The Democratic National Convention wrapped up Thursday night with Kamala Harris accepting the party’s nomination for president. It was a rousing end to a four-day party in Chicago’s United Center, one that was jam-packed with big-name speakers, bumping musical performances, and unbridled enthusiasm over Harris’ campaign, which is somehow only a month old with the election right around the corner.
The DNC has been lauded as a success, providing a powerful launchpad for Harris and her running mate Tim Walz to bring home their campaign for the White House — but the week still featured its share of WTF moments. The logistics around the arena were not ideal, the fossil-fuel industry was present, and the Democratic Party refused to allow a pro-Palestine voice to speak onstage.
Here are some of the most memorable moments from the convention, good and bad:
THE BEST
Harris and Walz blowing the roof off the arena
If Walz is the campaign’s coach, Harris is its quarterback, and the two are in lock-step.
On Wednesday, Walz delivered what he described as a “pep talk” for the nation from their coach. “Let me finish with this, team,” he said. “It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team. Kamala Harris is tough. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready.”
That message carried into Friday, when Harris delivered her own acceptance speech and made the case for herself as the best candidate to take on Trump. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said, but the consequences “of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
The two speeches exemplified the balance between the candidates on the Democratic ticket, with Walz acting as the campaign’s motivator and hype man while giving Harris the space to lean into her career roots and prosecute the case against Trump.
The roll call
The most reliably boring part of every party nominating convention is the roll call vote, during which delegates from every state and territory cast their votes for the prospective candidates. It wasn’t boring at the 2024 DNC.
DJ Cassidy, whose resume includes Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s wedding as well as Obama White House parties, selected songs to represent every delegation — in many cases with help from the delegations. Highlights included Chappell Roan for Missouri, Kendrick Lamar for California, Tom Petty for Florida, Kansas for Kansas, and the Dropkick Murphys for Massachusetts.
But the unquestionable star of the roll call was Georgia, whose moment in the spotlight featured an in-person appearance by Lil Jon, who performed his hits “Shots” and “Turn Down for What.”
The return of Michelle Obama (and also her husband)
It’s been more than 10 years since former First Lady Michelle Obama gave a nationally televised address, and her return to the DNC blew the roof off of the United Center.
Obama called back to the election of her husband, former President Barack Obama, speaking about “the contagious power of hope” generated by the enthusiasm surrounding Harris’ campaign.
The former first lady has never been shy about calling balls and strikes, but Tuesday’s speech was a far cry from her infamous declaration that “when they go low, we go high,” and she had no qualms about publicly eviscerating Trump. “I want to know who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said.
“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work in America, we do something,” she added to ground-shaking cheers from the audience.”
Michelle’s address may have stolen the show from her husband’s headlining speech, with the former president even quipping that he’s “the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama.”
That big Project 2025 book
Ideas can often be hard to translate into real-world action. Conservatives hoping for another Trump presidency decided to write all of their worst ones down in Project 2025, a 900-page plan to restrict the rights of Americans and give the president an unprecedented amount of power.
Multiple DNC speakers used a giant physical copy of Project 2025 as a prop to represent the Republican agenda.
Host Keenan Thompson stole the bit though, asking the audience if they’d ever seen “a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”
Taking aim at Trump
Democrats have long been propping Trump up as a menacing force set to dismantle American democracy. Speakers at the DNC appeared to adopt a new tactic in taking on the former president: reframing Trump as a subject of mockery.
Democrats trolled the president Sunday night by projecting “Trump-Vance Weird as Hell” onto Trump Tower in Chicago. The next night, Golden State Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr joked that in November “we can tell Donald Trump ‘night night,’” mimicking Steph Curry’s famous sleep celebration. The next night, the Obamas both made fun of Trump, with Michelle making a dig about how the presidency could be a “Black job” and Barack mocking his obsession with crowd sizes, making a gesture with his that many took to represent the small size of something else. Earlier that night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called him a “two-bit union buster who thinks of himself as more of a patriot than a woman who fights to lift working people up every single day.” On Wednesday, Bill Clinton made fun of Trump’s obsessions with Hannibal Lecter while turning the focus to his self-obsession, imploring Ameircans to “count the I’s, not the lies” when he speaks. Walz called him “weird” again later that night. Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger said he was a “weak man pretending to be strong, a small man pretender to be big” on Thursday, before Harris labeled him as “unserious” during her acceptance speech. Harris cautioned, though, that the consequences should he win in November would be plenty serious.
The musical performances
Beyonce may not have performed as was rumored on Thursday night, but the DNC still featured a star-studded rolodex of musicians who helped turn the convention into a spectacle. Stevie Wonder, John Legend, The Chicks, Pink, and Maren Morris were all featured in the lineup. Lil Jon also made a surprise appearance during the delegation roll call, and the Chicago Bulls’ drumline made the convention feel like a party.
The emotions
For all the performances and inspirational speeches, the DNC was also a deeply emotional event, full of heart-wrenching testimony about the way policy has impacted the lives of Americans.
On Tuesday, several women shared their experiences attempting to secure life saving reproductive care in states with abortion bans. On Wednesday, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American hostage kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, delivered an emotional plea for the return of their son, the other remaining hostages, and a ceasefire that “ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza.” On Thursday, gun violence survivors, their families, and classmates spoke of the trauma they lived through.
The gut wrenching segments echoes the very personal stories shared by some of the convention’s biggest names. President Joe Biden shared an emotional moment with his daughter, Ashley, who introduced him before his primetime speech on Monday night — which included plenty of gratitude from the crowd for the president. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) teared up on Tuesday while sharing a story about Harris’s support for her when she first arrived to Congress, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had to take a moment to collect herself after receiving a more than a minute long standing ovation on Thursday.
Walz’s speech on Wednesday was also highly emotional. His story about conceiving using fertility treatments and a profession of his love for his family in the audience led to tears from just about everyone. “Hope, Gus, and Gwen: you are my entire world and I love you,” Walz said.
THE WTF
Palestinian erasure
The DNC snubbed the Uncommitted Movement — which represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “uncommitted” during the primary to show their support of Palestine — refusing give a pro-Palestine voice time to speak in the United Center.
“I was working on it every day for the past week or more,” James Zogby, a former member of the DNC’s executive committee, told Rolling Stone. “The campaign made a mistake — an unforced error. This didn’t have to happen the way it did and now needs to be fixed.”
Democrats provided a forum that wasn’t televised for the movement, which held a sit-in outside of the arena when they learned they wouldn’t be allowed into the main event Wednesday night. “I was incredibly honored to be considered,” Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American and member of Georgia’s legislature who hoped to give a speech at the convention, told Rolling Stone on Thursday.
Fossil-fuel companies sponsoring events
Not only has the climate crisis not exactly been at the forefront of the Democratic Party’s messaging lately, an off-site event hosted by Punchbowl News was sponsored by ExxonMobil. Climate activists, including DNC member RL Miller, disrupted the event. “Exxon lies, people die!” they chanted.
“Companies like Exxon should have no place at the DNC,” the Sunrise Movement said in a statement. “Exxon has spent decades misleading the public about the climate crisis and buying off politicians. If the Democratic Party wants to be taken seriously by our generation on climate change, they need to walk the talk.”
Conservatives going “undercover”
Is that three raccoons in a Kamala Harris bomber? Or is it just right-wing extremist Matt Walsh wearing a wig?
Members and supporters of the opposite party are always present at nominating conventions, but, for some reason, several prominent Republican figures thought putting on the equivalent of chunky glasses and a mustache would make them unrecognizable to the most politically obsessed crowd in the nation.
Walsh was spotted wearing what looked like a dollar-store wig and an array of Harris pins. Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec attempted to infiltrate a pro-Palestinian protest outside of the DNC wearing sunglasses and a keffiyeh. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe opted for a mask, glasses, and beanie to cover most of his face.
Probably the most embarrassing display came from MyPillow founder and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, who shaved his mustache and donned a jaunty fedora in an attempt to disguise his identity — only to be outed by 12-year-old political influencer Knowa.
Did Lindell try to debate a 12-year-old? Yes. Did he lose? Also yes.
Conservative freaking out because Democratic families love each other
Conservatives took to social media to call Doug Emhoff “weird” for having what appears to be a good relationship with his daughter Ella — whose tattoos and fashion sense have been a lightning rod for buttoned-up conservatives — and Biden “creepy” for hugging his daughter Ashley after she introduced him on Monday.
They later mocked Tim Walz’s son Gus, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, for crying as his father expressed his love for his family during his acceptance speech on Wednesday. “Talk about weird,” Ann Coulter wrote.
Bad fact-checks
Fact-checking politicians is a critical charge of the American press, but during the DNC some outlets have been inexplicably twisting themselves into pretzels to soften Trump’s position on key electoral issues.
The New York Times rated President Joe Biden’s claim that Trump “created the largest debt any president had in four years,” as “misleading,” because — even though Trump did “rack up more debt than any other in raw dollars” — the debt incurred under Obama during his eight-year term was larger. Four versus eight … math is hard, but not that hard.
When Biden said on Monday that Trump wanted to cut Medicare, PolitiFact rated the statement “mostly false” even though Trump repeatedly proposed cutting Medicare during his presidency and in March told reporters that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.” But because Trump has backpedaled from the position now that he’s running a tight race for the White House, voters should apparently take him at his word.
Perhaps the most egregious “fact-check” came from The Washington Post, which attempted to push back on Biden’s claim that “Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.” The Post countered that “Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
Make it make sense.
Logistical chaos
The DNC was beset by organizational mishaps, with people waiting hours to get into the United Center on Monday. The programming suffered some setbacks, as well, with delays forcing the cancellation of a performance from James Taylor so Joe Biden could take the stage at a reasonable hour on Monday. He still wasn’t able to come on until after primetime, however, with his speech wrapping up after midnight on the East Coast. The DNC blamed the delays on the “raucous applause” causing speakers to take longer than anticipated.
The issues weren’t confined to Monday. The DNC reportedly told journalists on Thursday that they could not be guaranteed entry if they left the arena to go to the bathroom, and at a certain point stopped letting people onto the floor, even turning away Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who spoke at the convention earlier that night.
Trump’s counter-programming
Trump did all he could to wrest the spotlight away from the DNC … kind of. The former president held a series of events during the week, but he wasn’t able to muster much energy — or anything new to say outside of sprinkling fresh batch of sensationalism on his well-worn talking points. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread or you get shot,” he claimed, absurdly, during an event to address crime in Michigan. “You get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be.”
He was also on the defensive. During an event intended to focus on the economy in Pennsylvania, Trump tried to convince factory workers that he’s normal, despite Democrats now regularly alleging that he and his running mate J.D. Vance are weird. “I think we’re extremely normal people,” he insisted.
Trump didn’t do much for his argument that he’s totally not weird by having a full-fledged, multi-platform meltdown during and after Harris’ acceptance speech on Thursday.
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.