Now that Democrats have coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as their presumptive nominee in the 2024 election, the party has been free to use a line of attack on Donald Trump that he and Republicans had leveled at President Biden: He’s too old, he’s in cognitive decline, and he’s lost touch with reality.
A normal candidate might try to counter those claims by staying on message and avoiding any mention of mental asylums. Trump is apparently uninterested in such a strategy, and has therefore continued to include a puzzling shoutout in his stump speech after first adding it to his rally routine last year. When he gets on the topic of migrants, he consistently ends up talking about Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibalistic murderer featured in thriller novels by author Thomas Harris and their various film and TV adaptations, including the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
How did Trump end up name-checking Lecter as part of his pitch to the MAGA base? Responding to a request for comment on the matter, campaign communications director Steven Cheung replied, “President Trump is an inspiring and gifted storyteller and referencing pop culture is one of many reasons why he can successfully connect with the audience and voters. Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
Absent any further explanation, a forensic review of the former president’s speeches over the past year is in order. What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.
July 2023: “That’s like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff.”
Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on July 29, 2023, Trump alluded to the film that had introduced Lecter to millions of moviegoers. “People are pouring across the border now, disease-ridden people,” he warned the crowd. “And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from insane asylums,” he claimed, falsely. “That’s like Silence of the Lambs stuff. But they’re coming in to our country.”
Trump had repeated “insane asylums” line enough by then that various media outlets had already debunked it, but the nod to The Silence of the Lambs seemed to be an ad-lib. Moving past this brief aside, the former president did not embark on a digression about Lecter himself. But, as we shall see, the iconic villain would eventually take the spotlight in Trump’s rants on border security.
October 2023: “You know why I like him? Because he said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump.'”
As legal prosecutions of Trump got underway in New York and Georgia last year, many commentators joked about the idea of Trump being confined to the kind of glass prison cell Dr. Lecter inhabits for most of The Silence of the Lambs, or muzzled and straitjacketed as the character is when police are transporting him elsewhere. But Trump himself did not mention Lecter until two rallies in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Oct. 7, that mainly focused on his economic policies (with some shots at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, then his rival in the Republican primaries).
At the earlier event in Waterloo, Trump launched into his usual anti-immigration rhetoric and spoke about a supposed “invasion” at the border. “Think of it, the people coming in, think of it,” he said. “They’re from prisons and jails.” He went on to claim that migrants are “from mental institutions and insane asylums, noting that “an insane asylum is like Silence of the Lamb [sic] stuff. That’s serious stuff. That’s Hannibal Lecter. How good an actor was he? How good an actor was he? Did he play a good role, right? But insane asylums, they’re emptying them out.”
Later, in Cedar Rapids, going off-script after describing migrants as “vicious,” Trump recalled, “I said, that’s Silence of the Lamb [sic]. You know what that is? Has anybody seen Silence of the Lambs? Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television, or one of the — ‘I love Donald Trump.; So I love him, I love him.” Trump went on to joke that even if he were the “worst” actor, “I’d say he was great to me.”
Anthony Hopkins, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the performance Trump described, had neither endorsed nor professed his love for the former president. It’s possible, as some have speculated, that Trump had confused Hopkins with Jon Voight — a conservative actor close in age, with a passing resemblance — who vocally backed Trump’s 2016 run and said in a red carpet interview days after the Republican’s stunning upset victory, “I worked very hard for him. I love Donald Trump.”
But, since Trump appeared to recall neither man’s name, he wound up with a sound bite that suggested he thought Hannibal Lecter was the name of the actor in the film, and a fan of his.
November 2023: “We got him coming into this country now.”
Throughout October, Trump went on invoking Hannibal Lecter when stoking fears of migrants crossing the border, often noting that his campaign staffers had specifically asked him not to use the term “insane asylum” before segueing into the question “Did anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” (At a rally, in Sioux City, Iowa, he followed this up this question by observing: “The young people didn’t. The young ones didn’t. They don’t want to hear about Hannibal.”)
In a Houston rally in November, Trump called for mass deportations, again said he had been warned not to use the phrase “insane asylum,” and again used it as a jumping off point to ask if the crowd was familiar with Lecter. “Anybody ever heard of the wonderful Hannibal Lecter?” Trump asked. This time, he struck a less amused tone. “We got him coming into this country now, because other countries are dumping their people from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
Suddenly, the Lecter citations were far more ideological than Trump misremembering which Hollywood stars had said nice things about him — this would be the boogeyman to bolster his claims about Central and South American nations turning mentally unstable people loose. Which, again, are baseless.
December 2023 – April 2024: “Hannibal Lecter… they’re all being deposited into our country.”
Through the end of the year, as he prepared to dominate the 2024 Republican primaries, Trump implied to his crowds that without tighter border controls, Hannibal Lecters from foreign nations would infiltrate the country and wreak havoc on ordinary citizens. At a Jan. 16 rally in New Hampshire, this scenario grew more implausible still, with Trump saying it was “not just in South America” that dangerous individuals had gotten out of mental hospitals. “They’re closing them up all over the world, in Africa, in Asia, in Europe and the Middle East,” he blustered after saying of insane asylums, “That’s Silence of the Lambs. That’s Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump tried the material out on a bigger audience, too, when delivering remarks at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. “We have a new category, migrant crime,” he said during a 90-minute speech. “And it’s going to be more severe than violent crime and crime as we knew it.” The candidate next declared, “An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids. It’s Silence of the Lambs, okay? You know, the — Hannibal Lecter! They’re all being deposited into our country.”
While the bit regularly failed to get much of a reaction from people sitting through his rambling monologues, it was now obvious that Trump felt comfortable naming the cannibal psychiatrist in primetime. The Lecter comments began to make headlines, and from there, they only got more ridiculous.
May 2024: “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
On May 11, Trump visited Wildwood, New Jersey, and debuted a more exaggerated version of his Lecter riff. This time around, it felt as if he had just rewatched The Silence of the Lambs and had more narrative detail to draw upon.
“Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs?” Trump asked the crowd once he had started in on his false “insane asylums” migration claims. “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
In one fell swoop, Trump had latched on to one of the film’s most memorable lines (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”) and invented a catchphrase of his own — “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” — to go with it. Nobody could say for sure whether Trump believed Lecter, the character, had died (he doesn’t in any of the books or movies that feature him), or that Hopkins had (the actor, 86, remains in good health, while Brian Cox and Mads Mikkelsen, two other actors to play the character, are alive and well; it’s also extremely unlikely that Trump is familiar with the obscure prequel Hannibal Rising, whose French star, Gaspard Ulliel, died in a skiing accident in 2022). Maybe he just liked the rhyme.
In any event, the confusion around Trump’s views on Lecter created an entire media cycle, causing a reporter to shout “Why Hannibal Lecter?” at him outside the Manhattan courthouse where he was tried and convicted for falsifying business records. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live kicked off its season finale with a sketch about Trump considering who to add to his ticket as vice president — with Lecter himself one among several unappealing options.
June 2024: “If he suggests, ‘I’d like to have you for dinner,’ don’t go.”
By this summer, Trump had found a groove with the Lecter moments, and they grew increasingly detached from the “insane asylums” talking point that had inspired them in the first place. In most cases, he appeared to simply enjoy imagining the cultured and witty serial killer stalking his victims, and reliably described him as the “later, great Hannibal Lecter,” even warning supporters in Chesapeake, Virginia, “If he suggests, ‘I’d like to have you for dinner,’ don’t go.”
And, because outlets could now report that he was praising Lecter as “great” and “wonderful” — sarcastically or not — Fox News had to run defense, with anchors calling the story a “hoax” and arguing that Trump was “just playing around.” Trump, too, set about criticizing the reaction from “fake news” sources. “‘Oh, he likes Hannibal Lecter,'” he said, mocking media outlets during a keynote speech for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2024 Road to Majority Conference on June 22. There was a smattering of laughter from the conservative Christian activists in attendance. “No, they’re crazy,” Trump added.
July 2024: “These are real stories.”
The Lecter habit had at last gone so viral that a Deadline interviewer asked Anthony Hopkins about it in an article published in mid-July. The actor, who had had no idea Trump was mentioning his character on the campaign trail, was perplexed. “As if [Lecter] is real?” he asked, and laughed. “I’m shocked and appalled what you’ve told me about Trump,” he remarked.
But if Trump’s aides and speechwriters cautioned him not to bring up Hannibal Lecter at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July a few days after he survived an assassination attempt, he did not listen.
On July 18, delivering the longest ever presidential nomination acceptance speech by a candidate in the modern era — breaking his own 2016 record — Trump spoke for a tedious and unfocused 93 minutes, hitting the same notes as in his rally program. When he got to the usual doomsaying about migrants from foreign “insane asylums,” Trump took a beat and returned to his favorite subject. “You know, the press is always on me because I say this: Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before.”
All month, Trump tended to introduce the figure of Dr. Lecter — “a lovely man” — by noting that the press would respond with bafflement and alarm, as they had been for months. He was altogether defensive at a rally following the RNC in Charlotte, North Carolina: “You know, they go crazy when I say ‘the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” he said. “They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter, he must be cognitively in trouble?’ No, no. These are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb [sic].” In St. Cloud, Minnesota, he came up with another twist on the formula, singling out a specific person in the audience and joking that Lecter would eat them. “He’d love to have you for dinner,” Trump said, pointing. “You, right there.”
Political observers outside the MAGA faithful still want to understand the connection Trump keeps making between the border issue and The Silence of the Lambs. Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term “insane asylums” with the concept of “asylum seekers” — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as “an inspiring and gifted storyteller” neither confirms nor dispels this theory. But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Trump and his followers identify more with the murderous doctor than the FBI agents who locked him up. After all, Lecter didn’t raid Mar-a-Lago.
Update July 30, 4:34pm ET: This story has been updated to include comment from the Trump campaign.
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.