“I’m so nervous,” says Olivia, a photographer with Jewish Voice for Peace. “I’m so nervous.” She keeps repeating it. Olivia and about a dozen other activists are huddled in a cluster of booths in the Astro diner in midtown Manhattan. Cara, another JVP member, has propped up her phone next to a ketchup bottle so we can see a livestream of the action taking place a few blocks away at Radio City Music Hall: President Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, are onstage with Stephen Colbert, before a crowd of over 6,000 donors — some of whom paid more than $500,000 for front-row, VIP access — for an event the campaign says raised more than $25 million.
It’s the biggest bash of the election cycle so far, a chance for a beleaguered, historically unpopular president to surround himself with the trappings of political and cultural power in America’s greatest city. The people at the tables around me are tuned in for a different reason: They’re waiting for their activists inside the venue to try to bring the whole thing to a crashing halt.
In the past six months, Biden has weathered a persistent and vehement wave of protests, disruptions, and organized voting campaigns against his support of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, millions have been displaced, and experts say the population is at imminent risk of famine.
As Biden cruises to a primary victory, activists across the country have mounted protest campaigns at the polls — instructing Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in states where that’s possible, or write in “cease-fire.” In Wisconsin last week, nearly 50,000 voters marked “uninstructed” on their Democratic primary ballots, a figure that almost doubles the margin Biden won the state by in 2020. Similar campaigns in Michigan and Minnesota also cleared that margin, signifying that voters in several key swing states can’t be taken for granted come November.
But the pro-Palestine movement’s most visible actions have been loud, growing protests in city streets, at national landmarks, and in closed-door meetings alike. On the East Coast, one of the most prominent protest groups is Jewish Voice for Peace, a nonprofit founded in 1996 as a counterweight to Zionism. These protests — screaming disruptions at speeches, attempts to block Biden’s presidential motorcade, banner drops at live events — are meticulously planned and organized.
At the Astro, you could cut the tension with a blunt diner knife. There’s half a plate of onion rings that everyone has forgotten. Jane Hirschmann, an activist who was turned away by security trying to get into the Biden fundraiser, is watching on another phone with her two daughters and a big glass of red wine. Nearly everyone is texting frantically — updating a group thread of photos and videos from inside Radio City, trying to sort out who’s who and where they are. The livestream cuts out for a moment.
“Did we lose it?” someone asks. “Well, if they cut the Wi-Fi in the building …” someone else says, right before the stream comes back on. Cara gets a message. “Both banners are in,” she says. Olivia and another activist try to make a tally of how many protesters they have inside the building: There are multiple groups involved, and no one is sure how many of their members managed to get through security. We’re nearing the moment of truth. “Are they waiting for a signal?” Olivia asks. “The signal is Biden talking!” someone at the next table over responds.
Then we hear it. On the livestream, which is being broadcast by an attendee in the Radio City orchestra pit, we start to hear shouting from one of the upper decks. The diner goes quiet, everyone bending closer to the nearest screen to hear. The first action was supposed to be a banner drop from the upper level, but the livestreamer is still facing the stage, so we’re going off sound cues broadcast in tinny quality through a shaky X feed. We can’t see the banner, but we get the gist of a chant. “LET! GAZA! LIVE! LET! GAZA! LIVE!”
The tension breaks but doesn’t fully subside. There’s more to come. Over the next 15 to 20 minutes, a succession of activists affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace and several other groups takes turns shouting, chanting, or questioning Biden whenever he tries to speak. Jay Saper, one of JVP’s organizers, tells me they want the disruptions solely focused on Biden — opposing him whenever he speaks, forcing him to confront the issue head on. It doesn’t take long for them to get results: Colbert, the event’s moderator, breaks into a discussion of Gaza as security ejects one group of disruptors.
“Excuse me, Mr. President. For people who are watching at home on the feed, you may not be able to hear, but there’s some protesters here. There are some protesters here who are no doubt related to the protests we saw across the street,” Colbert says. “There are people outside, and people in this room, I’m sure, who have passionate divisions about what the best course of action is for the crisis in Israel, in Gaza right now. What do you believe the United States’ role should be going forward to ensure the most peaceful and prosperous future for the people of Israel and for Gaza?”
The question is almost certainly planned, scripted, and prepped-for, and Biden’s response is boilerplate: After telling security to “let them go,” he offers up a call to “get more food and medicine” into Gaza, mourning that there were “too many innocent victims, Israeli and Palestinian.”
“But we can’t forget, Israel is in a position where its very existence is at stake,” Biden continues. “You have to have all those people. They weren’t killed. They were massacred. They were massacred. And imagine if that had happened in the United States and tying a mom and her daughter together, pouring kerosene on them, burning them to death. It’s understandable Israel has such a profound anger, and Hamas is still there. But we must, in fact, stop the effort that is resulting in significant deaths of innocent civilians, particularly children.”
The answers onstage aren’t good enough for the group in the diner. “Oh come ON!” someone yells, when Obama follows Biden with more platitudes. But their people are in the room, determined to have their say.
Getting to this point took a lot of work. The action was organized by JVP and a coalition of groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and Adalah Justice Project; each worked their connections to wealthy individuals, who purchased tickets and then transferred them to the volunteers. A week before the fundraiser, the coalition had around 55 seats inside Radio City Music Hall secured for planned disruptors. But the day before the event, activists with tickets started getting emails from the Biden campaign, informing them that the campaign was “unable to accommodate” them at the event and would refund their tickets. “This decision is final,” the emails read. The emails continued on Thursday morning, just hours before the event. Saper, one of JVP’s lead organizers for the evening, was denied a ticket; so was Sarah Koshar, another organizing lead.
Jane Hirschmann and her daughter Nell Hirschmann-Levy were issued tickets. They, too, received rejection emails, but before the event, they try their luck in line anyway. When they reach security, however, they are directed to what event staff call the “Solutions Tent,” where they are told that their names are not on the approved list of attendees. “The solution was kicking me out,” another disruptor who tried to gain attendance says, laughing.
The Biden campaign had clearly anticipated that this might happen. In early March, NBC News reported that the team organizing the Radio City fundraiser was “discussing whether to hire a private company to vet attendees.”
“Thousands of supporters who are deeply invested in protecting democracy and believe in a future without the chaos and violence of Donald Trump attended [the] historic fundraiser,” Biden campaign spokesperson Daniel Wessel tells Rolling Stone in a statement. “It was closed to those who had previously disrupted or we had reason to believe would disrupt the event.”
Wessel adds, “President Biden believes making your voice heard and exercising your First Amendment right is part of being an American — unlike Donald Trump, who threatens protesters with violence and wants to jail people who disagree with him.”
Some of the aspiring disruptors weren’t hard to find: Several of those attempting to enter the Radio City event had been arrested at previous actions targeting Biden. Protesters arrested at a Feb. 2 disruption who attempted to block the Biden motorcade from traveling through New York’s Upper East Side had their court dates set for Feb. 26; the Biden campaign returned to New York that day for a fundraiser and also taped an episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers. Saper says many of the activists went straight from their court appearances in downtown Manhattan to 30 Rock to protest Biden, and some were arrested again in a highly publicized action in the NBC building’s lobby.
On the day of the fundraiser, as more rejections roll in, the disruption coalition scrambles to figure out who they would actually have inside Radio City. The coalition has two banners, painted on thin sheets of canvas sewn into the lining of different attendees’ jackets. A few hours before the doors open, Saper briefs the small cadre of disruptors who still had a shot at getting inside in a corner of Central Park, before the group splits up and goes through the line in small groups of ones and twos to avoid attracting more attention. Disruptors are instructed to wear “wealthy Democrat drag” to fit in.
Hirschmann wears a Biden-Harris pin on top of her plum topcoat, which she jettisons to an attendee after security turns her away. Eventually, some of the coalition’s disruptors find their way in, among them David and Jeanie Dubnau, a couple in their 80s; Alice Sturmsutter, 76, a retired nurse; and Hannah Ryan, a photographer assigned to record the disruptions. All told, the coalition puts roughly 10 disruptors inside the event. Approximately 45 are turned away.
“They had tried so hard to not let us in,” says Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian advocacy organization that helped organize the protest. “They are clearly scared of disruptors, they’re scared of being confronted with the fact that they are funding a genocide. It felt maybe in some ways it was pure luck that we could get some people in — but also a testament to the power of our moment and the size of our movement. They can’t track everyone.”
As Biden’s campaign has worked to contain the protests — and shield the president from them — fundraisers, including the Radio City bash, have been restricted to the traveling White House press pool. Rolling Stone and several news outlets were denied press access. But as the campaign moves into the general election contest, and Biden holds more public events, there are signs that the campaign will have to reckon with disagreement on a much more regular basis.
A closed-door meeting with Muslim American leaders last week landed with a thud when only six invitees showed up. The campaign’s last major public event, an abortion rights rally in Virginia, was dogged by protesters, as well.
Some of these events, like the Radio City infiltration or the mass street protests that jam up traffic in major cities, require significant time and attention from dozens of organizers to pull off. But Munir Atallah — an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, which was part of the coalition for the Radio City event — tells me that disrupting the Democratic Party machine is easier than people think.
“What’s so profound about this style of disruption is that it’s very easy to organize, but it’s incredibly effective,” Atallah says. “All it really takes is you and your friend group deciding you’re pissed off.”
As the fundraiser starts to wrap up, the JVP leaders leave the diner and rejoin the protest outside of Radio City. The disruptors, ejected in mostly peaceful fashion from the event, meet us there — still holding their banners. Security pulled them from the event, but let them keep the props. The Dubnaus were some of the first to go, dropping a banner that kicked off a wave of subsequent disruptions.
“It felt a little scary getting up in a room with that many people,” David Dubnau says, as Olivia organizes the group for a photo with Radio City’s lights in the background. “When I thought about, ‘Well, gee, am I going to have the guts to stand up and do this?’ … I just thought of all the kids in Gaza who are getting amputation without anesthetic, and I thought, ‘Well, this doesn’t take that much courage.’”
The threat in all this action is implicit. The general election is coming, and Biden will almost certainly be the name on the ticket in blue — facing off against Trump. To the Democratic faithful, these public shows of disloyalty represent the dangerous possibility that naive idealists will hand Trump the presidency in November. The protesters don’t see it that way — they insist that if Biden doesn’t budge, it will be his fault alone if he loses the election.
There are some signs that the president’s position on Israel may be shifting slightly: Following the assassination of seven aid workers from the Washington, D.C.-based aid group World Central Kitchen, a reportedly “tense” conversation between Biden and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu resulted in news that an aid corridor would be opening in Gaza’s north. Biden stopped short, however, of threatening to condition arms sales. As of last week, he was still pushing Congress to approve the sale of more F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
As the little dramas of security screenings, banner drops, and shouted questions play out inside, a large crowd gathers across from Radio City, waving flags and chanting, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of event attendees waiting in line across the street, past a line of sanitation department garbage trucks parked in a defensive barrier on Sixth Avenue. They stayed there, in freezing early-spring showers, for the duration of the event, waiting to bird-dog the Biden donors as they leave. They scream “GENOCIDE SUP-POR-TER! GENOCIDE SUP-POR-TER!” at small gaggles of horrified attendees in fancy dress, scurrying toward the subway or cabs.
One protester makes the stakes clear: “Congratulations on helping to elect Trump!” It’s been a long night, but the crowd outside Radio City hasn’t lost its edge: They’re really going after anyone who walks by with a Biden-Harris lawn sign, passed out to attendees inside. “SHAME! SHAME!” one woman screams. The crowd outside, and the disruptors inside, want to make sure that supporting the status quo is anything but comfortable.
“What does it say about our society if nothing happens at that event, if everything goes on as usual?” says Atallah, the Palestinian Youth Movement organizer. “We have to disrupt and mark these events, to say that it’s unacceptable, what our government is supporting.”
As the last shell-shocked attendees filter off down midtown’s streets, the protesters are still there. The rain has been replaced by cold, biting wind; keffiyehs are pulled tighter around heads and necks. There’s another protest tomorrow, and Biden will surely be back soon. Odds are, the bird-doggers will be there, screaming for peace.
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.