KYIV — Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a decades-long quest to restore his country to what he views as its rightful place in world affairs, and he is willing to crush anyone who stands in his way. Putin’s regime has ruthlessly consolidated power through murder and oppression, while using unfettered militancy abroad to expand the Kremlin’s reach.
Until recently, the West has largely accommodated Putin, deluding itself that engagement and dialogue would temper his remorseless thirst for control and appetite for conquest. Western inaction, infirmity, and addiction to cheap Russian oil and gas have allowed the dictator to prevail despite a series of wars, assassinations, terror attacks, and a deadly conflict in Ukraine that has killed hundreds of thousands.
The latest high-profile victim of Putin’s bloody repression of political opposition is Alexei Navalny, 47, a nationalist politician and anti-corruption campaigner who led a series of protests against Putin ahead of the 2012 election in Russia.
“Putin kills any potential political threat to his rule — and to a possible democratic future for Russia,” says Oleg Mihailik, a human rights lawyer in Ukraine. Before the 2022 invasion, the lawyer regularly worked with opposition figures and dissidents fleeing from Russia, Belarus, and other lands under Kremlin domination. Now, he primarily focuses on humanitarian aid in liberated territories.
On Friday, the Russian prison service announced that Navalny had been found dead in his cell in a high-security prison above the Arctic Circle in Western Siberia, where he was serving the latest in a series of sentences, after being tried on charges that human rights groups describe as a “sham.”
Navalny is survived by his wife Yulia and two children. Yulia Navalnaya said Friday, “I want Putin and his entire circle [to] know that they’ll bear responsibility for what they did with our country and my family and my husband.”
A spokesperson for the family said they would issue no additional comment while Navalny’s lawyer travels to Siberia to investigate. Russian authorities say the cause of death was a blood clot, but this has not been independently verified.
“Let’s make no mistake, Putin assassinated Navalny. He did so because Navalny was brave enough to stand up to Putin. He did so because Navalny offered the Russian people an alternative to kleptocracy and repression. This is a tragic day for Navalny’s family but also for Russia,” wrote Bill Browder, a financier-turned-activist responsible for the passage of landmark anti-Putin legislation in the U.S.
Called the Magnitsky Act, it individually sanctioned members of Putin’s inner circle for their involvement in the 2009 arrest, torture, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a tax advisor who worked with Browder in exposing high-level corruption.
Navalny also ran afoul of the authorities over his anti-corruption efforts. He first came to national prominence in 2008, when as an activist investor in multiple oil and gas companies, he led a crusade against bribery and corruption by trying to force companies to publicly disclose their financial records. By 2011, he had established a non-profit called the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF).
In the months leading up to Russia’s March 2012 election — in which Putin was set to win an unprecedented third term by flagrantly exploiting a constitutional loophole — Navalny became a key figure in mass protests in Moscow against the return of the former KGB officer.
There was cause for fear among those who joined the protesters. Over the course of his 24-year career at the highest levels of Russian leadership, Putin has ruthlessly eliminated critics and opponents of his regime.
As one might expect from a former KGB agent who served as a liaison with East Germany’s Stasi secret police in the 1980s, very few of the misfortunes that have befallen his enemies can be tied to Putin directly. Like Navalny, most of those who oppose Putin have died suddenly under murky circumstances.
When Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister in 1999, it was in the hopes of finding a silovik — or strongman from within the security state — who could keep the resurgent communist party at bay while strengthening Russia’s nascent liberal democracy and market reforms.
Russia in the late 90s was beset by economic chaos, corruption, and security crises. Chechen militants were clashing with Russian forces in border areas, and had backed a separatist movement in Dagestan. Hardliners within the security services wanted to reassert control over the region, despite Yeltsin’s continued promises that there would be no new war in Chechnya; the first, ending in 1996, had been a disaster.
In August 1999, only a month after Putin became prime minister, Russia was rocked by a series of bombings targeting apartment blocks in Moscow, Dagestan, and Rostov that killed hundreds and wounded thousands. Three bombs were also discovered and defused before detonation.
Within weeks of the first bombing of an apartment building, the previously obscure bureaucrat Putin had become the plain-speaking commander-in-chief in a War on Terrorism, promising to “wipe out” Russia’s enemies in televised meetings with military commanders in the field.
His popularity soared.
By December, Putin became acting president, taking over as Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor.
In May 2000, when Russia held its first post-Yeltsin presidential election, acting-President Putin won easily. It was arguably the first peaceful transition of power in Russian history.
But skeptics immediately began asking questions about whether Chechen terrorists were actually behind the apartment bombings. Some suspected that the Russian security services had carried out false-flag attacks to bolster the candidacy of their chosen man: Putin.
Such a line of thinking was not without merit. On Sept. 23, 2000, residents of an apartment building in Ryazan, in central Russia, had reported suspicious men carrying sacks into the basement of their building. When police arrived, they discovered what appeared to be 300 pounds of explosives with a detonator and timer attached.
The device was defused by the local bomb squad, the head of which said the substance in the sacks had tested positive as RDX, a military-grade explosive. Local officials praised the residents and police for their vigilance in preventing a tragedy.
Descriptions of the suspects and their car were made public, and two men were quickly arrested. But there was a problem.
The suspects produced IDs showing that they were members of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the primary successor agency to the KGB. After local authorities made phone calls to Moscow to verify that the men worked for the FSB, the suspects were released.
Later that night, Putin unleashed a devastating air campaign against Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev brushed aside the incident in Ryazan as a “training exercise” that had never posed a risk to the public. The FSB said that the sacks had contained sugar, not explosives.
The wave of apartment building bombings attributed to Chechen terrorists stopped in the immediate aftermath of the Ryazan incident, but the questions started. In the early years of Putin’s presidency, Russian news media was still freewheeling and inquisitive. Investigative journalists immediately began to find flaws in the government’s story.
Official inquiries soon followed. Like the media, in the early 2000s, the State Duma — Russia’s lower legislative house created in 1994 — had not yet been brought to heel under Putin’s hand. Legislators and opposition parties remained chaotic-but-energetic participants in state governance.
Fears that the FSB was murdering Russian citizens in staged bombings prompted former Soviet dissident-turned-legislator Sergei Kovalev to form a public commission of inquiry in 2002.
It was now, with the Kovalev Commission, that Putin’s public opponents began to die. On April 17, 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, the commission’s vice chairman, was shot to death outside of his apartment in Moscow.
Four men were arrested, and based on the testimony of one of the suspects, the “mastermind” was found guilty. He maintained his innocence and tried to kill himself, before being transferred to Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison.
However, FSB Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko soon went public with assertions that Yushenkov was killed because of his investigation into the apartment bombings. Litvinenko would later defect to the U.K. after publicly calling out corruption and links between organized crime, security officials, and the powerful oligarchs who rule Russia’s economy; he died on Nov. 23, 2006 — slain with polonium-laced tea, in the first-known case of assassination by radiation poisoning.
The list of Putin critics who have been murdered, died suddenly, or have nearly died is long: Lawmaker Yuri Shchekochikhin, felled by a “mystery illness” on July 3, 2003 — only days before he was set to travel to the U.S. and meet with FBI officials to report on corruption in the FSB; investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot by contract killers on Oct. 7, 2006; lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova, shot to death outside a press conference on Jan. 19, 2009; Natalia Estemirova, a human rights activist kidnapped and murdered in Chechnya on July 15, 2009; whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny, whose sudden death while jogging in London on Nov. 10, 2012 has been called into question; oligarch Boris Berezovsky, dead of a mysterious suicide on March 23, 2013; physicist Boris Nemtsov, shot to death in Moscow on Feb. 27, 2015; former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who barely survived being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok on March 4, 2018; Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash on Aug. 23, 2023, after mutinying against the Kremlin over its handling of the war in Ukraine. There are dozens more lower-profile victims.
Navalny can now be added to the list. In many ways, he was one of the more critical threats Putin has faced during his rule. The 2011 protests that sealed Navalny’s status as a viable opposition figure in Russia were particularly galling to Putin, who viewed them as a continuation of the United States’ policy to undermine his rule.
“Our people do not want the situation in Russia to develop like it was in Kyrgyzstan or not so long ago in Ukraine,” Putin said at the time, referring to political protests that had resulted in Moscow-aligned politicians losing power.
To Putin, the protests were another attempt at a “color revolution,” part of a broader campaign of regime change pursued by Washington in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.
Navalny was arrested multiple times during the protests from 2012 onwards, often facing trial on drummed-up charges of financial misconduct. But he continued his political activism, organizing rallies, creating a political party, participating in elections, and producing documentaries critical of Putin and his cronies’ kleptocracy.
Despite numerous attacks — even twice being doused with a bright green antiseptic dye — and extensive bureaucratic interference aimed at keeping him out of politics, Navalny persisted. His ACF was branded a “foreign agent” and banned in Russia in 2019; he even survived an assassination attempt by poison on Aug. 20, 2020.
After being evacuated to Berlin for treatment and recovery, in January 2021 Navalny made the fateful decision to return to Russia to carry on the fight against Putin. His plane was diverted and he was arrested upon landing. Navalny spent the rest of his life in prison.
“He was a very brave man to return back to a totalitarian country, knowing he had no chance to survive there, and having every chance to become a powerful Russian opposition leader from abroad,” human rights lawyer Mihailik says — and he would know. In 2019 Mihailik was shot in the chest by a sniper, in an assassination attempt he believes was tied to his own anti-corruption activism. Mihailik survived, but the perpetrators were never caught.
Outside of Russia, public outrage at Navalny’s death has been swift.
“Putin tried and failed to murder Navalny quickly and secretly with poison, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison. He was killed for exposing Putin and his mafia as the crooks and thieves they are. My thoughts are with the brave man’s wife and children,” wrote Garry Kasparov, the former chess master turned anti-Putin critic.
With the death of Navalny, there are few prominent figures who have the gravitas and influence to rally significant public opposition to Putin: The closest may be the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky — once Russia’s richest man — who has lived in exile since 2013 and has been called the Kremlin’s leading “critic-in-exile.”
But Khodorkovsky is not in Russia. While Navalny’s courage and tenacity in returning home and risking a martyr’s fate are undeniable, it is an open question whether his death will have a lasting effect on Putin’s regime.
“This creates a significant political problem for the regime — they will have to deal with Navalny’s legacy,” observed Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the Russian politics-focused R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “I have no doubt that very soon we’ll witness a significant wave of anti-Navalny repressions, raids after indignations in social networks, criminal cases, and arrests.”
Putin’s rule has now endured through five U.S. presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden — and each administration found ways to appease, placate, or ignore Putin as he expanded his power internationally. Sanctions and strong words have done little to prevent him from achieving his goals.
Despite Biden’s 2021 promise that Putin would face “devastating consequences” if anything happened to Navalny, it isn’t clear that the U.S. has any more mechanisms to use as leverage against the Kremlin than it has already employed after the invasion of Ukraine.
For almost a quarter of a century, Putin has been responsible for the assassination of dissidents and political opponents at home and abroad; the systematic and deliberate targeting of civilians, aid workers, and journalists in several war zones; the brutal suppression of independence movements inside Russia; and the illegal annexation of territory in neighboring countries.
Although the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over war crimes last year, and he has been branded an international pariah, the man who rules Russia may never be held to account for his atrocities — including his complicity in silencing Alexei Navalny.
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.