CHICAGO – As political leaders have been campaigning for the Democratic Party and its nominees throughout the week, a contingent of Hollywood stars are making the case for the importance of funding the arts and the efficacy of the arts at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
They’re here with The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public advocacy organization that was formed in 1989. It’s led by actor Tim Daly, who serves as president, and CEO Robin Bronk. The organization has been bringing celebrities to both the DNC and RNC for 24 years.
I’ve been invited by the organization to exclusively trail the celebs — Yvette Nicole Brown, Dean Norris, Iain Armitage, Anthony Anderson, Uzo Aduba, Chris Witaske, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Yvette Nicole Brown, Busy Phillips, John Jacobs, Danai Gurira, Yolonda Ross, and Jon Cryer — as they meet with U.S. lawmakers and the general public to communicate how the arts impacts the world, not just those who make a career within them but youth programs that empower people over a lifetime across every kind of discipline.
“Our goals for being here are to meet people, collect more allies, and to also try to help people find some language to change the narrative about arts in this country,” Daly says, noting that England, whose population is a fifth of the size of the U.S. spends $1.4 billion, and Spain, which is less than a fifth of our population spends $1.6 billion, whereas the U.S. invests $200 million. Meanwhile, the first thing eliminated from U.S. schools is often arts programs.
“We have to make the case to people that arts are as important as math, science, history, and every other subject… So if we can convince people of that, which I think we are quite good at, then hopefully people all across this country will realize that if their kid plays in the band or acts in the school play or paints a mural, or does break dancing, that it gives them an outlet, a way of keeping their imagination and their creativity alive, so that whatever they become — an engineer, a gardener, a professional artist — they will have the enrichment of that experience,” he adds.
The organization also works to make positive impacts on social welfare concerns, such as homecare and being caregivers, a cause Brown and I discuss as being paramount, and it’s also personal. Her father has Alzheimer’s disease. She is the chairwoman of the Creative Coalition’s Entertainment Industry Commission on Caregiving and also just launched a podcast yesterday called Squeezed to help caregivers navigate the often-heartbreaking role. “[It] is all about those of us who are caregivers, those that know that they’re caregivers, and those that don’t. And it’s basically a love letter to those that care and those they care for. And it’s a way for us to feel less alone.”
The weekly podcast will include a variety of guests, “from parents to people that are parenting their parents. We talk to a couple of death doulas,” she explains. “We’re hitting care and grief, and we’re hitting all the points that are a part of the caregivers journey” along with those who are receiving the care, she says. “A lot of people that are caregivers don’t even call themselves caregivers… Every one of us is either going to be one or receive care before we leave this Earth. And so this podcast is for everyone to prepare you if it hasn’t happened to you yet, and to be a safe place to land for those that are in the trenches.”
Dean Norris, who has attended two DNC conventions thus far as part of the Creative Coalition (the first being in 2016 and he was also invited to the 2020 RNC but was working at the time), understands the impact of the arts on young people. He and his wife Bridget formed N-PAC Norris Performing Arts Center, which includes dance, theater, vocal, and acting programs.
“We realized that arts were being defunded,” he explains of the reason they created the space in Southern California eight years ago. “And it’s been so such a blessing. It’s given kids a place to go, where they feel comfortable, where they can express themselves.”
The center offers small classes and has 300 students. “This gives kids a chance to find their people, because they can’t find their people necessarily in high school anymore,” with drama programs being cut from schools. “When I see the kids, like the joy that they have of having a place where they can do this and experience and have like-minded people.”
The star power is evident throughout events that take place on Tuesday and Wednesday at the DNC. A private dinner draws luminaries including Kamala Harris’ campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez, a POTUS speech writer, the CEO of Miramax, and execs from different Fortune 500 companies.
We travel together on a private bus to various events, including the convention at the United Center. On the way on Tuesday, there’s palpable excitement in the air, as this is the first time several of the actors — including hometown The Bear actor Witaske — have ever attended a DNC convention. As the bus drives by Chicago’s Trump Tower someone boos the building. When we arrive, the group splinters to take in the night’s events.
On Wednesday, the stars have a full itinerary of events, including a lunch program called “51 Stars D.C. Statehood: Making a Case for Kindness and Equity,” where each actor reads inspiring quotes to attendees, who later swarm them to take photos and chat. “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world,” Busy Phillips reads, quoting Desmond Tutu. Among the dignitaries in attendance at the Kindness event are Reverend Jesse Jackson. Filmmaker Steven Sawalich screens the trailer for his film, A Case for Kindness.
I speak with the youngest member of the celebs at this year’s DNC, and the youngest The Creative Coalition has ever brought to a convention, 16-year-old Iain Armitage, of Young Sheldon. The prodigious actor, whose first role was playing Ziggy on Big Little Lies at age 7, is also a voracious music fan. We discuss the use of music during the roll call (and tons of other music, too, including him singing songs in both English and Russian). Born in Savannah, Georgia, he gives props to his home state’s roll call, though he enjoyed all of it. “I am a massive music fan. And I think one really cool thing was getting to hear every state really, really represent themselves, because music is pretty much, in my opinion, at least, the ultimate form of representation everyone goes through in their life,” he says. “I think naturally, everybody has a playlist of their lives… And I think getting to hear people really show up and represent through music, it’s just an awesome thing, always.”
We make another quick stop at an event about clean energy, before we head to the convention, where once again, each of them is swarmed by fans, pulled away for media interviews, and are invited into private suites to watch the night’s speakers who include Oprah Winfrey.
The Creative Coalition’s big gala thrown with Giffords Law Center, Reproductive Freedom for all Foundation, and End Citizens United Let America Vote Action Fund takes place at Ramova Theatre following Wednesday’s convention. The night’s entertainment, Drive-by Truckers and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, drew D.C. elites, including Sens. Mark Kelly, Chris Murphy, Catherine Cortez Maso, and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Diana DeGette, Sharice Davids, Gabe Amo, and Andrea Salinas, along with Mayors Jacob Frey (Minneapolis) and Kate Gallego (Phoenix) and EMILYs list President Jessica Mackler all on the tony guest list. They, along with the stars, cut loose until 2 a.m.
“It’s an ecosystem where really hard work and grassroots is rewarded, because it’s the delegates who are the real celebrities,” Bronk says of their DNC participation and the events surrounding it. “And we know our place there. The Creative Coalition — as I call it, the 51st state of Hollywood — we’re there as observers to learn and to bring the superpower of Hollywood to bear on the country and where the pendulum of priority swings, so that we’re the supporting cast. It’s nice to see that there’s an ecosystem where hard work, love of community, and love of country is rewarded.”
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.