed market rules would prevent the emergence of bottlenecks and private tollbooths. The actual trajectory of the internet — toward a stack dominated at each layer by a handful of firms from carriers to platforms to ad brokers — renders the scene almost allegorical: an administration hymning competition as the guarantor of openness while midwifing, in practice, the consolidated, quasi‑monopolistic order that would eventually narrow and privatize the very public sphere it imagined itself to be creating.
For 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, Americans had trusted that science and technology would bind the nation together, just as railroads and the telegraph had once compressed its continental distances. The historian John P. Diggins observed that “whereas the very nature of politics in America implied division and conflict, science was seen as bringing forth cohesion and consensus.” That faith was about to be tested to destruction.
Within two years, Gore and Newt Gingrich collaborated to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and buried inside it was a provision — Section 230 — that would prove more consequential than anything else in the bill. It granted the new platforms a liability shield unavailable to any other business in America: immunity from responsibility for the content their users generated, moderated, or amplified. The effect was to hand the architects of the digital age a license to build without obligation. Welcome to the Wild West; the platforms own the sheriff.
What followed was an era of rapacious accumulation. In 1994, the largest company in America by market capitalization was Exxon, valued at $34 billion. Today, Google is worth $3.7 trillion. And when Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, flanked by the very technocratic elite whose fortunes had grown beyond all precedent, the possibility loomed that the preceding 10 years was crystallizing into a name: techno-fascism — an authoritarian, corporatist order in which a narrow caste of technocratic elites deploys digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, intensify surveillance, and erode democratic accountability, all while presenting their dominion as the neutral application of expertise.
For the past decade I have written about the almost theological divide between two competing creeds. The gospel of nostalgia promises to “make America great again” — its default logic being that the America of the 1950s, when white men’s assumptions went unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or queer individuals, was a more stable and legible world worth recovering. The gospel of progress, as Andreessen has written, holds that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” Its default logic is simpler: stop complaining. Flat wages, rising social media–induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet — perhaps, but at least we have iPhones. But the philosopher Antonio Gramsci had foreseen this dialectic in 1930: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.”
After the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022, Thiel called for a party that could unite “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”— a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump’s second administration: Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state. By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump. The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.
The Copernican Moment
A deep unsettlement runs beneath our society today. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, we are now displacing the human from the center of consciousness. New discoveries about cognition in other animals and organisms — octopuses dreaming, bees counting, trees retaining memory of drought — suggest, as Michael Pollan has written, that thought and feeling are not human monopolies but properties of life itself. The first Copernican revolution humbled our astronomy; the second threatens to humble our very being.
Yet the revelation carries its twin anxiety. If mind is no longer our exclusive inheritance, what becomes of that inheritance when machines begin to mimic it? Artificial intelligence poses not merely a technical challenge but a metaphysical one. It asks whether consciousness can exist without vulnerability — without the pulse and jeopardy of a life that can be lost. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us that the brain evolved to serve the body, that consciousness begins in feeling. Machines, however elaborate, know no hunger, no pain, no desire. To be conscious in the human sense is to participate in necessity — to be held by one’s own fate.
The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics — the imaginative labor of collective destiny — has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.
This interregnum, then, is not a pause but a rupture — a suspended time in which institutions still stand yet no longer persuade, in which the future arrives in forms no one quite intended. What began for my generation as the optimistic dream of a communications revolution has matured into a general condition of American life: a digital oligarchy adrift between orders, armed with enormous power but uncertain whom, or what, it serves. Some of us glimpsed the terrible risk when it was still only a risk — that the principles of kleptocracy would become America’s own. That grim vision is now arriving, in real time, in the person of Trump. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, “The brazenness of the self-enrichment now underway resembles nothing from any earlier White House, but rather the corruption of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial state.” And the techno-fascist oligarchs are at the trough, waiting to be fed.
The Age of Surveillance and Simulation
The first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state. What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.
By the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit. A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed. Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door. The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work. What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly, a panopticon of self-restraint.
Into this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers. Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information — tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life. Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes. The point was not simply that we were being watched, but that we were being rendered legible — sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us. As Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:
It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It’s a public space — you don’t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn’t record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition — and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?
We are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Anthropic drew them first. The company refused to allow its systems to be turned on the American public in the name of security and declined to let the Pentagon wire its AI into autonomous weapons capable of identifying and killing without human authorization. To the Defense Department, accustomed to purchasing compliance along with contracts, the idea that a vendor might set moral limits on military use was borderline insubordinate. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. President Trump, on Truth Social, called the company “radical woke” and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Anthropic had been, in effect, blacklisted for conscience.
What happened next revealed something important about the moral landscape of the AI industry. OpenAI, which had publicly positioned itself as sharing Anthropic’s red lines — Sam Altman insisted his company, too, opposed mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — moved swiftly to fill the vacuum. While Anthropic was being frozen out of Washington, D.C., OpenAI quietly negotiated and signed a deal of its own with the Pentagon, granting the Defense Department access to its models for deployment in classified environments. OpenAI then published a blog post with a pointed aside: “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.” The company that had stood shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic in principle had, in practice, used Anthropic’s exclusion to capture the contract.
The backlash was swift — and came from inside the house. Caitlin Kalinowski, who had led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics teams since late 2024, publicly announced her resignation. Her statement, posted on X and LinkedIn, was brief and precise: “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people.”
The formulation was careful, almost scrupulously fair to her former colleagues. But the substance was damning. A senior technical executive, one who had spent her career building the physical systems through which AI meets the real world, had concluded that OpenAI had crossed lines it had publicly promised not to cross — and had done so without the internal deliberation those lines deserved. Some users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, became the number-one free app in the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. The market, in its way, had registered a verdict.
What the episode exposed is the hierarchy of pressures operating on every AI company at this moment. Altman’s public statements and OpenAI’s private negotiations inhabited different moral universes, and the gap between them is a measure of how quickly principle buckles under the combined weight of government contracts, competitive anxiety, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Hegseth and Trump have sent the clearest possible signal: Companies that draw lines will be punished; companies that erase them will be rewarded. The outcome of this first moral battle of the AI era will do much to determine the shape of every battle that follows.
But erasure, in this case, is not incidental — it is the business model. The questions that seem separate — who controls the weapons, who watches the citizens, who owns the culture, whose labor trains the machine — are in fact a single question, asked of us all at once: whether humanity will remain the author of its own story, or be quietly written out of it.
The Technocracy’s Bargain
Artificial intelligence functions in this landscape not only as a tool, but also as an ideology. The systems that now summarize our news, grade our tests, and generate our images are built entirely from accumulated human expression, yet are heralded as replacements for the slow, wayward work of thought. By design they remix rather than originate; they automate style while evacuating risk. The consequence is a flood of synthetic prose and imagery that feels like culture but carries none of the scars of experience. Anyone with a prompt can simulate the surface of artistry, further collapsing the distinction between the crafted and the merely produced.
We need to insist on the human self as something more than a flicker of circuitry or an echo of stimulus — to hold that our consciousness is not reducible to mechanism, that our art, our music, our capacity for beauty and sorrow carry a dignity no machine can counterfeit. We need to imagine a future in which humanity still governs its own creation — not as the object of its inventions, but as their author and their measure. A world that offers consumption in place of purpose courts a different and more corrosive kind of unrest.
The outlines of that unrest were already legible by the middle of the decade. In labor reports and think-tank bulletins one could trace the quiet unmaking of the white-collar world. Young graduates, credentialed and deeply indebted, were discovering that the jobs they had trained for no longer existed in familiar form; whole categories of administrative and creative work were being absorbed by AI or retooled around its efficiencies. Commentators spoke of an “AI job apocalypse” not as metaphor but as demographic fact — an educated stratum slipping downward, its ambitions collapsing into precarity. History offers a warning: When a surplus of the educated meets a scarcity of opportunity, turbulence and unrest follows. The clerks and interns of the knowledge economy can become the dissidents of a new era.
But many of the technocrats already sense what is coming and prefer to prepare their escape. They buy compounds in New Zealand, secure airstrips in remote valleys, fortify estates on distant islands stocked and wired for siege. The gesture betrays everything: They, too, expect the storm. They simply mean to watch it from a safe distance — beyond the reach of the graduates, the strivers, the displaced millions who will inhabit the world their machines made. In that distance — the gap between those who build exits and those who have nowhere to go — the interregnum takes on its most recognizable shape: a society waiting, with gathering impatience and anger, for a new settlement that has yet to arrive.
Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, said something recently about AI and labor that hangs in the air like a change in pressure: For once, those who have never known economic danger are about to feel what it means to be exposed — to live without insulation from the market’s weather. According to The New York Times, “The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year.”
For 30 years, the country has drifted ever further from the world of things. The old economy of matter — of tools, factories, and physical production — was gradually exchanged for an economy of signs. We learned to believe that the future belonged to those who trafficked in abstractions: the managers of systems, the manipulators of symbols, the custodians of information. That belief became the moral core of the professional class. To think was noble; to make was obsolete.
For decades, the professional class watched the industrial world hollow out and mistook the spectacle for confirmation of its own permanence. It confused exemption with destiny. Now, the correction is arriving — not from the shop floor, but from the circuits.
This is one meaning of the interregnum: a pause in which the old class myths no longer align with material reality, and no new story has yet cohered. In the space between, people who once felt like authors of the future are discovering that they were also characters, written into a script whose logic they did not fully control.
Yet another path exists, if we can summon the imagination to take it. Rather than waging a doomed Luddite resistance, we might seek a grand bargain with the architects of the new order — entering into direct negotiation with Big Tech over the political terms of the transition. The question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.
How much of the immense stream of revenue flowing through the platforms and hyperscalers could be redirected toward a sovereign fund, a common dividend for those whose labor has been displaced? Anthropic’s Amodei has suggested a tax of three percent of AI revenues to seed the sovereign fund. It is a moment that calls less for purity than for negotiation — an uneasy but deliberate partnership between humanists and technologists, aimed at keeping a frustrated graduate class from becoming the raw material of a larger revolutionary breakdown.
Marshall McLuhan believed that new media were creating “an overwhelming, destructive maelstrom” into which we were being drawn against our will. But he also believed in a way out. “The absolute indispensability of the artist,” McLuhan wrote, “is that he alone in the encounter with the maelstrom can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the awareness to tell us what the world is made of. The artist is able [to give] … a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.”
Our great inquiry now must be: How do we quit the politics of national despair — a maelstrom that our own ingenuity has created? It will be hard, because a vast media industry depends on your engagement with its outrage. Three companies — X, Meta, Google — monopolize the advertising revenue that flows from that outrage. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say these social media companies hold too much power. To break the spell, we need to understand the roots of the phony culture war they have cultivated — and remember that America has had a real promise. Only when we recover that memory can we begin to imagine what the new promise of American life might look like.