It’s Day 20 of the Kamala Era, but Trump World remains in the Before Times. Sure, the Let’s Go Brandon merch is being sold at a discount, but otherwise the mood in the non-swing state of Montana is very July 2024. Or July 2016. The ex-president is on his way for a rally tonight, and the sound system in the parking lot of Bozeman’s Brick Breeden Fieldhouse bleats out the same seven songs, including “Memory” from Cats. The roughly 8,000 supporters who began queuing at dawn will hear the song approximately 30 times before they enter the temple of Trump this evening.
There are plenty of other Trump comfort-food visuals; a Red Bull-slamming dude wears an electoral college T-shirt with Trump states in red and blue states labeled Dumb Fuckistan. The guy in the block suit is here and tells an admirer that it is his greatest wish to sub in for Fox’s Greg Gutfeld one day. (His dream comes a bit closer later today when Fox News misidentifies him as a Montana voter.) Huckleberry smoothies are being hawked for $14 next to a pickup truck emblazoned with the image of Donald Trump shooting a Tommy gun while saying “Merry MAGA you filthy animal.” A teen waits in line for a portable toilet and sings along with the Natasha Owens classic, “Trump Won”:
“We got dead people votin’ Dropboxes and Dominion
And facts are facts, it’s not just my opinion
The Democrats know how to steal
Come on man, here’s the deal
Trump won and you know it
Trump won and you know it.”
What we are all doing here is not exactly clear. The Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket is barnstorming swing states on a sugar high that may or may not last until November, but this is Trump’s only rally of the week. It is being held in Montana, a state he still owes money from previous rallies and a state he will win by at least 15 points. My theory is that Trump booked the Bozeman trip before President Joe Biden’s departure from the race. That’s when he thought he could cruise the country once a week grandstanding for Senate candidates that could get him a Republican majority.
I’m also guessing the fundraisers had already been locked in. Trump is heading to Big Sky’s posh Yellowstone Club this afternoon, the kind of event that would cause the fictional John Dutton to spit on the ground and then deliver a deranged monologue about all the rich fuckers ruining his beloved Montana.
One of those late-arriving arrivistes is Tim Sheehy, the Montana Republican Senate candidate running against three-term incumbent Jon Tester, a seven-fingered dirt farmer from Big Sandy. Sheehy is generically handsome with gelled, dark-blond hair. He glad-hands this morning in a Sheehy for Senate fleece, proclaiming, “We’re going to save America, and these people are going to help us do it.”
Tester was not available for comment because, according to a source, he was busy pulling 16-hour days on his tractor harvesting peas back on his farm in Big Sandy. Sheehy once called Tester’s farmer credentials fake and described the farm where Tester grew up as just a “weed patch.” I don’t think they are friends.
Sheehy’s background is different. He was raised in a posh Minnesota lake house and only moved to Montana in 2014. Sheehy has never spent a day involved in Montana politics, continuing a storied tradition of Republican rich dudes moving to Montana, buying a ranch, throwing on some work jeans, and trying to convince the locals he is a man of the people.
Sheehy has a lush bio, a Navy SEAL who served with distinction in Afghanistan before moving to Montana and founding Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting company. Many of Sheehy’s photos feature him looking rugged in a flight suit with one of Bridger’s planes in the background. Tonight, he will talk about water-bombing forest fires for a living.
Alas, the thing about too-good-to-be-true candidates is they often turn out to be not actually true. Bridger Aerospace reported losses of $77 million in 2023 with its stock down 54 percent for the year. An auditor recently reported: “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, operating cash flow deficits, debt covenant violations, and insufficient liquidity to fund its operations that raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
Well, he still has a stellar military record. Sort of, maybe? Sheehy has a bullet lodged in his arm that, depending on his various accounts, either happened in Afghanistan during an attack, or from friendly fire, or, uh, in Glacier National Park in 2015 when he dropped his Colt .45. Sheehy has shared a Rashomon number of accounts of his bullet, and I assumed this would cause him to low-key his military record tonight.
I should have known better. I also should have known that Donald Trump’s presence here has little to do with getting him to 270 electoral votes and a helluva lot to do with a political vendetta straight out of a not-picked-up Showtime pilot on corruption.
Stories emerged in the days after Trump was shot about how his brush with death had changed him into a softer version of himself. Politico posited, “A changed Trump? Some allies detect an ‘existential’ shift after shooting.”
Nope. In a few hours, Trump will take the stage and call a reporter a “maggot,” mock Tester’s weight, promise mass deportations, and question the origin of Kamala Harris’ last name.
Nothing has changed and that’s a problem.
I CAME ACROSS a half-dozen Trump supporters clasping hands and praying for his safety near their SUV as I walked toward the fieldhouse a few hours before the rally. It wasn’t residual words of thanks for Trump surviving last month’s assassination attempt, but news that Trump Force One had mechanical difficulties and had to land in Billings, a hundred miles away. Other supporters had more personal concerns.
“He better not fucking cancel; I’ve been out here for 12 hours,” mutters one guy.
Agreed.
Trump doesn’t cancel, but he has to hop a different plane from Billings to Bozeman and then his motorcade heads down to his Big Sky fundraiser. That meant he wouldn’t take the stage here until 9:30 p.m. local time, which seems to defeat any attempt to alter the political narrative as Harris and Walz held another rapturous rally in Arizona during primetime. This was my first Trump rally since his infamous one in Tulsa during the 2020 campaign that claimed Herman Cain’s life, but the presentation hit the same notes of malice and unintentional comedy.
The sound system pumps in Celine Dion singing the theme song from Titanic, and later there’s a video of Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Great Balls of Fire” from the movie of the same name — the heartwarming tale of a 22-year-old man courting his 13-year-old cousin that surely would be anathema to the Pizzagate anti-pedo supporters in the crowd.
The gathered hear a series of opening acts who are obsessed with the issue of masculinity. Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me in a fieldhouse with multiple national rodeo championship banners in a state governed by Greg Gianforte, a man once convicted of assaulting a reporter.
The Montana Republican Party chair derides Tester as a vodka cranberry drinker, which offends my personal vodka drinking preferences. The microphone finds Matt Whitaker, who has parlayed three months as Trump’s acting attorney general into a career often dropping the “acting” from his speech. He shouts for a while about a “world on fire” and a Justice Department targeting Catholics even though President Biden is a practicing Catholic.
Then we get Congressman Ryan Zinke, a man in a black cowboy hat going after Walz for purported stolen valor. Zinke, it should be pointed out, was a decorated Navy SEAL who never made captain because he was caught billing the Navy for personal expenses and was run out as Trump’s ride-a-pony-to-work interior secretary for using planes and helicopters for private travel. (He attempted to diffuse the controversy by making the distinction that he never took a jet for private travel; they were all prop planes.)
There’s still no sign of Trump, so Sheehy is brought out alone. He begins his speech with a joke.
“Well, you know my name,” says Sheehy. “Those are also my pronouns. ‘She-he.’ I can tell you going to middle school in the Nineties that wasn’t a fun thing to have.”
Oh boy.
Sheehy goes through his military record with no word about his own personal magic bullet. Then he makes a grievous mistake; he makes sense. He offers the usual Republican words about the border crisis and then makes an observation.
“If you wonder why we have a border crisis, it’s because everybody wants to come here and be Americans,” says Sheehy. “No one’s walking across deserts to move to China. No one’s climbing and going in the ocean to move to Russia. They are coming here to be Americans, and we should be proud of that.”
This is a good point! Alas, it runs counter to the Trumpian view that America has become a dystopian shithole. The crowd doesn’t know what to do and there’s an odd quiet. An uncertain Sheehy pivots back to familiar ground.
“Montanans want common-sense government. And what does common sense mean to Montanans? They want a secure border, safe streets, cheap gas.” The crowd stands and cheers. “Cops are good. Criminals are bad. Boys are boys and girls are girls.”
Sheehy exits to applause. The video screen cues up Freddie Mercury camping it up at Live Aid.
TRUMP FINALLY HITS the stage at 9:30 p.m., 90 minutes late. Maybe it’s all the rest he’s been getting, but he’s in a good mood. It’s moments like this that you get a real sense of the man, in all his dyspeptic glory. He talks of Biden and you get Trump unfiltered.
“You know, he wanted to debate. If we didn’t have a debate, he’d still be there. Can you imagine if we didn’t have a debate? Why the hell did I debate him?”
The crowd laughs, but you know from his face that Trump means it. He realizes debating Biden early is going to turn out to be the biggest fucking mistake of his life.
The idea that the shooting would transform Trump into a fully formed human was always ridiculous, but there still is the question of Donald’s own personal great reset: He is now trailing Harris nationally in some polls and performing poorly even in the swing states. The man is an amoral realist — could he pivot somewhat to the center in the search of the sliver of the electorate that could determine his fate?
The answer, my friends, is absolutely not.
Trump plays his hits in all their disgusting glory. He calls New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman “Maggot Haberman” because she wrote an article casting doubt on a story that the ex-president told about a treacherous helicopter ride. Speaking of Tester, Trump proclaims, “I don’t speak badly about somebody’s physical disability, but he’s got the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”
He offers insight into his verbal slam strategy. “I’ve done a lot of bad name-calling,” says Trump with a chuckle. “You know, when you call somebody that you know how to say the name perfectly, and you call it on purpose, they say, ‘Sir, you made a mistake.’ I say, ‘No, I didn’t.’”
His attacks on Harris are gross and predictable. “You know, it’s interesting. Nobody really knows her last name. If you ask people, ‘Do you know what her last name is?’ Nobody has any idea what it is. ‘Harris.’ How the hell did this happen?”
I did some reporting, and Harris turns out to be the last name of Vice President Harris’ father. Some further digging suggests taking your father’s last name is a common practice in Western cultures.
Trump hits an anti-media jag, and the crowd starts their usual finger-pointing and chanting at us reporters herded together in our veal fattening pen. I debate shouting back, “You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!” but instead decide on a five-minute mental health break.
Trump has at least another 45 minutes in him despite the fact some fans are heading for the exits. So I go into a toilet stall and pull up a video I shot on my phone earlier in the day.
I’d heard that there was going to be a 20-foot inflatable IUD outside the Bozeman Public Library as part of a pro-choice, anti-Trump demonstration. Might be some good color. But I fucked up the time and instead stumble into Bubblepalooza. Twenty or so toddlers were blowing said bubbles, fitting themselves with crowns, and listening to the Treble-Makers harmonize through “Top of the World” and “Going to the Chapel.” Finally, I get a glimpse of some of that happiness and joy that Kamala has been talking about!
I leave the stall heartened and energized, only to see a four-year-old peeing on his shoes as he chants, “USA! USA!” Meanwhile, his dad and a friend are screaming, “Sword fight!”
I can do this.
The best thing about a Trump speech is that it is impossible to miss anything because the guy loops around a subject at least five times. Now he’s talking about brutal crimes committed by “illegal aliens,” and he makes a promise:
“Here’s all we’re going to do. It’s going to be called a Trump mass deportation, because we have no choice. We have no choice. We have no choice. If Harris wins, a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators will ravage your communities … We have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s going to be as vicious as any crime ever seen in this country before.”
The remaining crowd stands and cheers. The thing you need to know about Trump rallygoers is they love Trump because he is the political equivalent of a Law & Order binge. He’s always going to hit the same bigoted points you’ve grown to love. You will go home confirmed in your entrenched ideology. Have some more Cheetos.
But tonight there’s a twist, a special guest star that might explain everything. Trump introduces his good friend and former White House doctor Ronny Jackson. Jackson is hyped up on something, maybe just revenge.
“I want to tell you a little bit about this man, Jon Tester. This man who says that he represents Montana in the Senate. This man who tells you that he’s up there trying to clean the place up and trying to fix what’s broken.” Jackson makes some odd motions inside his mouth. “This man is a sleazy, disgusting, swamp politician. He’s a fraud, and he’s a liar.”
Dejected reporter heads pop up from their Slack channels like dogs sensing a squirrel with a hobbled leg. Turns out Tester was the ranking member on the Senate Veterans Affair Committee when Trump nominated Jackson to be VA secretary in 2018. Tester helped torpedo Jackson’s nomination after discovering credible allegations of misconduct — drunkenness and the liberal distribution of prescription meds to his colleagues.
Jackson sees it differently.
“I had a spotless, spotless, flawless career in the Navy, I’ve never had a single complaint about anything,” says Jackson. “He came after me. He tried to destroy me. He tried to destroy my family.”
Jackson then turns back to his friend. “The end of Jon Tester starts tonight, and it starts by bringing this man back to the White House!”
Trump smiles at the doctor who proclaimed he was in better shape than Barack Obama. “You’re a great leader,” he says. “You’re a great admiral.”
This isn’t actually true and seems relevant in the time of Walz getting swift-boated over his use of the rank of sergeant major. Jackson is not actually a rear admiral anymore. The Navy demoted him in 2022 after the Navy Inspector General found the charges of unprofessional behavior brought to light by Tester were accurate. Point goes to the seven-fingered man with the big stomach.
And you may ask yourself, what the hell does any of this have to do with Trump turning his campaign around? Absolutely nothing. The fact that Trump trotted Jackson out to launch a personal vendetta is proof the man is never, ever, ever going to change. There are some benefits: This may result in the man not being able to replace Clarence Thomas when the judge finally discovers shame.
The arena is now a quarter empty. Trump wraps up with his own vulgar mantra.
“We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. We will make America free again. We will make America great again.”
This is not a recording.
I stumble into the Montana night full of Trump bros high-fiving and cracking open cold ones.
I miss those happy babies blowing bubbles.
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.