Russian mercenaries are chasing one of the world’s most notorious fugitives: the warlord Joseph Kony, who abducted tens of thousands of children from across central Africa, brutalizing and brainwashing them as child soldiers and sex slaves in a decadeslong maelstrom of terror.
Multiple sources independently describe to Rolling Stone a bloody near-capture of Kony by Russian mercenaries working for the Wagner Group, in a remote corner of the Central African Republic in early April. A social media post affiliated with Wagner also confirms some aspects of the group’s interest in the warlord.
“This amounts to hot pursuit [in] the African bush,” says a U.S. source familiar with efforts to capture the warlord. “The U.S. military got within 72 hours of Kony. Wagner may be even closer.”
The operation demonstrates Russia’s ever-expanding reach across Africa, and also illustrates the shortcomings of more than two decades of U.S. military strategy on the continent. Despite spending billions on counterterror operations, training, and infrastructure in Africa since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, extremist violence is at an all-time high, according to researchers at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S.-funded research institute. Even as fatalities from terror attacks have spiked with “a near doubling in deaths since 2021,” a string of coups and civil wars has unraveled Washington’s partnerships and created chaotic power vacuums.
American adversaries like Wagner are stepping into the breach.
The mercenary group is the de facto armed expeditionary branch of Kremlin foreign policy, and is a key player on the African continent and in places like Syria and Ukraine, directly supporting Russia’s military operations. What separates Wagner from other private military companies is that it is funded and backed by Russian state security apparatuses.
Founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ultranationalist entrepreneur with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Wagner forces conducted a high-profile mutiny against the Kremlin last June. The central complaint of the mutineers, led by Prigozhin, was that the war in Ukraine was being mismanaged — leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Wagner mercenaries.
The Wagner uprising, the first military challenge to Putin’s rule, ultimately proved futile. Prigozhin agreed to end the mutiny in exchange for guarantees of safety and revisions to Wagner’s role in Ukraine. Those guarantees didn’t amount to much. Prigozhin died when the business jet in which he was flying crashed in a field northwest of Moscow — only two months after the public falling out with his boss.
But Wagner itself was too valuable to cast aside. After Prigozhin’s death, the company has been placed under the direct control of the Russian defense ministry and its military intelligence branch, the GRU. Parts of its operations have been rebranded as “Africa Corps,” but the Wagner name remains in common use.
The group is especially active in Mali, Niger, Sudan, and the Central African Republic, where Wagner is adept at shoring up autocratic regimes, suppressing rebel militias, and terrorizing civilians.
But Wagner’s pursuit of the warlord Kony exemplifies a new assertiveness in Russian strategy in Africa.
Kony is a self-proclaimed Christian prophet accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture by the International Criminal Court. The warlord rose to power in the late 1980s as a rebel leader among the Acholi people, an ethnic group dominant in northern Uganda.
To understand the Wagner operation in pursuit of Kony, Rolling Stone connected with a rebel group whose members witnessed portions of the April 7 attack and its aftermath near a village in eastern Central African Republic called Yemen (like the country). As the rebel group — UPC, or Union for Peace in Central Africa — was on the move in the hinterlands, a rebel commander named Ousmane relayed the account from fighters on the ground in a series of voice messages.
“At least four people were killed, including two civilians and two Wagner,” Ousmane says, adding that Kony was “still in the area” as of April 8.
The operation began when 14 defectors from Kony’s “Lord’s Resistance Army,” or the LRA, surrendered to a group of men posing as Central African Republic government forces at the end of March. The men were, in fact, a Chadian armed group affiliated with Wagner, which often partners with local militias to support its operations.
The defection occurred in Central African Republic’s Haute-Kotto Prefecture, a wooded savanna of more than 33,800 square miles — larger than South Carolina — with few roads and numerous isolated villages. Its dense shrublands and intricate network of rivers, streams, and pools is a haven for armed groups, ivory smugglers, and poachers, and it has long been key to Kony’s survival.
The Chadian group brought the 14 LRA members — a mix of combatants, civilians, and two children — to a town called Sam Ouandjia, where they contacted Wagner, who soon arrived in force.
Wagner forces arrested the defectors and took them to an unknown destination, says a source with expertise in the region and the LRA, who requested anonymity given security risks to individuals in the Central African Republic.
“The treatment of these defectors upset local authorities in Sam Ouandja, who have often worked with other key stakeholders to peacefully process and support LRA defectors in the past,” the source says, adding that the whereabouts of the defectors — including at least two children — remain unknown, “raising grave concerns for their safety and rights.”
The source says that only days after taking the defectors into custody, Wagner forces attacked the village of Yemen, where Kony had recently been, and which is the site of a large marijuana plantation that funds an array of regional militant groups. Locals say that Kony’s camp was within 10 miles of the village, the source says.
“We’ve been hearing about a mythical arms-and-drugs bazaar hidden in the bush as a haven for poachers and smugglers for years,” the source says. “It makes sense that Kony would want to stay close to it.”
Details of the attack were reported by locals who described a firefight that killed between two to eight people, the source said. Those accounts broadly matched those provided to Rolling Stone separately by both UPC rebels and a U.S. source.
“[Wagner] went there with helicopters, two helicopters, and they fired down at [Kony’s camp],” says Ousmane, the UPC commander. The airborne assault was followed by a ground operation, which led to a sustained firefight. “As they [Wagner] know the bush well, they did a lot of damage, they burned the entire village of Yemen. There are small villages around it, they burned all those villages. All.”
Kony was not among the fallen, the source with expertise in the LRA adds, and is believed to have escaped during or prior to the Wagner attack.
“It’s possible they weren’t that close to catching him, that Kony fled beforehand. But they certainly tried, and found a location near one of his camps,” says the U.S. source familiar with efforts to capture the warlord, and who independently confirmed details of the attack on the village.
“They also arrested a few people” including a local chief, says Ousmane, the UPC commander.
“Initial reports indicated Kony fled towards Sudan in the company of around 71 fighters not counting women and children,” says the source with expertise in the LRA. “He likely decided to change locations soon after the defection of the [LRA] group members in late March, consistent with his historic modus operandi.”
Indeed, Kony has a long history of disappearing into the bush when his pursuers get too close.
Kony created the LRA on the heels of civil war that devastated northern Uganda in a witches’ brew of genocide, rape, and murder, replete with concentration camps, total destruction of villages, and millions of refugees. The current president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, dispatched his forces in a futile effort to destroy the LRA. The end result was a conflict that spread to the neighboring countries of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.
In a simmering, decadeslong conflict in which multiple armed parties with little restraint or regard for international law regularly carried out atrocities against civilians, the LRA stood out as the most brutal of all the warring parties. Abducting children from across northern Uganda and elsewhere and indoctrinating them in Kony’s messianic personality cult, the LRA filled its ranks with child soldiers. The children were dehumanized through calculated brutality aimed at desensitizing them to violence and bloodshed.
Multiple efforts to negotiate an end to the LRA’s campaign of horrors led nowhere, and by the late-2000s, stopping the group had become a global cause célèbre, akin to efforts to stop the genocide in nearby Darfur.
By 2008, the U.S. State Department had dubbed Kony a “specially designated global terrorist,” and the Pentagon was providing intelligence and operational support to Uganda to capture him. When those efforts failed, the U.S. military became directly involved.
On the orders of President Barack Obama in 2011, U.S. Army Special Forces led the American pursuit of Kony in an operation called Observant Compass. Many ongoing U.S. military operations in Africa have a broadly defined counterterror focus that emphasize air strikes, intelligence gathering, and training local partner forces to tamp down on the activities of extremist groups.
Observant Compass had a much simpler directive: Kill or capture Joseph Kony.
“This is a unique mission in the sense that — for a soldier that’s been in the army for a few years — this is one of the most clearly defined, succinct missions I have been associated with,” Lt. Col. Matt Maybouer, the forward commander of a special forces base in Entebbe, Uganda, told this reporter on a visit to the operation in 2016. “Because it came directly from the president.”
Observant Compass — like the other counterterror operations in Africa — provided the impetus for the U.S. to organize a sprawling network of bases, airfields, and supply networks in some of the world’s most inaccessible terrain. The counter-LRA operation alone was spread across five countries in central Africa, costing an estimated $780 million.
But, despite offering up to $5 million for information leading to Kony’s capture, and significant success in capturing LRA splinter groups and reducing the militant group’s influence, the warlord remained elusive.
Observant Compass was wound down by former president Donald Trump after he took office in 2017, and Uganda also ended its counter-LRA efforts, reasoning that the group and its offshoots had permanently fled across the borders and weren’t coming back.
Enter Wagner.
The group has one of its largest operations in the Central African Republic, where more than 1,000 personnel support the government of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in exchange for natural resource concessions — giving Wagner effective control over mines that are a lucrative source of gold, precious metals, and other minerals.
These concessions are “key to financing Wagner’s operations in the [Central African Republic] and beyond,” including in Ukraine, according to the U.S. government.
“The Wagner Group exploits insecurity around the world, committing atrocities and criminal acts that threaten the safety, good governance, prosperity, and human rights of nations, as well as exploiting their natural resources,” the U.S. Treasury Department wrote last year, announcing it had sanctioned numerous individuals and companies assisting Wagner with its operations in Africa.
Afrique Média TV, a Kremlin-linked media outlet that serves as a primary source for information about Wagner activities in Africa, has not discussed the incident or the mercenary group’s apparent interest in Kony. But on April 21, a Telegram channel known to be used by Wagner posted a statement saying the mercenary group had conducted an operation freeing “14 children enslaved by the terrorist group LRA for eight years.”
“During the operation, two generals, a colonel and six LRA militants were killed and weapons and ammunition were captured. Russian specialists transported the children safely to Bangui, where they are currently in the instructors’ camp awaiting the process of returning home,” the statement said.
A Wagner operative named “Viktor” — a pseudonym — known to be in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, did not respond meaningfully to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment. Efforts to reach a separate Wagner field operative in the Central African Republic by cellphone were unsuccessful.
The recent experience of an Italian adventurer in the Central African Republic suggests the group may be trying to soften its image in Africa.
Niccolò Monica has a unique perspective on Russian mercenary operations in Africa: Earlier this year, he was detained by Wagner in the Central African Republic, spending several days as their prisoner.
Monica, who was traveling overland from Cameroon to Chad through the Central African Republic as part of his long-term goal to visit every country in the world, was stopped by police at a checkpoint just 30 miles from the Chadian border, after days of travel through a perilous region that is rarely visited by outsiders.
“I like to cross borders,” Monica tells Rolling Stone. “They are always such an interesting geographical component. I cross many borders by land.”
Monica told the police he was a tourist. “They didn’t believe me,” he says.
Security forces were dismayed to encounter such an unusual visitor. They took Monica and his motorbike-taxi driver into custody, and called in Wagner.
“When I saw this group of giant, heavily armed soldiers coming towards me and saw the Wagner red skull logo on their hats, I thought I was dead,” says Monica. “For the first few minutes, I was very shaken, and the situation was quite surreal, but after five minutes, everything was much more chill. They didn’t handcuff me or use force — they just asked me to follow them. They didn’t try to get physical.”
The mercenaries took Monica to their operating base, where he was thoroughly questioned, searched, and inspected for tattoos or tell-tale scars that might reveal he was more than the simple tourist he claimed to be. However, the English-speaking mercenary brought in to conduct the interrogation behaved courteously and professionally, Monica says, adding: “I really felt that they had direct orders to be kind to me.”
Monica had been able to notify an Italian diplomat of his situation by text before being taken into custody, which touched off a storm of frantic high-level inquiries about his location and status from the Italian government. He was eventually released by Wagner to Central African Republic officials, who in turn handed him over to a series of diplomats, before he was flown back to Italy.
Monica says he is aware of Wagner’s reputation, which includes accusations that they have committed war crimes and were complicit in the assassination of three Russian investigative journalists in the Central African Republic. He thinks the treatment he was afforded was designed to send a message.
“One of the guys told me, ‘You see? Wagner is good. We made coffee for you and gave you nice friends to talk to,’” Monica says.
Such image-burnishing fits with the goal of the Wagner Group — and by extension, the Kremlin — of demonstrating it is a reliable partner in Africa. By backing Wagner’s security operations, Moscow not only gets a ready source of hard cash used to personally enrich Putin’s inner circle of siloviki — or security-state oligarchs — it also gains a lever of influence in countries like the Central African Republic and Syria. This is essential for Putin’s strategy to supplant and diminish Western influence globally.
Overall, U.S. strategic-military partnerships in Africa developed over the years of the Global War in Terror have begun to disintegrate. Key components of the American counterterror strategy have unraveled — including in Niger, where the leaders of a recent military coup are demanding that the U.S. withdraw, and in Mali, where the French military was also forced to withdraw after a military coup. Meanwhile, protesters across multiple African countries can now be seen carrying Russian flags and calling for the deployment of Wagner.
If Wagner were to catch a warlord that an American president personally ordered the Pentagon to kill or capture, to no avail, it would only further humiliate the U.S. It would also bolster Wagner’s image, demonstrating to governments that there is an alternative to Western intervention.
One former military officer familiar with U.S. operations targeting Kony admits that the Russian operation shows the mercenaries are on the right track: “It’s not the end of the Kony story, but it’s a continuation — and Wagner may give us the ending.”
The officer wryly notes there may be complications if Wagner accomplishes what American special forces could not. “How ironic would it be if the U.S. has to pay Wagner the $5 million bounty for catching Kony?” he says.
Legal hurdles would make such a payment unlikely, but U.S. government lawyers may soon have an opportunity to work such details out, he adds.
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.