This article is being published in partnership with the watchdog group Documented.
An organized and well-funded network of right-wing groups is spending countless millions attacking a bipartisan election reform that could threaten the MAGA political project.
Ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, rather than just selecting one — has been used in state and federal elections in Alaska and Maine, and it has been gaining momentum in dozens of other states and municipalities, often with bipartisan support. Voters in Nevada and Oregon will hold referendums on adopting the system in 2024, and several other state and local governments have also been considering ranked-choice voting measures.
But beginning in early 2022, and intensifying in 2023, a range of so-called “election integrity” groups, from Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project to Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, have made stopping ranked-choice voting a top legislative priority.
Five states have since banned any city or county government from adopting the system, and at least six other states are considering similar measures this year. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) approved a model bill banning ranked-choice voting last year, a Turning Point Action official successfully pressed the Republican National Committee to adopt a resolution opposing the practice, and the Heritage Foundation has organized grassroots activists to oppose ranked-choice voting in several states.
The far-right fixation on ranked-choice voting “is a bit bizarre,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s Law School. “It’s not really an issue of ‘honest elections’ or ‘election integrity,’” he said. “It’s a debate about the best way to translate voters’ preferences into election winners.
“I would guess,” Hasen said, “that the reason for the fear of ranked-choice voting is that it could help elect more Republican moderates rather than more extreme Republicans.”
Ranked-choice voting is one of the few — if not the only — democracy reforms that still has bipartisan support. For example, 21 cities in deep-red Utah use ranked-choice voting, where it is broadly popular, and bills to implement it have attracted Republican co-sponsors in states like Wisconsin, Virginia, and Georgia. The organized attacks on ranked-choice voting appear aimed at eroding support for the reform among Republican lawmakers and conservative activists.
Groups backed by right-wing activist Leonard Leo are playing an outsized role in the campaign against ranked-choice voting. Leo, who served as former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, helped construct the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. In 2021, he was put in control of a $1.6 billion dark money fund to help push U.S. politics to the right.
While Leo’s relationship with Trump has frayed — he reportedly considered boosting another MAGA-aligned candidate, Ron DeSantis, in the GOP presidential primary — the success of his political project relies on electing far-right candidates under the same system that produced Trump.
RCV, the MAGA Killer
Ranked-choice voting, also known as RCV or instant runoff voting, does not provide a clear benefit to Republican or Democratic candidates generally. But it could make it harder for MAGA candidates to get elected.
Trump and other MAGA candidates generally have not won elections with majority support, but have achieved a degree of electoral success by winning a plurality in divided and often low-turnout primaries with backing from a militant far-right base, before relying on gerrymandered districts, the spoiler effect of third parties, and/or suppressed Democratic turnout to squeak through in the general. By allowing voters to rank their preferred candidates, RCV can give non-MAGA candidates a better shot.
Trump’s 2024 campaign offers an illustration of this. Trump’s path to victory in the general election could rely on third party candidates — like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West — shaving points off Biden’s support in key states. That inference is supported by the fact that Trump megadonors are backing RFK Jr. while also financing Trump. (Trump’s allies ran a version of this play in 2020 with their behind-the-scenes support for Kanye West’s doomed third-party campaign.)
Ranked-choice voting would upend this spoiler strategy. A progressive voter could rank, say, West first, and Biden second; if West didn’t clear 50 percent in the first round, then the vote would go to Biden. Third party candidates wouldn’t play the spoiler — or, put another way, a voter could support the candidate they prefer, and also designate a backup choice, rather than being forced to only choose between the lesser of two evils.
(A key advocate for banning ranked-choice voting is acutely familiar with this spoiler effect. Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R), who led an anti-RCV session at the recent Turning Point Action summit and has long been affiliated with the right-wing group, was also secretly involved in an illegal 2018 effort to run Facebook ads boosting left-wing Green Party candidates in swing states.)
Down-ballot races also illustrate how ranked-choice voting might threaten the MAGA political project. Far-right lawmakers generally make it to Congress by winning low-turnout primaries with just a plurality of the vote, then coasting to election in safely Republican districts. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), for example, won just 36 percent of the vote in his first primary, and hasn’t faced a serious primary challenger since. As a recent FairVote analysis described, this has left Gaetz and other far-right lawmakers accountable to a small minority of activist primary voters; their only fear is a primary challenge from the right, which incentivizes bomb throwing rather than governing.
MAGA Opposition to RCV Grows in 2022
The effort to ban RCV started in Tennessee. In early 2022, Tennessee’s governor signed a bill banning the use of RCV in the state, ending a long-running dispute with the city of Memphis, whose residents had repeatedly voted to adopt RCV. (A few months later, the bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Sen. Brian Kelsey, would plead guilty to two criminal federal campaign finance charges.) That was followed by Florida banning RCV as part of an omnibus election package, and then a wave of reports, op-eds, and media appearances from an array of right-wing groups trashing “rigged choice voting.” Even Project Veritas published a “Ranked Voting EXPOSED” video before imploding.
Publicly, right-wing groups critique RCV because it is favored by progressive donors, and they claim it is so confusing that it “disenfranchises” voters — an especially rich claim coming from groups that otherwise seek to make access to the ballot box more onerous.
“The Left has railed against simple election laws like voter ID for years. Now many liberal donors are pushing ranked-choice voting (RCV), even though it has repeatedly been shown that RCV makes it harder to vote, risks longer lines at the polls, and discourages participation,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Leo-backed Honest Elections Project, in a statement to Rolling Stone and Documented. (RCV supporters dispute those claims, pointing to post-election polls from RCV jurisdictions suggesting voters overwhelmingly understand and like the system, and noting that voter participation increased in many RCV elections, especially among young people.)
The MAGA opposition to ranked-choice voting intensified after the 2022 elections in Alaska. In that race, Alaska voters returned moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski to office, despite Trump’s attempt to exact revenge for Murkowski supporting his impeachment after Jan. 6. Murkowski prevailed over a far-right Trump-backed challenger by attracting the second-place rankings of the 10 percent of voters who listed the Democratic candidate as their first choice. Alaska voters also thwarted Sarah Palin’s attempted comeback by reelecting Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, thanks in part to Republican voters ranking Peltola as their second choice. (Notably, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system actually helped Republicans win in down-ballot races.)
Palin blamed her loss on ranked-choice voting, and is now supporting an effort to repeal Alaska’s system, teaming up with a right-wing megachurch minister who has openly practiced LGBTQ “conversion therapy,” claimed that COVID vaccines cause “spontaneous abortions” in 80 percent of pregnant people, and who set up a fake church to secretly bankroll the anti-ranked-choice voting repeal effort (which is likely to appear on the November ballot).
The national efforts to oppose ranked-choice voting are slightly less insane than the Alaska campaign, or at least better organized.
The wide-ranging, coordinated right-wing campaign against RCV was illustrated earlier this year in Wisconsin, where a bipartisan bill to implement RCV moved to a hearing in February, triggering opposing testimony from a range of right-wing groups, including Leo’s Honest Elections Project; the advocacy arm of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has been backed by Leo as well as the billionaire cardboard box magnate Dick Uihlein; and the Uihlein-backed Election Transparency Initiative.
The Election Integrity Network — the network of state-based election conspiracy theorists led by former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell — also distributed anti-RCV talking points and messaging guidance to MAGA activists in Wisconsin. Mitchell supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the then-president urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes; she narrowly escaped indictment, and has become a leader in the movement to undermine democracy.
Nationally, Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has also been hosting a regular coalition call focused specifically on ranked-choice voting that includes state activists and national players. In 2022, Election Integrity Network activists played key roles in driving grassroots opposition to bipartisan pro-RCV measures in states like Virginia, Georgia, and Illinois, as well as Wisconsin.
The Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm has also urged its grassroots activists to pressure lawmakers on RCV measures in states like Texas, Utah, and Georgia, and its representatives have testified in support of RCV bans in states like Arizona. It has also been holding grassroots anti-RCV events in states like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Arizona, and sponsored a multi–part ranked–choice voting “Special Report” that aired on the fringe Real America’s Voice network.
“Polarization is Sometimes Good”
Despite public claims about RCV supposedly “disenfranchising” voters, privately, right-wing leaders acknowledge that ranked-choice voting threatens the MAGA political project.
For example, at an August 2023 event in Arizona, Gina Swoboda — who is the executive director of the Dick Uihlein-backed Voter Reference Foundation and the Trump-endorsed chair of the Arizona Republican Party — declared that “polarization is sometimes good,” and described how RCV would make it harder for MAGA to keep pushing the GOP to the right.
“The entire purpose of ranked-choice voting,” Swoboda claimed, is “to eliminate the political parties altogether. It will force the candidates to run for the middle like they are in a general election, and then they will not take the positions that we need them to commit to.”
Snead, of the Honest Elections Project, has also echoed the idea that ranked-choice voting would disadvantage extreme right candidates — and additionally claimed that it would somehow advantage “dark-money groups,” which is a jaw-dropping declaration from an organization founded by Leonard Leo, whose dark money network has funded groups fighting to protect dark money, and who has personally defended the virtue of secret political spending.
Speaking on Real America’s Voice network in June of 2023, Snead said, “I think that their calculus is you change the dynamic of elections, push our politics to the center left, make it harder for conservatives to get elected without that party primary and then of course you displace the parties themselves, allowing these dark-money groups to step in and have even more influence over our politics.”
Snead specified that he was referring to “outside and independent expenditure groups funded by folks like George Soros,” the liberal billionaire.
This was not a one-off line of attack. Soros conspiracy theories are common among RCV critics. In fact, the title of Snead’s new book is The Case Against Ranked-Choice Voting: How George Soros and Other Billionaires Use a ‘Dark Money’ Empire to Transform America. His co-author is Trent England, the head of a group called Save Our States that was founded to defend the undemocratic electoral college, but is increasingly targeting ranked-choice voting.
Along with Snead, England is embedded within Leo’s network. Both are full-time employees of Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the group’s most recent tax filings. Snead’s Honest Elections Project is itself a project of 85 Fund, and England’s Save Our States now appears to have a similar status, with funding to the group flowing through 85 Fund. For example, the Bradley Foundation’s 2022 tax filing shows that a $200,000 grant to support Save Our States was routed through 85 Fund (under the fund’s earlier name, the Judicial Education Project). As Rolling Stone first reported, Leo’s network also recently set up a new pair of legal entities, with iterations of “Save Our States” and “Honest Elections Project” listed as trade names.
Snead and England are more than just co-authors and co-workers at Leonard Leo’s network. They’re also co-chairs of the “Stop RCV” coalition alongside a front group created by notorious corporate PR flak Richard Berman — described as “Dr. Evil” in a 60 Minutes profile — and several members of the State Policy Network.
One coalition member is the Maine Policy Institute. Last year, the institute’s “Maine Wire” podcast conducted a wide-ranging interview with Leo last year in which the financier noted that he was supporting the group. The coalition has developed model legislation banning RCV, and Snead has testified in support of RCV bans in states like Montana, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
This constellation of Leo-backed groups also have their fingerprints on an ALEC model bill banning ranked-choice voting, which the “bill mill” adopted at its 2023 annual meeting and subsequently promoted as a top model policy. (ALEC’s CEO had previously said the group would be outsourcing its election reform work to Honest Elections Project.) ALEC has been described as a “pay to play” operation, and this is no exception; Honest Elections Project sponsored ALEC’s annual meeting at the “Vice Chairman” level, which cost at least $25,000 the prior year, and Save Our States was a “Trustee” level sponsor, which cost $5,000 in 2022. The Stop RCV coalition also kicked in, paying to slap its logo on the hotel keycards used by conference attendees and to host an exhibition booth.
Much of the technical support for the RCV attacks is coming from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), which played a key role in helping to craft and support RCV bans in multiple states. FGA has received millions from Leo’s network and from Uihlein, who is a key backer of election denial.
Representatives of FGA and its advocacy arm testified in support of RCV bans in states like South Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin and Montana, according to Documented’s review of state records. FGA additionally published a report, launched a “Ranked Choice Voting is a Disaster” microsite, and has published multiple op-eds opposing RCV.
Ranked-Choice Voting “Makes our Democracy Better for All Voters”
England, of Save Our States, has emphasized that it isn’t just MAGA-world hating on RCV — some Democrats dislike it, as well. “The D.C. and Nevada Democratic parties oppose RCV, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom has opposed its expansion, and many jurisdictions across the country have tried and then rejected it,” England said in a statement to Rolling Stone and Documented.
The fact that some officials in both major parties oppose RCV isn’t surprising, said Chris Saxman, a Republican and former Virginia lawmaker.
“Party leaders want to be in control of the nominating processes,” Saxman said, and both Democratic and Republican party bosses would prefer that voters be “stuck with a binary choice in the general election.”
Despite efforts to make RCV toxic for conservatives, Saxman and other Republicans are eager to see ranked-choice voting expand, arguing that it can actually strengthen parties.
The Virginia Republican Party, for example, used ranked-choice voting to choose Glenn Youngkin as their gubernatorial nominee in 2021, rather than a more MAGA-fied candidate. He prevailed in the general election, depriving Democrats of trifecta control of state government.
Ranked-choice voting “turned around a near-death experience for the Republican Party in Virginia,” Saxman said. For Republicans, “the successes of RCV in Virginia should be obvious.”
“Ranked-choice voting is a completely neutral, process-based reform that favors neither party,” said Kevin Hancock, Strategic Litigation Director at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “RCV also just gives voters more choice — basic common sense that makes our democracy better for all voters.”
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.