Culture war games: magnifica meat computers

The end of free market consensus
By Gary Gerstle

The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond election cycles. In the last 100 years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.

At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state able to govern the economic system in the public interest. The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.

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Political orders … are complex projects that require advances across a broad front. New ones do not arise very often; usually they appear when an older order founders amid an economic crisis that then precipitates a governing crisis. “Stagflation” precipitated the fall of the New Deal order in the 1970s; the global financial crash and ensuing recession of 2008-09 triggered the fracturing of the neoliberal order in the 2010s.

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In the United States, conservatism has long been the preferred term to frame the political developments that describe what I refer to as neoliberalism.

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Conservatism, in the classical sense, signifies respect for tradition, deference to existing institutions and the hierarchies that structure them, and suspicion of change. One can find manifestations of these ideas in American politics across the second half of the 20th century, most importantly in a widespread determination among white Southerners to maintain racial privilege in the era of civil rights and among Americans throughout the country who, in the name of tradition, were pushing back against liberation movements calling for equal rights for women and gay people, and for sexual freedom.

Other beliefs commonly associated with conservatism in America, however, do not fit comfortably under this political label. A celebration of free market capitalism, entrepreneurialism and economic risk-taking was central to Republican Party politics of the late 20th century. Yet this politics was not about maintaining tradition or the institutions that buttressed it; rather, it was about disrupting traditions and upending institutions that stood in the way.

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Neoliberalism prizes free trade, celebrates deregulation as an economic good and valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples. It hails globalization as a win-win position that both enriches the West (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. These creedal principles deeply shaped American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order.

Neoliberalism, then, sought to infuse political economy with the principles of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism (born in the 18th century) discerned in markets extraordinary dynamism and possibilities for generating trade, wealth and a rising standard of living. It sought to liberate markets from monarchy, mercantilism, bureaucracy, artificial borders and tariffs. It sought, in other words, to release the economy from the heavy hand of the state in its various guises. It wanted to allow people to move around in pursuit of self-interest and fortune. Classical liberalism wanted to let individual talent rise (or fall) to its natural level. It carried within it emancipatory, even utopian, hopes of people freed and a world transformed.

Every student of neoliberalism must pay careful attention to its harsh elements, including mechanisms of coercion used to impose market discipline on a society; support, sometimes ruthless, for pursuing capitalist accumulation; and an indifference to questions of economic equality and redistribution.

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The precise timing of the fall of the Soviet Union and of communism more generally — 1989-1991 — explains why the 1990s was a more decisive decade in neoliberalism’s triumph than the 1980s had been, and why Clinton’s role in securing neoliberalism’s triumph was in some ways more important than that of Reagan himself. After 1991, the pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class vanished. The room for political maneuver by class-based progressive forces narrowed dramatically. This was the moment when neoliberalism transitioned from a political movement to a political order.

Every political order contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among constituencies that it must manage; the neoliberal order was no exception in that regard. One such contradiction has already been noted: that which existed between those who saw neoliberalism as a strategy for enhancing rule by elites and those who saw in it a pathway toward personal emancipation.

Another lay in the uneasy coexistence within the neoliberal order of two strikingly different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life. One, which I label neo-Victorian, celebrated self-reliance, strong families and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality and consumption. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family — heterosexual and led by male patriarchs. Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in their members and especially in the young, and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. This view found a mass base in Jerry Falwell’s legions of evangelical Christians, mobilized politically as part of an influential religious organization known as the Moral Majority.

The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order, which I label cosmopolitan, saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance and prescribed social roles. In the United States, this moral perspective drew energy from the liberation movements originating in the New Left of the 1960s and flourished in the era of the neoliberal order. Cosmopolitanism rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living.

The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.

The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists and immigrants, and for stigmatizing lower-income Black people for their “culture of poverty.” The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph — the 1990s — was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars.”

The End of Neoliberalism
By Branko Milanovic

If one were to define neoliberal globalization during the 40-year period from the early 1980s to around 2020, one could say it was driven by two ideas: cosmopolitanism and competition.

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Cosmopolitanism meant that every individual in the world was to be thought of as equally important and equally capable of economic improvement if they faced optimal economic conditions—which implied security of private property, free trade, low taxes, and a “tolerable administration of justice.”

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Cosmopolitanism was also the political idea underpinning a neoliberal world where national government as such would be out of sight and would leave individuals free to pursue their self-interest. This was, ideally, a world of small or almost invisible government.

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For cosmopolitanism to create global wealth and prosperity, the world also had to be competitive. Not only would people be allowed to compete with (or against) one another regardless of national borders, but they also needed to be stimulated to compete by the display of all the goods that could be theirs and by the societal approval they would command if they won in that competition.

Competition produced global growth: Between 1980 and 2020-21, the average world GDP per capita more than doubled, jumping from $7,700 (in 2005 international dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity) to almost $17,000. This makes the worldwide yearly average growth rate 2.1 percent per capita, an extraordinarily high rate for a period of 40 years. (And this despite the increase of the world population from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 8.3 billion now.) The more than doubling of per capita income combined with an almost doubling of the world population means that the total amount of goods and services produced in the world quadrupled during the era of neoliberal globalization.

But this “anonymous” growth rate, realized principally thanks to the high growth rates of Asian countries and notably China, did not help neoliberals’ case in rich countries. What was politically salient was not the 2.1 percent global rate but the fact that in the United States and in most rich Western countries, much of the population registered real (adjusted for inflation) growth rates of approximately 1 percent per year, while incomes of the rich grew two to three times faster.

Moreover, the neoliberal period (dated from Ronald Reagan’s presidency onward) was not only pro-rich, in the sense that incomes of the rich increased faster than those of the middle class and the poor. It also represented a slowdown in across-the-board growth compared with the preceding period. In fact, at every point of U.S. income distribution—except at the very top—growth was slower during the neoliberal era than during the previous decade and a half.

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The winners of neoliberal globalization in rich countries—inspired precisely by their cosmopolitanism, which they regarded as a moral virtue (being free of poisonous nationalism)—were quick not only to treat their less fortunate compatriots’ welfare as of no greater importance as the welfare of a foreigner or a stranger but also to believe that their compatriots’ failure in such an open competition was indicative of some moral flaw. Economic success meant being virtuous, or as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose rise to power coincided almost perfectly with those of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, did not deny: “To be rich is glorious.”

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The less fortunate compatriots felt forgotten and ignored, and they were resentful of the way in which they were treated. They saw the readiness, even eagerness, of the rich to invest in faraway places as callousness toward domestic workers.

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The malcontents who in previous times would equally replenish extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing parties, as they did during the Great Depression in the 1930s, had now much less choice. The left-wing parties were either discredited by the failure of the “real-existing socialism” or, through their accommodative third-way policies, seen as accomplices of the center-right parties in promoting the type of neoliberal globalization that so disenchanted Western working and middle classes. Indeed, the peak of neoliberal globalization was achieved under the notionally left-wing governments of Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the U.K., and François Mitterrand in France.

So the disappointed masses turned toward the right-wing parties that promoted national solidarity, an end to the (economically) equal treatment of the domestic population and foreigners, and even a return of industrial jobs. In the international arena, neoliberal globalization thus became increasingly replaced by neomercantilism, which used economic coercion, the seizure of foreign assets, import bans, and extravagant tariff policies to cut, or at least control, the free flow of goods and services. Free flow of labor was even easier to cut because its political popularity, even at the peak of neoliberal globalization, was small.

The second part of the neoliberal equation—competition within society and across borders and time zones—created, with the assistance of technical advances, a world where the upkeep of one’s homes and cars and even domestic chores, from cooking to elder- and childcare, were shifted precisely to the people who no longer had steady jobs and were part of the class of malcontents. The moral norms that previously held societies and families together and would have forestalled such outsourcing had become effaced by a desire to be “glorious”—that is, to be rich. That perceived amorality also helped the rise of anti-systemic right-wing parties. They grew on the promise of a restoration not only of lost jobs but of self-respect among malcontents and a return to allegedly traditional values for society as a whole.

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As in a Greek tragedy, the very features that ensured neoliberal globalization’s success for decades produced its inevitable demise.

The spirit of the nineties and the malaise of today
By Branko Milanovic

It does not require great originality nor insightfulness to contrast the world of the 1990s and that of today. They are dramatically different in terms of distribution of economic power between nations and in terms of inequalities within nations. But they also differ in the ruling spirit, at least in the Western world.

Perhaps one can begin with Tocqueville’s characterization of a similar age in the 1830s France:

“The particular spirit of the middle class became the general spirit of government; it dominated foreign policy as well as internal affairs: an active spirit, industrious, often dishonest, generally orderly, bold out of vanity and egoism, timid by temperament, moderate in all things except in its taste for comfort, and mediocre; a spirit which, mingled with that of the people or of the aristocracy, can do wonders, but which alone, will never produce but a government without virtue and without grandeur.” (Tocqueville, Souvenirs [of 1848], my translation)

That spirit “bold out of vanity and egoism,” permeated societies within, and informed international politics. It was fundamentally born out of the defeat of Communism.

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What created problems and ultimately destroyed the spirit of the nineties was that material interests of many individuals and geopolitical interests of some nations were no longer served well by the spirit of the nineties.

Materially, the rise of China and more broadly of Asia lowered the economic position of Western middle classes, made their jobs redundant or precarious, while on the geopolitical stage, the rise of China challenged the dominant position of the United States. This double change (at the individual, and national levels) revealed deep inconsistencies in the spirit of the nineties. It was argued that the spirit was “sharing” and cosmopolitan; and indeed it was so long as the relative betterment of the Third World involved countries and peoples without significant power or role globally. But as soon as that betterment spread sufficiently (as it did with China), it was no longer desirable. So, one was forced to conclude: improvement in welfare of the poor is desirable only so long as it does not markedly affect the relative power and the position of the rich. Once such a caveat is made, though, the entire pacific and cosmopolitan spirit if the nineties is exposed as an ideological cover to service interests of the rich.

If we go farther and look at the concrete applications of that ostensibly generous and cosmopolitan spirit, we find increasing inconsistencies: it applied variously to friends and to others. In words of Mark Carney: “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”. Political self-determination in one case was approved, while in another it was frowned upon; liberal principles of multiculturalism and intermingling were in one case celebrated; in the other they were excoriated; democracy, if it brought to power desirable parties was praised, but the same mechanism in the case of “bad delivery” was ignored.

The more the redistribution of economic and political power advanced, the more the contradiction in the spirit of the nineties became visible. Rules had to be applied with increasing inconsistency because ideological inconsistency was the only way to maintain material superiority. Thus the spirit of the nineties began its slow, and then accelerated, decomposition until it was revealed to have been no different than the spirit of many past ages: an ideology adopted and promoted by those classes that did well by its rules and had an interest to maintain it. Once that became obvious, the elaborate ideological scaffolding created to make the system appear as equitable and as promoting global welfare, collapsed as well.

The Long, Slow Death of Social Democracy
By Ruy Teixeira

Incredible as it may seem today, in 1940, three-quarters of American adults aged 25 and over were high school dropouts (or never made it as far as high school), and just five percent had a four-year college degree or higher. But education credentials exploded in the postwar period. By 1960, the proportion of adults lacking a high school diploma was down to 59 percent; by 1980, it was less than a third; and by 2024, it was just six percent. Concomitantly, the proportion with a bachelor’s degree or higher rose steadily and reached 39 percent in 2024. This is quite a change: from a country where only one in twenty adults had a college degree to one where nearly two in five do.

As the educated class has become more numerous, it has realigned toward left parties, especially its professional segment. Indeed, in the United States of 60 years ago, professionals were actually the most conservative occupational group. Now, they overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the college-educated more reliably support Democrats, while the broad working class (often defined as the non-college-educated) leans Republican.

How College Education Divided America
By Daron Acemoglu

There is nothing natural about the educational segregation that has emerged in the United States. But it has become a reality, with far-reaching consequences for postindustrial politics. It is emblematic of weakening ties within communities—and within the nation. It may explain how, as they became more politically influential and assertive, the well-educated became less understanding of the woes of those with lower levels of education. It is a big part of the story of how left-leaning, well-educated liberal elites started deviating from the premises of liberalism that had generated its past success.

The political rise of the college educated is related to the phenomenal growth in the number of people with college degrees. But even more important, it is a consequence of the rising status of the college educated, which is itself rooted in their meteoric economic climb—while automation, offshoring, globalization, and related sectoral trends have reduced the availability of good jobs for non-college workers. As the college educated have become politically more powerful, they have also diverged further from the less educated in their geographic locations and their social lives, reducing their ability to empathize with the latter’s problems and creating a major cultural rift between the two groups. In the process, a coalition between different segments of the college-educated and the tech sector has formed. I would argue this coalition has completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues.

Speak, Yuppie
By Dylan Gottlieb

Yuppies were called into being by the forces that were remaking the economy in the 1980s. After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.

To find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston.

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The number of WASPy white men at elite schools was simply too small to keep up with the torrent of financial deal-making. Chasing rapid growth, banks and law firms began to hire all sorts of graduates — first Jewish and Irish and Italian men, then, as the women’s and civil rights movements diversified the university-bound population, a growing number of white women and Black, Latino and Asian men and women. In an age of ruthless competition, identity mattered less than workers’ credentials and willingness to work grueling hours.

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As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work. This was no accident: The legal and financial bosses who were commanding these diverse armies of young professionals sought to extract maximum value out of their labor.

This early wave of yuppies contains the origins of our present-day meritocratic competition, which turned college admissions into something akin to “The Hunger Games.” As top universities became the key credentialing institutions for lucrative professional careers, parents and children fought multiyear battles for a finite number of precious spots. In an era of inequality, families of all backgrounds found themselves pitted against one another in zero-sum competition for a place in the upper-middle-class elect.

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Yuppies also redrew our political map. They helped to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals. During the 1980s, a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein — remade liberalism for the postindustrial era. The meritocratic ethos of the trading floor, they reasoned, should govern society at large. Innovation, not regulation or redistribution, would drive growth. And the sclerotic regulatory state was only hampering it. What was needed instead was a nimbler government that oversaw a technology-heavy economy, with yuppies at the vanguard.

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Goldman Sachs employees and their families donated more to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign than any other firm. In 2008, Barack Obama would raise more money from Wall Street lawyers and law firms than any presidential candidate in history.

The rise of the yuppie was not without its costs. The upper echelons of our society became more inclusive in terms of race, ethnicity and gender — but only for those who ran a gantlet of educational and professional challenges on their way to the top.

What Was the Yuppie? A Historian Has Thoughts.
By Steven Kurutz

Are today’s matcha drinkers and marathon runners yuppies?

There’s a downwardly mobile tranche of us out here — the precariat, we might say — who share the tastes and cultural capital of a fine education but no longer the economic capital. They’re prioritizing their yoga class or $10 smoothie, but they can’t go on the ski vacation, or they’ll never afford an Upper West Side apartment.

These tastes have become democratized. You can buy sushi made in your grocery store in Tennessee. It doesn’t mean we’re all yuppies. Some of us earn enough — and some of us don’t.

Guy Standing: “To be in the precariat is like running on sinking sand”
By Angeliki K. Karageorgou and Costas Gousis

Angeliki Karageorgou: … You have said many times that the precariat is not just insecure jobs. Would you like to describe to us the fundamental characteristics of the precariat?

Guy Standing: Yes, I mean, the precariat has emerged as a new class in the 21st century. And essentially what we’ve seen is that the neoliberal economic revolution of the 1980s and 1990s has produced a new model of capitalism. I call it rentier capitalism, in which more and more of the income flows to the owners of property; physical property, financial property, and intellectual property. And less and less goes to those who are performing labour and work. And in that context, what we’ve seen is that financial capital has become the dominant force in the global economy.

And in the process, a new globalised class structure has emerged. That class structure has a plutocracy at the top, an elite serving the interests of the plutocracy and a salariat of people in employment security with pensions and so on. The old proletariat, the old working class of the 20th century is dying and shrinking. And still our politics on the centre-left and on the Left have focused on the old proletariat. But really the new class is the precariat. And underneath the precariat, there’s the lumpen or underclass, people dying in the streets with opioids and so on. The precariat is wanted by global capital and it can be defined in three dimensions.

The first dimension is what I call distinctive relations of production. That means that people in the precariat have unstable, insecure labour. They have no occupational narrative to give to their life, no sense of becoming something. They’re living bits-and-pieces lives. They have to do a lot of work that isn’t counted, recognised and remunerated. They have to do a lot of work for the labour [market], work for the state, work for reproduction. And they have to experience something that has never happened before and that is very important for the young people. Because this is the first time in history when a mass class has had to have a level of education greater than the level required for the jobs they can expect to obtain. It’s a very distinctive situation and ironically many of the jobs require higher levels of education credentials to obtain them but actually don’t need them in the actual performance of their labour. And this creates a great sense of frustration, alienation and so on.

The second dimension is that the precariat has to rely on low volatile money wages. It doesn’t get non-wage benefits, it doesn’t have access to rights-based state benefits and it’s losing the commons. I’ve written about the commons in a separate book; the commons which belong to all of us and give a sense of solidarity and security to our societies. But they’ve been privatised, commodified, and depleted by austerity. The ironical thing is that because we’re living in an age of rentier capitalism dominated by finance, the precariat is exploited by debt. And financial capital wants people to be in debt. That’s how they make their money. So the precariat is living on the edge of unsustainable debt all the time. One accident, one illness, one mistake and they can be out in the streets. And this creates incredible stress, insecurity, mental illnesses, and deaths of despair.

The third dimension is the most important of all, that the precariat has distinct relations to the state. By that I mean that it’s losing rights of citizenship. It’s losing civil rights, it’s losing social rights, it’s losing cultural rights, it’s losing economic rights and it’s losing political rights because politically there are no parties that systematically represent the precariat’s interests and aspirations. And this leads to the most important defining feature of the precariat. They feel like supplicants. They feel they have to ask for favours all the time. They have to rely on discretionary judgments by landlords, by employers, by parents, by spouses, by their children in order to survive. And this is very undignifying and creates more stress, more feelings of inadequacy and a lot of anger.

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Costas Gousis: Αfter the publication of your book in 2011 and during the last decade, a lot of debates took place about the precariat and precarity as an analytical and political question. Is there any feedback on your book or any specific criticism that you consider particularly constructive in terms of pushing your discussion of the precariat further?

Guy Standing: Yes. On page 1 of the book, as published in 2011, I said that unless the politicians and the analysts came to understand and analyse the precariat, we would see the emergence of a political monster. Those were the words I used in English, “a political monster”. And in early 2016, I received an email, very strange, asking me to go and address the Bilderberg Group. Now the Bilderberg Group is the elite right-wing movement set up after the Second World War, having right-wing prime ministers, plutocrats, head of the CIA, head of MI6, head of NATO, and people like that. So I thought it was a joke from some friend of mine on the Left. Then they called me up and said, “Νo, we would really like you to come and address the Bilderberg Group”. So in early 2016, I suddenly was addressing 100 people including several Prime Ministers, several Ministers of Finance, the head of NATO, the head of CIA, and so on. And right in front of me was Henry Kissinger.

Now, I thought that all of these people would have no interest in my analysis on the precariat. But I said, “Look, do not be surprised if Donald Trump is elected President later this year in November, 2016; do not be surprised if in Britain they vote for Brexit because you’re not having a policy agenda that responds to the insecurities of the precariat. And part of the precariat will vote for populist neo-fascist agendas”. And sure enough, of course, Donald Trump won in November 2016. And I received numerous emails and messages from people who said, “your political monster has arrived”.

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… our politicians, mainly, are dead men walking. They’re dead men walking, unable to grab the initiative and have the courage to come up with the transformation agenda. And the political problems on the Left will only continue unless they realise that they have to have a new agenda which promises people a sense of security, a sense of freedom and a sense of social solidarity suitable for the 21st century. And I’m sorry to say that the mainstream parties on the centre-left and the Left have failed. And again and again they get defeated and they throw up their hands and they don’t understand why they’re defeated.

But until they change their agenda and their vision, that defeat will continue.

The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class?
By Guy Standing

The precariat’s needs cannot be met by modest reforms to the existing social and economic system. It is the only transformative class because, intuitively, it wants to become strong enough to abolish the conditions that define its existence and, as such, abolish itself. All others want merely to improve their position in the social hierarchy. This emergent class is thus well-placed to become the agent of radical social transformation—if it can organize and become sufficiently united around a shared identity, alternative vision, and viable political agenda.

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The precariat is split into three factions, which has hindered its becoming a class-for-itself and is challenging for those wishing to develop and organize a progressive response.

The first faction is the Atavists. They have fallen out of the proletariat, or come from old working-class families or communities whose members once depended on full-time jobs. Some are young; many are older, looking back wistfully. Their deprivation is about a lost Past, whether real or imagined. Having relatively little schooling or education in civics, history, or culture, they tend to listen to the sirens of neo-fascist populism.

They have been voting for the likes of Trump, Putin, Orban, Marine Le Pen, Farage and other Brexiteers, and the Lega in Italy. It is not correct to call them the “left behind,” since they are expected to function inside a new labor market. But they are bitter, eager to blame others for their plight. Those they demonize comprise the second faction of the precariat, the Nostalgics. This group is composed of migrants and minorities, who feel deprived of a Present, with nowhere to call home. For the most part, they “keep their heads down,” doing whatever they can to survive and move forward.

The third faction is best described as the Progressives, more educated and mainly young, although not exclusively so. Their defining sense of deprivation is loss of a Future. They went to university or college, promised by their parents and teachers that this would lead to a defining career. They emerge without that, often with debt stretching into that future. Beyond their own future, more and more despair about the planet’s ecological future.

A challenge for aspiring politicians is to build a broad policy strategy for bringing all three factions together in common cause. That is beginning to happen, so it is unnecessarily pessimistic to think a new progressive politics cannot be forged for the precariat as a whole.

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The bad news is that the Atavists have been strongest so far, ushering in unsavory characters and agendas. The good news is that their size has probably peaked (the ex-proletariat are aging), while the Nostalgics and Progressives are growing relatively and absolutely, with rising numbers of migrants and graduates entering the precariat every day. And the best news of all is that the Progressives are beginning to organize politically. They can be the vanguard of a new progressive politics, if political movements and leaders emerge to embrace and articulate their combination of insecurities and aspirations.

Historically, every progressive surge has been propelled by the demands of the emerging mass class. Today’s progressive transformation must, therefore, be oriented to the precariat, driven by a strategy that appeals to enough of all its factions to garner adequate strength.

This number helps explain why many Americans are down on the economy
By Aimee Picchi

American workers’ share of the economic pie has fallen to its lowest level since at least 1947, when the federal government began tracking the data, according to an analysis by Federal Reserve economists.

The measure, known as “labor share of income,” tracks how much of the nation’s economic output flows to workers in the form of wages and salaries, as opposed to the share that goes to investors and corporations through profits, dividends and other capital income. A shrinking labor share of income indicates that more economic gains are flowing to shareholders and business owners, rather than to workers.

As of early 2026, American workers received 54.1% of national income, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. By comparison, that figure topped 65% almost 80 years ago, when the government began tracking the data following World War II. In early 2020, it stood at 57.7%, indicating that workers have continued to lose ground since the pandemic.

Roughly 48% of Americans said their financial situation was worse in May than a year ago, the highest share since January 2023, according to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three-quarters of Americans said their incomes aren’t keeping up with inflation, according to a May CBS News poll. Roughly 29% of respondents said the economy was in good shape.

American workers are taking home a smaller share of the nation’s income — capturing less of what the economy produces — due to several long-standing issues, ranging from the erosion of union membership to tax law changes that have steered more gains to CEOs, investors and high-income Americans, economists told CBS News.

As those currents played out over decades, many low- and middle-income workers have lost economic ground, making them feel increasingly financially precarious even as the economy as a whole has continued to expand and rebound in the wake of multiple crises.

“You’ve got a lot of people who seem to work for firms that, in the aggregate, seem to be doing really well,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “They’re very profitable, and yet [workers’] wages aren’t growing particularly fast relative to how fast the firms are growing.”

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The change in labor income helps explain the emergence of the so-called K-shaped economy, said Angela Hanks, chief of policy programs at the left-leaning Century Foundation. The term describes the growing fortunes of America’s top earners, while low- and middle-income earners are failing to keep up.

“You see this chart, and you immediately understand why consumer sentiment is so low — you understand why, at 4% unemployment, people are pessimistic about the economy,” she said. “Even if you have a job, even if you feel like your household is relatively stable, you do feel this underlying precarity at all times.”

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… the shift of income away from workers and toward investors and corporations is becoming self-reinforcing, Hanks said.

“As labor’s share declines, it becomes harder for labor to exercise its power to demand higher wages, better working conditions, and easier for capital to suppress that demand,” she added.

In other words, as workers get a smaller piece of the economic pie, they lose power to bargain for better pay and working conditions. By contrast, corporations and shareholders gain leverage in keeping the upper hand, she said.

…

Inflation has also outpaced worker wages, meaning the typical household is losing purchasing power. More Americans report struggling to pay for healthcare, while credit card delinquencies across the U.S. have reached their highest level in 15 years. And the rise of AI is fueling public concerns about losing jobs to automation.

With many families increasingly financially pinched, some are turning to credit cards and other forms of debt to cover daily expenses, which could also contribute to their pessimism about the economy, Hanks said.

“People are increasingly using debt as a way to make ends meet — we have record-high credit card debt, auto debt,” she said. “People are falling into delinquency and default at concerning rates, and are using these products not for extravagant purchases, but just to get by and make ends meet.”

Democrats have a working-class voter problem that progressives like Abdul El-Sayed are still struggling to solve
By Nicholas Jacobs

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years, 38% in 2024.

Working-class identity is more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It’s a specific way of looking at the world.

Conventional definitions of the working class often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group – not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. Based on the American National Election Studies self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked around 56% in 1960 and has fallen more or less continuously since, sitting at just about 30% today.

Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century: A majority did so in 1958, but not since.

Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 – the first time in the survey’s history – did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.

The data shows a politically homeless working class: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.

…

In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while 54% of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix.

…

On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap emerged.

On whether religion is an important part of their life: a near-zero gap through the early 1990s, but 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 became 30 points in 2024. Whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support. By 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

…

Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the institutions working-class voters have increasingly less faith in.

This distrust stems from specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.

Why working-class people account for around 1% of lawmakers in the US – and only 2% in the average democracy around the world
By Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes

Both major U.S. political parties regularly tout their commitment to working-class Americans and claim to be the party of the working class. However, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nominate many candidates who spent substantial time in working-class jobs.

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By our count, about half of all Americans in the labor force have working-class jobs. However, people who last had working-class jobs when they got into politics make up only about 1% of the average state legislature, regardless of their party affiliation. The same goes for Congress.

And the U.S. isn’t alone. Starting in 2016, we partnered with a team of researchers to collect data on 97 of the 103 democracies with more than 300,000 citizens. Like the U.S., the average global democracy draws just 2% of the members of its national legislature from people who last had working-class jobs.

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Our new book, “Keeping Workers Off the Ballot,” shows that what keeps working-class Americans – and their counterparts around the world – out of elected office is that they so rarely run. And that’s because campaigning anywhere for any office at any level of government is personally burdensome, as we show in our book. It takes time and energy, it entails personal risks ranging from embarrassment to physical violence, and the outcome is always uncertain.

In surveys in the U.S. and other democracies, working-class people are significantly more likely than equally qualified professionals to say that they cannot run for office because of concerns about taking time off work and being unable to pay their bills during months spent on the campaign trail.

This inequality is magnified by a second process: In elections everywhere, parties and interest groups play key roles in recruiting and supporting candidates. These gatekeepers understand that working-class people have a harder time running for office.

As a result, party leaders – even those who care deeply about the working class – pass over qualified workers and instead favor the white-collar professionals they think will have an easier time on the campaign trail.

Six facts about union density in the United States
By Lauren Bauer and Tia Cole

The share of employees in the U.S. who are covered by or a member of a union, i.e., the union density rate, has fallen drastically over the past four decades. In 1985, 17.9 percent of wage and salary workers were members of a union, and 20.4 percent were covered by a union contract. Today, union density is at an all-time low: One in 10 workers were members of a union in 2025.

While union density has declined, union membership grew somewhat in 2025. In 2025, there were an estimated 14.7 million union members, which is an increase of roughly 400,000 from 2024.

The Last Gasps of American Labor
By Michael Lind

It is no coincidence that the “30 glorious years” of mass prosperity that followed World War II coincided with the high point of trade union membership and pro-union government policies, in Western Europe as well as the U.S. The U.S. had the bloodiest labor violence of any Western country between the Civil War and the New Deal, with the National Guard, Army, or private detectives commonly used to crush railroad, mine, and factory workers on behalf of corporations. In American courts, meanwhile, unions were often treated as illegal conspiracies.

The prosperity of American industrial workers of the 1950s like those in the automobile industry was not the result of radical technological change. Work on the assembly line was not that different in 1950 than it had been in the 1920s. What workers had in the 1950s that they lacked a generation before was power—the collective power of trade unions, without which isolated individual workers have no leverage in negotiations with giant corporations over wages, hours, and benefits. Between the 1950s, when a third of the American workforce was unionized, and the 1970s, productivity growth was translated into widespread wage growth because unions forced employers to share more of their profits with workers, along with managers and shareholders.

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Without the massed power of organized labor to counterbalance the influence of organized business in politics, the two parties serve rival business lobbies and affluent households. Corporations and banks and wealthy donors, along with nonprofits and the universities that they bankroll, celebrate race and gender characteristics which divide the working class while opposing unionization efforts that transcend those divisions.

Whether most American workers in the private sector in the future become prosperous middle-class citizens or struggling, insecure serfs will depend largely on the power of unions. Unfortunately, a revival of organized labor in the private market faces numerous obstacles, including inadequate federal labor law, transfers of production to American “right-to-work” states or foreign countries, and high levels of unskilled immigration.

…

Contrary to the employer-class propaganda you are likely to read in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and other house organs of the economic elite, the post-1960s wave of immigration by low-wage workers has enabled employers to break unions, lower wages, and worsen conditions in many low-wage industries from meatpacking to construction to farm labor. The greatest victims of displacement or the suppression of wage growth by mass unskilled immigration have often been less-educated, low-wage American workers of all races, some of them immigrants themselves or members of historically disadvantaged minority groups.

Dems’ Tea Party-like rebellion built by a decade of frustration
By Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein

Zoom in: Democratic voters’ growing distrust of their party’s leadership — and their embrace of left-wing outsiders and populists — is rooted in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.

1. In the party’s primaries that year, Democratic National Committee members and party elites helped ensure that Clinton won the nomination over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive icon.
2. The insiders limited primary debates and had unusual joint fundraising agreements between the DNC and Clinton’s campaign. The DNC’s internal bias against Sanders was confirmed by a WikiLeaks email dump in 2016.

The Democratic Establishment Had This Coming
By Mara Gay

Establishment Democrats lost the 2024 and 2016 presidential elections, handing control of government to Republicans. They couldn’t prevent Republicans from stealing a seat on the Supreme Court, helping lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They failed to stop President Trump from sending masked federal agents into the streets or giving billionaires tax breaks. Some of them backed supplying weapons to military campaigns that have killed civilians abroad, while in the United States everyday people struggled to meet basic needs such as housing and food.

They have also alienated their own voters over many years by stifling competition and dissent within the party, from the Democratic National Committee’s attempted undermining of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid to the White House staff’s efforts in 2024 to hide President Joe Biden’s obvious signs of aging from voters.

…

Democratic leaders fear that their party’s growing progressive flank will dash its chances in the midterm elections. That is possible. But — clearly — many Democratic voters no longer buy this argument. There is less reason for them to worry than there was in previous election years. Much of their agenda reflects views that a large number of Americans now hold: disentangling politics and corporate interests, raising taxes on the wealthy, ending military aid to Israel, passing Medicare for All.

About 60 percent of U.S. adults say they’re bothered by the feeling that wealthy people and corporations don’t pay their fair share in taxes, according to a poll earlier this year from the Pew Research Center. The same survey found that 81 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans are frustrated because they believe wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.

A Pew poll in December found that 66 percent of all U.S. adults say the government has a responsibility to ensure all Americans have health coverage. Half of Americans support dismantling ICE, according to a YouGov poll in March. And a New York Times/Siena poll in May found that 57 percent of American voters oppose sending further military aid to Israel — including huge majorities of Democrats and independents.

…

In the contest of ideas unfolding in the Democratic Party, the progressives may go on to overreach, or lose important races for the party in key swing states. But the cautious centrists and center-left establishment politicians who have dominated the party for so long have failed. The sneering some of those elected officials have directed toward their own voters recently is a measure of their hubris, and an argument for still more competition. The Democratic base is finally prepared to take big risks on something bracingly different.

The new American dream: Having parents who can help pay for it
By Elisabeth Buchwald

For generations, the formula for getting ahead in America seemed straightforward: Go to college, work hard, save your money, buy a home and climb the economic ladder.

Today, that formula increasingly depends on something many Americans can’t control: whether their family has the financial means to help along the way. Without that support, many Americans face mounting debt and an increasingly difficult – if not impossible – path to homeownership and wealth accumulation.

The dependence is especially pronounced among young adults, who are entering an economy that has become less forgiving. Breaking into the job market is tougher than it was just a few years ago; everyday expenses are eating up a larger share of paychecks; student loan debt continues to weigh on borrowers; and would-be homeowners are being pushed to the sidelines as high prices collide with stubborn mortgage rates.

That reality is reshaping the role of family support. Nearly half of adults ages 18 to 29 received assistance from someone they don’t live with to cover recurring expenses over the past year — such as housing, transportation and medical bills — according to the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.

An almost identical share (49%) of people from that cohort also reported living with parents, according to the survey, which was fielded in October. That’s up six percentage points from 2022 and 12 percentage points from 2019.

How Economic Anxiety Is Driving the Democratic Socialists’ Surge
By Emma Goldberg

Nationally, the job market for educated young people is dire. The unemployment rate for college graduates between 22 and 27 has been up significantly in the last three years; more than 40 percent of college graduates that are employed held jobs that didn’t require their degrees.

And even New Yorkers who have low six-figure salaries say they have realized that neither their college degrees nor their high income seem to guarantee a sense of long-term stability.

…

Plenty of establishment Democratic leaders are alarmed by how widely the democratic socialist message is resonating, with some saying that the desire for economic change is understandable but that the group’s policies and candidates won’t have broad enough appeal in swing states.

“They believe the capitalist system is rigged for those at the top,” said Jay Jacobs, chairman of New York’s Democratic Party.

“What D.S.A. is doing is filling a vacuum in a time where people are feeling very much distressed over their economic condition,” he added. “The challenge we have is to compete in the arena of ideas with them.”

…

As young people grow more economically disillusioned, D.S.A. members have become younger and more white collar. In a 2013 national survey of its members, the organization found that the median age of its members was 68 years old. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 33. In 2013, 3 percent of D.S.A. members surveyed said they were white-collar workers; by 2021, that had grown to 13 percent.

On Inequality and Socialism
By Musa al-Gharbi

There is a tradition of socialist thought that recognizes that success is generally a product of an individual’s effort, discipline, persistence, ingenuity and cultivated ability but also unearned advantages, the confluence of favorable circumstances, the efforts and support of others and/or public infrastructure and investments. Success is rarely not a product of individuals’ talents and effort. However, it isn’t purely (or in many cases, primarily) a product of individuals’ attributes and labor either. It’s virtually always both/ and rather than one or the other.

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This same strain of socialism insists that we shouldn’t have “working poor”: if someone is working full-time they should be able to live a decent life on their wages. People who genuinely can’t work because they’re infirm, disabled, old, children shouldn’t be destitute. In the event of market caprice, economic downturn, layoffs, exogenous shocks, people should be some kind of social safety net and insurance policy that keeps households afloat. Citizens’ basic survival shouldn’t be hostage to circumstances beyond their ability to predict or control. Opportunity hoarding and regulatory capture among the affluent should be constrained to promote economic dynamism and social mobility.

This approach to socialism recognizes, on the one hand, that people are not atomistic entities who create themselves and can flourish independently of others. Instead, persons are products of society who are embedded in societies.

…

As Orwell noted, insofar as normies support socialism, this approach is what they seem to have in mind: its goal is not to make sure that everyone is equal in every respect, but to make sure that everyone in a prosperous society can live a decent life.

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Because this form of socialism centers the dignity and flourishing of persons (over collectives), recognizes the value of markets for mitigating information and coordination problems, but insures against market risks and failures through robust social safety nets, while prioritizing equality under the law over other forms of egalitarianism – this tradition is most typically referred to as “liberal socialism.”

…

This approach to socialism has a robust and proud track record. Many may not recognize this reality because “radical” socialist accomplishments are now baked into most contemporary liberal societies.

For instance, people used to routinely work 12-16 hour days or more. Six or even seven-day workweeks were not uncommon. In the late 19th century, the typical industrial worker put in 100 hours per week. Many struggled to get by despite spending most of their waking hours laboring. Socialists declared that this was unacceptable. They insisted that all workers should be entitled to at least 8 hours of sleep every day, and 8 hours of time to use as they wished – and they should have days off to spend with their families or recuperate. Hence, work should be contained to no more than 8 hours per day and five hours per week, and wages should allow workers to support themselves on 40 hours of weekly labor. This was perceived as a radical or utopian demand at the time — an unworkable set of expectations that many predicted would ruin the economy and place extreme strain on industries and employers. Resistance was fierce (and sometimes bloody). Yet, in Capital (Vol. 1, Ch. 10), Karl Marx marveled at how effectively and how quickly socialists in America elevated the cause of the 8-hour day nationwide – a cause that had been slower to catch on in Europe. Now the 8-hour day (with overtime compensation above 40 hours a week) is standard in the U.S. and most other Western liberal countries. Thank socialists (and, ironically, Henry Ford).

Socialist writer Upton Sinclair produced a novel intended to shed light on capitalist exploitation, The Jungle. The book was a runaway success and ushered in new workplace protection and food processing sanitation laws in response to the public outcry over the conditions it described. Other socialists in coalition with progressives would build on these early successes and push developments further. If you appreciate the existence of the Food and Drug Administration or OSHA (previously, the Bureau of Labor Standards), thank socialists.

The Civil Rights Movement, too, was led by socialists, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Baynard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, WEB DuBois and beyond. Socialists have also been at the forefront of women’s rights. If, on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, you’re proud of America’s progress towards the ideals enshrined in its founding documents, thank socialists.

In fact, socialists’ advocacy didn’t just dramatically improve the quality of Americans’ lives, lift people out of poverty, and save lives – they may have also helped preserve liberal democracy and the market economy writ large.

FDR’s New Deal was created to help stabilize capitalism in the aftermath of the Great Depression, stave off the growing specters of communism and fascism, and consolidate the left into the Democratic Party. In order to achieve these objectives, he implemented huge swaths of what U.S. socialists had been campaigning for: massive public works investments, employment programs, worker protections, wage floors, and much more. As the Executive Committee of the Colorado Socialist Party noted in the early 30s, “Roosevelt is putting into effect most of the 1932 socialist platform.” John Meynard Keyenes was also deeply shaped by socialist arguments and advocacy, and their influence on his policy recommendations is unambiguous.

By integrating socialists’ most popular and ambitious ideas – first into the Democratic Party platform and then into U.S. policy and the broader liberal economic and democratic order — FDR successfully took the wind out of the sail of socialist movements in the U.S., converting many socialists into banal Democrats as he’d hoped. Nonetheless, it’s important to bear in mind that, as an historical fact, the New Deal was comprised largely of plans that were designed and long advocated for by liberal socialists. When implemented, they radically transformed U.S. society and culture, improved the lives of generations of Americans, and served as a model for many other liberal democracies worldwide. What we understand as banal liberalism today is already a hybrid of classical liberalism and socialism.

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The goal of liberal socialism is not to punish or limit success, eliminate the rich, or flatten all inequalities but to make sure that all citizens can share in social prosperity and live a decent life. The aspiration is to keep wealth flowing – having it change hands, get spread widely, and be productive — rather than seeing it consolidated into a small number of coffers and hoarded across generations. Liberal socialism is fundamentally oriented towards growth, economic dynamism and social mobility, expanding opportunities, and protecting personal liberty.

…

But, of course, liberal socialism is not the only brand of socialism out there.

There is another broad tradition of socialism that leans very hard into zero-sum thinking. Its adherents tend to analyze the world in terms of group conflict. They perceive and talk about the world primarily in identitarian terms – nationality, socioeconomic position, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, political party, or some other axis of difference upon which people can be organized for struggle.

Advocates of this approach aggressively fixate on differences between groups, irrespective of whether those disparities are material or symbolic, significant or small. Virtually all inequalities are viewed as presumptively illegitimate (whether differences between populations at the macro level or gaps between individuals who are made to serve as a synecdoche for their respective groups) — especially if the “wrong” side seems to be in a better position.

Observed inequalities in any particular context are held to be expressions of immoral systems – patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, white supremacy – each of which are, themselves, subordinate to (and expressions of) capitalism. These inequalities, in turn, are held to be the cause of virtually all problems individuals face in their life. By implication, pretty much all problems humanity has ever faced (since even before the emergence of capitalism) can be overcome with this one neat trick of overthrowing the prevailing order (and replacing it with a theorized utopia).

While awaiting the revolution, lawless and selfish behaviors from advocates such as shoplifting, looting and vandalism are justified on the basis of sticking it to the capitalists… even though it tends to be less advantaged people who actually bear the cost of these actions.

Meanwhile, any perceived obligation for advocates to adjust their own lifestyles and behaviors – to make costly sacrifices themselves — is conveniently sidestepped under the auspices that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

…

Those whom activists fail to sympathize with are viewed as being 100% obligated to do whatever is in their power to rectify social wrongs, even at great risk or expense to themselves. Failure to comply is held up as proof of complicacy with various systems of oppression (white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on). It is only social justice advocates and their favored groups that exist in a moral state of exception.

Operating under this double-standard, adherents slice the salami any way they can to demonstrate unequal distributions of status or resources and then, on the basis of these disparities, insist that the allocations of resources, opportunities and attention needs to be revised… typically in ways that better accord with their own personal ideal and material interests (albeit often in the name of the least well-off).

The explicit goal in these bids is to consolidate power and resources into the hands of the “good guys,” who will then redistribute these assets in a more fair and rational manner. In practice, things almost never work out that way. Instead, the primary beneficiaries of these expropriations tend to be the advocates and activists themselves, with precious little “trickling down” to the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society.

…

Put simply, this darker current of socialist activism is as old as socialism itself. It seems to be most pronounced among elite aspirants whose lives and life prospects fall short of what they feel they are entitled to.

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Incidentally, this approach to social justice activism also tends to be deeply unpopular. This is, perhaps, why this strain of leftist politics virtually always leans heavily on surveillance, coercion, censorship, social isolation and other forms of oppression (often in the name of liberation) in order to achieve its designs.

In light of these tendencies, it may be most apt to label this tradition “authoritarian socialism.”

…

Authoritarian socialists often deride the liberal approach as evidence of comprised integrity, weakness of will, or a refusal to take core premises to their proper conclusions. They insist that liberals, basically, are posers. They’re the “real” left.

Antisemitism—Left, Right, and Growing
By David Masciotra

As the obligatory disclaimer goes, criticism of Israel and its government is fair game, including its violent response to the October 7, 2023. Many of the leading critics of the Israeli government are, in fact, Israeli. But we are now way beyond ordinary political debate. Consider for a moment that it has become common in New York for protestors to gather outside of synagogues and Jewish organizations and businesses, chanting that Israel “kills children” at worshipers. It is the equivalent of someone angry with the policies of the African Union staging a demonstration outside a Black church in Chicago.

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A recent report indicates that, in 2025, physical assaults against American Jews reached their highest levels since 1979. Hate crimes include murders near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., a Molotov cocktail attack at a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado, and a stabbing of a Jewish man in New York. In March, an armed man driving a vehicle full of explosives deliberately crashed into Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, attempting to murder congregants and others, including the children attending classes in the resident Jewish school.

I’m a Democrat. My Party Has a Double Standard on Antisemitism.
By Josh Gottheimer

In 2017, Democratic leaders denounced the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In 2022, Democrats took Donald Trump to task for having dinner with Nick Fuentes, an antisemite and a white supremacist. Across the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum, right-wing hate is consistently condemned.

But today, too many Democrats are noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left — at a moment when the Anti-Defamation League is reporting a surge of antisemitic incidents in the past three years.

It’s a glaring double standard.

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Last month, most Senate Democrats voted for two measures that would have blocked sales of military equipment to Israel, with some arguing that among the reasons for their votes was their assessment of Israel’s human rights record.

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If this is now the standard for supporting military aid and arms sales, then Democratic members of Congress should at least be consistent. Do they also believe we should block weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, given the history of human rights abuses in those countries?

The Democratic condemnation piled on Israel’s government is overwhelming in comparison to other allies. It’s also louder than Democrats’ condemnation of Iran’s regime for the slaughter of thousands of Iranians in December and January. Israel has been decried by some leading Democrats as an “apartheid” state. But I haven’t heard any of them claim apartheid when it comes to how women and L.G.B.T.Q. people are treated across the Middle East.

‘A Silent Moratorium’
By Lisa Tolin, Geraldine Baum and Malka Margolies

In interviews with PEN America, more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals described a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many spoke of rising hostility and exclusion both domestically and internationally that has taken a heavy and worsening toll.

The horrors of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and the devastation of Israel’s war and what human rights organizations and experts have determined to be genocide in Gaza, have had catastrophic human costs. The political and cultural debates around the war have fractured communities and families and spurred conflict in institutions worldwide, from corporations and cultural organizations to campuses.

The war has also had serious repercussions for free expression globally, including in the United States, as PEN America has documented and spoken about extensively. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers, artists, and activists have faced dire consequences for their expression including arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention, in addition to cancellations and exclusion in the literary and cultural spheres; Israeli and Jewish writers and artists on all sides of the conflict have been silenced and faced a range of threats and repercussions.

When Germany targets Jewish artists as antisemitic
By Elizabeth Grenier

In November 2023, an exhibition by Candice Breitz was canceled by the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery. The organizers wanted to avoid associating with the South African artist, claiming she had signed a letter by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, labeled by Germany’s government as “antisemitic”, and that she had not condemned the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas.

Breitz has repeated many times since then that both allegations are false, most recently at a panel discussion on the impact of Germany’s particular stance on BDS, held September 8 at Berlin’s International Literature Festival (ilb). Although she supports the democratic right to boycott, she said, she is not a BDS supporter and has never signed any of the movement’s letters.

And as the artist wrote on Instagram even before the museum’s decision was made: “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”

One more thing made Breitz’s case particularly emblematic: she is Jewish.

“I may carry the dubious distinction of being the first Jewish artist to be de-platformed and defunded by Germany, but I am not the first Jew to be impacted,” she said as the controversy erupted. “A wide spectrum of activists, artists and other cultural workers are being tarred and feathered in great haste and with McCarthyist zeal.”

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Stefan Laurin, editor of the Ruhrbarone, a blog whose reporting on claims of antisemitism has triggered media controversies leading to various cancellations — and which is known for having posted an inflammatory meme promoting the annihilation of Gaza — was also a guest at the ilb’s panel discussion.

As Candice Breitz pointed out during the discussion, Laurin’s reaction piece to the letter signed by more than 150 intellectuals and artists avoided mentioning that the signatories were Jewish. He rather vaguely referred to them as being part of “the antisemitic part of the cultural scene.”

During the discussion, Laurin attempted to justify his work by quoting the chief editor of the German-Jewish weekly Jüdische Allgemeine, Philipp Peyman Engel, who said in an interview with German daily Die Welt, that Muslims and radical leftists were a more important antisemitic threat than the far right.

…

“Jews are as politically diverse as all other people,” said Breitz in reaction to Laurin favoring Peyman Engel’s opinion over the one publicly expressed by more than 150 other Jews. She criticizes his selective approach as part of a troubling dynamic in Germany, where a distinction between “good Jews” and “bad Jews” is created to suppress dissenting voices.

This categorization was also strongly condemned by British-Israeli professor Eyal Weizman in a conversation published in the November 2023 issue of Granta magazine: “Once again, Germany defines who is a Jew, right?” he said.

“The irony that the German state would actually classify who is a Jew, what’s a legitimate Jewish position, and how Jews should react is just beneath contempt.”

A Short History of Collective Punishment: From the British Empire to Gaza
By Stanley L. Cohen

As old as war itself, collective punishment has long been the most damning and destructive weapon of all. Not satisfied with engaging combatants alone and directly, historically, it has fueled state reprisal against families, communities and entire populations in a drive to “win” a given conflict, military or otherwise, at all costs.

With roots that trace, literally, to the start of time, reprisal has evolved as modern warfare became more proficient and popular resistance more prevalent. Nowhere has collective punishment proved more evident and efficient than it has in the West where it has long run the gamut from civil sanctions, to population displacement, to political penalty, to imprisonment, to outright slaughter. Of late, it has grown more subtle, yet no less pernicious, through state censorship that seeks to control the narrative of the day.

…

During World War II, collective punishment was very much the norm as German and Japanese troops engaged in targeted reprisals against persons and communities as revenge for the acts of the few or for purposes of population control.

Following attacks by the Serbian resistance in October of 1941 German soldiers raided the town of Kragujevac in Yugoslavia seizing some ten-thousand civilians… including high school students while in class. Beginning the next day, they were executed in groups of four hundred at a time. When the massacre ended over 5,000 civilians, including women and children, were dead.

To understand where collective punishment would eventually lead, at the hands of Nazi Germany, one must look to its activity well before World War II. Thus, in the early 1930’s, it began to target its civil population by virtue of nothing more than their trade union and political activities and beliefs or religion.

Soon after the election of May 2, 1933, the SA (Nazi paramilitary) and SS (initially Hitler’s bodyguards) began to attack all forms of political opposition… beginning with raids on trade unions offices whose leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Later that year, they raided offices of political opposition parties… destroying equipment, confiscating funds and arresting their leaders. By the middle of that year, Nazis had banned all opposition parties.

In May 1933, the first book burnings under the Nazis occurred outside of the University of Berlin with university students leading the torch lit parade. In 1817, over 100 years earlier, students had initiated book burning with the goal of unifying the patchwork Germany of the time. Among the first works thrown into the fire in 1933 were those of Sigmund Freud’s. In what was clearly prophetic, German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine had written, one-hundred years earlier, “any people that burn books, will one day burn people.”

As Hitler consolidated power, thousands of communists, socialists, church leaders and anyone else who might oppose the Nazis were rounded up. Initially, these prisoners were held in local prisons and police stations. There were so many prisoners that makeshift buildings were converted to house them. Eventually, the Nazis solution to the inefficiency of the buildings was found in establishing large, purpose-built camps to hold these prisoners. These they called concentration camps. The first camp was established on 1 April 1933 at Dachau.

Between 1933 and the end of the war, some dozen years later, many thousands of people resisted the Nazis using both violent and non-violent means. Among the earliest opponents were Communists, Socialists, and trade union leaders. As punishment against this movement thousands were executed including German theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who opposed the regime.

As millions of Jews, Communists, Socialists, Gypsies, gays and political opposition were murdered in concentration camps throughout Germany and Europe, resistance continued to grow in Nazi-occupied areas outside of Germany.

In France, Denmark, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland, guerrilla fighters engaged in anti-Nazi sabotage. After Czech agents assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazis shot all of the men in the Czech village of Lidice none of whom had any involvement in the assassination.

Warsaw was, perhaps, the most legendary of all uprisings by an urban population in German-occupied territory. On April19, 1943 an armed revolt was begun by a group of Warsaw ghetto dwellers.The Jewish Fighter Organization (ZOB) led the insurgency and battled, for a month, using weapons smuggled into the ghetto. The Nazis responded by bringing in tanks and machine guns. In massive collective punishment, the Nazis burned blocks of buildings and destroyed the ghetto in its entirety. Ultimately, many of the 60,000 remaining residents, most of whom had nothing to do with the uprising, were executed or lost their lives as buildings were bombed or set aflame.

In the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane more than 600 men, women and children were murderedas collective punishment for acts of the resistance. Similar reprisals occurred in the Dutch village of Putten, the Italian village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema and the Soviet village of Kortelisky.

Tribalism Is Killing Liberalism
By Michael Carpenter

For decades, scholars of democracy believed that liberal political institutions were the end product of a process of “modernization,” loosely defined as industrialization, economic development, technological innovation, and the accompanying breakdown of traditional social structures. When these forces gave rise to a middle class powerful enough to demand democratic inclusion and civil rights, modernization theorists suggested, the institutions of liberal democracy would follow.

That theory turned out to be flawed. For starters, it could not explain why some middle-class societies fail to open up politically. Russia is a case in point. Successive U.S. administrations supported Russian economic development, always in the hope of gradually turning the country into a liberal democracy.

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Nor is a strong middle class by necessity a guardrail against democratic backsliding once liberal institutions have taken root. In fact, as the British historian David Motadel has argued, middle classes have often sided with antidemocratic forces when they considered their wealth and status under threat. In interwar Germany, and later in Latin America, strongmen turned middle-class democracies into highly illiberal dictatorships by playing on fears of economic collapse or communist revolution. Over time, these countries all reverted to liberal democratic governance—but not before “modernization” spawned some of history’s most ruthless dictatorships.

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Liberal societies stand out for their citizens’ capacity for mutual tolerance. Questions of religion, race, ethnicity, and political ideology may still inform people’s sense of personal identity, sometimes powerfully so, but because citizens are free to develop multiple, overlapping identities and affiliations, no single difference rises to the level of an existential conflict. Disagreements and divisions persist, but even on issues that speak to core aspects of identity, citizens learn to set aside their differences.

That peaceable arrangement is far from the norm. In most societies throughout history, the politics of identity was one of conflict: Protestants against Catholics, Serbs against Croats, peasants against noblemen. Even in liberal societies, persistent antagonism can cause tolerance to break down and devolve into outright hostility or even violent conflict. Citizens who for decades lived amicably in ethnically mixed communities are suddenly overcome by hatred toward their neighbors. It matters little whether they live in a developing country (Rwanda, East Timor) or a more affluent one (Cyprus, Northern Ireland).

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Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous analysis of nineteenth-century American civil society holds true today: citizens who engage in overlapping civil society networks—nongovernmental organizations, volunteer associations, interest groups, and the like—tend to develop identities that cut across social cleavages, which in turn fosters tolerance, civility, and trust. People who lack access to such networks, including those who live in remote, rural areas, are more likely to embrace illiberalism.

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The design of many social media platforms isolates users into peer-group bubbles, where they affiliate only with the like-minded and those who share their core identities, creating a powerful feedback loop that undermines the diffraction of identities through civil society.

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The consolidation of the like-minded online mirrors a broader trend among democratic publics: growing polarization, or the fact that communities are increasingly segregated into antagonistic camps with almost no common ground. Regardless of whether polarization is based on racial, partisan, ethnic, religious, or some other type of identity, its net effect is to segregate diverse identities into a handful of opposing camps and to encourage fierce tribalism among them.

Why Trump Isn’t to Blame for the Nation’s Toxic Political Tribalism
By Michael Kruse

In 2008, in an increasingly politically polarized country, both presidential candidates attempted to present themselves as post-partisan choices. John McCain was seen as a “maverick,” less beholden than others to the dogmatic demands of the Republican Party, while Barack Obama offered the possibility to bridge not only racial divides but the growing gullies between red and blue on the electoral map.

It was a nice idea. Bill Bishop knew it wasn’t true.

That spring, after all, Bishop had published The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. It put hard numbers and gave a catchy name to something people from coast to coast already were feeling: Americans were getting more and more divided — sorted, as it were, based on income, occupation and education, religion, lifestyle and worldviews. And that in turn was having drastic political implications.

The statistics backed him up. In 1976, 26.8 percent of voters lived in “landslide” counties — counties, that is, in which the winner in the presidential election won by more than 20 percent. In 1996, it was 42.1, and by 2004, it was nearing half. “Americans are increasingly unlikely to find themselves in mixed political company,” Bishop wrote — “pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred,” as he put it, “that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’” who lived differently, thought differently, voted differently. People weren’t picking presidents — they were choosing sides.

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Bishop is 68 now and retired from a journalism career that took him from Kentucky to Texas, where he helped found and still is a contributing editor for The Daily Yonder, which covers rural issues. Five or so years after his book came out, he moved from blue, cosmopolitan Austin to red, rural La Grange — a conscious effort to follow his own advice (“Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes,” he wrote in The Big Sort) and re-sort himself onto the other side of the divide.

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Michael Kruse: Is there any way in which the Big Sort has gotten better? Or has the country just gotten more and more “Big Sorted”?

Bill Bishop: The numbers that we use show that it’s just increased. Twenty-six percent of the electorate in 1976 lived in one of those 60-40 counties. And that’s only looking at Republican and Democratic voters. And by 2016 it was 60 percent. Rhodes Cook looked at super-sorted counties — that gave 80 percent or more of its two-party presidential vote — and found that 20 percent of the nation’s counties gave 80 percent. All the numbers point in that same direction.

Kruse: The Big Sort is now the Bigger Sort.

Bishop: There you go. I could have said that.

Kruse: Rereading The Big Sort over the last few days, it made me think about the 2004 election in a new way and made me wonder: Is it fair to look at that election in some sense as the first election of the rest of our political lives?

Bishop: Our conclusion was that we’re sorting in all kinds of ways, so it’s not primarily political — we see it in politics because we can measure it that way. But when people look at what church you go to, some churches become bluer, some churches become redder, and people will change their church or change their religion in order to be with their political group. And clubs will go that way. So, when we began looking at all the different aspects of life, they all began to show the same sorting into like-minded groups — based on essentially identity. And so the underlying engine of all this is identity and expression. It’s who I am.

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… in the big picture identity has become — I mean, politics now isn’t about dividing stuff up. It’s not about, as it was in the old days, getting roads in Kentucky. Now it’s about identity. All the other ways that people develop their identity or have developed their identity since time began in groups and in communities and in families and at work — all those have lost meaning. People are given the task of creating their own identities every day, which is what Facebook and Twitter are all about. A bunch of European sociologists describe this breakdown of community and how the individual has become the artist of his own or her own life and is given this daily task of creating a self. And so politics now plays that role. People use politics to create identity, not to divide up stuff. The policy that is in place under Trump is hated by Democrats. If the same policy remains under a Democratic president, then Democrats like it.

Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
By Musa al-Gharbi

The same tendencies that help promote intragroup cooperation and flourishing tend to undermine intergroup understanding and cooperation.

Our natural impulses are to sort into groups with people who share our values, politics, and other identity commitments, to publicly bring ourselves and push others into conformity with the group, and try to suppress, exclude or dominate others with incompatible goals and perspectives. Our default inclination is to perceive and interpret the world in ways that flatter our self-image, advance our interests and reinforce our existing worldviews – while explaining others’ deviance from our preferred positions through appeals to deficits and pathologies.

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… people who are highly educated, intelligent, or rhetorically skilled are significantly less likely than most others to revise their beliefs or adjust their behaviors when confronted with evidence or arguments that contradict their preferred narratives or preexisting beliefs. Precisely in virtue of knowing more about the world or being better at arguing, we are better equipped to punch holes in data or narratives that undermine our priors, come up with excuses to “stick to our guns” irrespective of the facts, or else interpret threatening information in a way that flatters our existing worldview. And we typically do just that.

In a decades-long set of ambitious experiments and forecasting tournaments, psychologist Philip Tetlock has demonstrated that—as a result of their inclinations toward epistemic arrogance and ideological rigidity—experts are often worse than laymen at anticipating how events are likely to play out . . . especially with respect to their areas of expertise. What’s worse, cognitively sophisticated people tend not to be very self-aware about our error rates either, because we excel at telling stories about how we were “basically right” even when we were, in fact, clearly wrong – inhibiting our ability to learn from mistakes and miscalculations.

In a similar vein, experts have been shown to perform a bit worse than laymen at predicting the likely effects of behavioral science interventions — especially outside of controlled lab settings. Political practitioners have been found to be no better than laypeople at predicting which political messages are persuasive. Comparative and longitudinal studies have found that highly educated political leaders perform no better than less educated ones, and may even be a bit worse in some respects. Experts are no less prone than laymen to overconfidence.

Rather than becoming more likely to converge on the same position, people tend to grow more polarized on contentious topics as their knowledge, numeracy, reflectiveness increases, or when they try to think in actively openminded ways.

These empirical patterns would be shocking and difficult to explain while operating under the assumption that humans’ cognitive and perceptual systems are primarily oriented towards objective truth. However, these tendencies are exactly what one might expect if we instead work from the premise that our cognitive capacities are fundamentally geared toward group building and coalitional struggles, and that we typically reason in ways that help us achieve our goals with and through other people.

On this understanding of how our brains work, we might likewise expect that the kinds of people the symbolic professions select for (cognitively sophisticated, academically high-performing, highly educated) may be especially prone to tribalism, virtue signaling and self-deception. And, unfortunately, there is a lot of empirical evidence that seems to pull in this direction.

For instance, highly educated Americans are also much more likely than others to know what positions they “should” hold in virtue of their partisan or ideological identities, and we’re more likely to align our beliefs to systematically accord with those identities. We are more likely to form positions on issues we didn’t previously have strong opinions about by looking to partisan cues—and to modify our existing positions to bring them into line with new messaging from party leaders. Politically sophisticated Americans are also more likely to systematically accord their political beliefs and preferences to their religion, race, gender, or sexuality—conforming themselves with what they “should” think or say on the basis of their identity characteristics (while other in-group peers tend to have much more heterogeneous sets of views and dispositions).

That is, in a literal sense, the kinds of people who comprise the symbolic professions strive to be “politically correct” in their views much more than other Americans. It should therefore not be surprising that college-educated Americans are more likely than other Americans to self-censor. Nor should it be shocking to discover that censorship in science is heavily driven by scientists themselves, typically against people whose moral and political views diverge from scientists’ own.

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Indeed, education and cognitive sophistication themselves seem to increasingly serve as a key basis for tribalism. Highly educated people tend to marry and socialize with others possessing similar levels of education as themselves. Even among the highly educated, those with high levels of academic performance tend to cluster together—and gradually abandon social ties with those of lower GPAs. And with respect to engaging with “others,” college graduates often look down on those with fewer (or worse) credentials than themselves.

One series of studies looking at college grads in the United States and western European countries found that people who graduated from college viewed less educated people more unfavorably than they did any other reference group. They were also less supportive of programs to help less educated people compared to other potential recipients. And while they often expressed some sense of shame or regret for prejudices expressed against other groups, they were unabashed in their bias against those less educated than themselves. In light of the ways educational attainment varies systematically along the lines of race, gender, and class, these forms of education-based prejudice often exacerbate and reinforce other forms of bias and discrimination.

Likewise, although highly educated and cognitively sophisticated Americans are less likely to express racially prejudicial attitudes on surveys, we tend to be far more prejudicial than most against those whose ideological views diverge from our own – despite the reality that the kinds of ideologies symbolic capitalists are drawn to are robustly associated with increased risk of neuroticism, anxiety and depression. Highly intelligent people are also much more prone to overreact to small shocks, challenges, or slights. That is, we are more sensitive and intolerant of many forms of conflict or disagreement.

Even the apparent racial and ethnic tolerance that highly-educated voters exhibit may be a function of the fact that, precisely in virtue of being more elite than other Americans, symbolic capitalists’ material interests, ambitions, and life prospects do not appear to be threatened by people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups. Research has found that when highly educated people do come to sense that their own interests or prospects are undermined or threatened by competition with racial or ethnic minorities, they often become significantly more hostile toward the groups in question despite their previous egalitarian leanings.

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In addition to our poor self-awareness with respect to how committed to egalitarianism we actually are, highly educated Americans tend to be much worse at gauging other people too — typically assuming others are more extreme or dogmatic than they actually seem to be. This is perhaps a product of the reality that, as compared with the general public, the kinds of people who become academics (highly educated, cognitively sophisticated, academically high performing) tend to themselves be more ideological in their thinking, more dogmatic in their views, and more extreme in their ideological leanings than everybody else—and the process of attaining a college education seems to drive people even further in the direction of moral absolutism. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the Americans most prone to zero-sum thinking included people who lived in cities, those who have especially low or high levels of income, people who identify as strong Democrats, and those who possess postgraduate degrees.

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The increasingly idiosyncratic constitution of the symbolic professions doesn’t just undermine the quality of the work we produce, it also contributes to a growing legitimacy crisis. Ever-larger shares of the population feel that folks “like them” have little voice or stake in our institutions. They don’t believe that symbolic capitalists and aligned institutions understand, respect or reflect their values and interests. This matters because, when people come to feel like they are not represented in institutions – and especially when they perceive that said institutions (or the people who dominate them) are outright hostile towards people like themselves – the natural and rational response is to delegitimize, marginalize, defund or dismantle those institutions. This is a pattern that holds across institutional types, issue areas, and geographical or historical contexts.

Symbolic capitalists try to pathologize this resistance. We attribute it to misinformation, anti-intellectualism and the like. However, the uncomfortable reality is that Americans actually have good reason to be alienated from symbolic capitalists. Our institutions are, in fact, highly unrepresentative of the public as a whole. Symbolic capitalists often are disdainful or hostile towards the concerns and perspectives of “normies.” These dynamics grow especially pronounced during Great Awokenings, but they’re also present in “ordinary” times, and have grown gradually worse over time – perhaps owing to the reality that the symbolic professions have, themselves, grown more fiercely oriented around selecting on the basis of college degrees (especially from elite schools), standardized tests, and the like. The more institutions filter for these traits, the more they’re selecting for people who are extraordinarily prone to dogmatism, extremism, tribalism and virtue signaling – and the more “out of touch” and ideologically parochial we would expect these professions to grow as a result.

Book Review: The Road to Wigan Pier
By Musa al-Gharbi

The Road to Wigan Pier was initially commissioned by the Left Book Club to document the plight of workers in Northern England during the interwar period. Orwell faced two core obstacles in helping symbolic capitalists in hubs like London understand the working class everywhere else:

1. Very few people in his target audience had ever held a non white-collar job. Most of his socialist readers had been born relatively well-off and were currently relatively affluent. The experiences of manual labor, chronic unemployment and poverty were totally alien to them.
2. His audience, despite their socialist leanings, tended to hold negative and inaccurate views about “those people” sociologically distant from themselves – limiting their sympathy to the plight of workers. They romanticized “the proletariat” in the abstract but detested the working class in practice.

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He repeatedly draws lines to help readers understand how the conditions they take for granted are predicated on the exploitation of the working class. They could not enjoy their current standard of living without these “others” experiencing their standards of living. The abundant electricity they rely on isn’t (just) a miracle of industry, science or technology. It’s primarily a product of hard labor – “ghost work” — that provides the means for all the other modern marvels that white-collar professionals take for granted. And this energy was affordable for city dwelling professionals because the working class was absorbing the costs. As Barbara Ehrenreich would later emphasize:

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on— when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently— then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to every one else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, ‘you give and you give.’”

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Theologian Sheldon Vanauken once observed, “The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians–when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”

Orwell makes the same point in The Road to Wigan Pier about socialism. Right or wrong, he argued, when people try to understand what socialism means for them, they don’t read theoretical tracts, nor do they imagine utopian or abstract possibilities. Instead, they look at actually-existing socialists, the institutions, organizations and communities they belong to, etc. to get a sense of what the ideology would look like “in the world.” In terms of community, he argues, socialism has always been tied to urbanity in a w ay that is off-putting to many. But the bigger stumbling block is that the kinds of people they typically encounter who broadcast themselves as “socialists” tend to be folks you wouldn’t want to sit in a train with for a couple hours, let alone launch a social movement with or entrust with power.

“Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially the working class, from whom he is of all people furthest removed… On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely capable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred – a queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs… the net effect is to give outsiders the impression that there is nothing in Communism except hatred.” …

“Sometimes when I listen to these people talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the impression that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt, a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smel the blood of a right-wing deviationist!’” …

“The really interesting thing about these people is the way they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved” …

These impulses, he emphasized, tended to be in stark contrast with the working class people he observed:

“The working man… is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense…. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on a Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about… in my opinion he is the truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency” …

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Orwell argued that adherents to socialism tend to be relatively affluent, or “middle class” (by which he meant folks who were neither aristocrats nor commoners, neither workers nor capitalists. People who were highly educated and engaged in white-collar jobs. If he were writing the book today, he’d likely use a term like “professional managerial class” instead).

Despite their expressed egalitarianism, Orwell posited, these “middle class” socialists were deeply committed to maintaining their elite position. They wanted to achieve social justice goals… so long as doing so didn’t require any inconvenient changes. They were generally disinclined to make sacrifices with respect to their own lifestyles and aspirations, or to make compromises with respect to their own ways of navigating the world. If changes were required in order to build a cross-class coalition, they believed it was working class people who should think and behave more like them, not the other way around …

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To make matters worse, most social justice advocates were not particularly reflexive about these realities. Orwell suggested that their faux radicalism seemed to blind them to their elitist tendencies. It also obscured the ways “middle class” socialists exploited and perpetuated the very social problems they decried. It lead them to believe their “activism” was a genuine threat to the system when, in fact, their behaviors (to include their tendency to drive normies away from the left) often served to reinforce the prevailing order …

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The path forward, Orwell suggested, is for social justice activists to abandon their snobbishness and parochialism, their moral grandstanding, their inclination towards abstraction over practice, their insistence upon off-putting eccentricity, and their tendencies to surveille, micromanage and paternalize others — to focus on what’s essential and important — in order to build a broad-based coalition that addresses people’s material concerns, yes, but not at the expense of their “ideal interests” (to borrow a concept from Weber). However, it was unclear to Orwell whether social justice activists actually cared about their professed causes enough to do what must be done in order to achieve their expressed ends.

The Democratic Party Has a Monumental Choice to Make
By Musa al-Gharbi

The Awokening was driven by a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society: highly-educated, relatively-affluent, urban and suburban white liberals. More specifically, these movements revolved around symbolic capitalists – i.e. professionals who provide no direct physical goods or services to others but instead make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they’re known. Think: lawyers, consultants, educators, entertainers, journalists, analysts, researchers, artists, administrators, communications professionals and so on.

One interesting finding from my research was that, despite the ubiquity of “kids these days” narratives, the Awokening was driven primarily by mid-career professionals – i.e. folks in their late 20s through early 50s. Contemporary young people came of age in the context of this Awokening and had to contort themselves into the (politically) correct image to please the older gatekeepers who controlled their access to admissions, scholarships, jobs, etc.

Meanwhile, older professionals, eager to prove their continued relevance and preserve their legitimacy, responded to the insurgency of their erstwhile successors by trying to prove that they were “with it” too. As a result, there was a rapid shift throughout these professions driven by aggressive maneuvering in the middle career stage.

Now, looking at numerous empirical indicators, it’s clear that the post-2010 “Great Awokening” has crested. Mid-career professionals have become more focused on their pocketbooks and careers, and moderated or disengaged on many other cultural and political fronts.

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There have been large protest movements in reaction to Trump’s second administration. They continue to be driven primarily by symbolic capitalists. Research by sociologist Dana Fisher shows that the “People’s March,” “No Kings” protests and anti-ICE demonstrations are overwhelmingly comprised of the same constituents who drove all the other Awokening demonstrations: 86 percent of participants were white, 76 percent had a BA degree or higher, 94 percent identified with the left and the Democratic Party.

However, there was one striking difference between these movements and the ones that preceded them: the age of participants. The #Resistance2.0 protests have been led primarily by later-career professionals and retirees. The median age of organizers for these protests was 67 years old. Older Americans have showed up in force across the country. Young people have been largely M.I.A.

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As with the #Resitance2.0 protests, the core constituency for democratic socialist candidates is also highly-educated, relatively-affluent urban and suburban white liberals. However, unlike the recent anti-Trump protest movements, most support for democratic socialist candidates has come from voters under 50, with the strongest support from Americans under 30 years old.

Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is skewed in the same direction. Eighty-five percent of members are non-Hispanic white. Over 80 percent of members over 25 have BA degrees or higher. Most of those under 25 are in college. Only 10 percent of members work in blue-collar, retail or food-service jobs (and another 15 percent are unemployed, disabled or retired); the rest are symbolic capitalists or college students (i.e. aspiring symbolic capitalists). In terms of age, 73 percent of DSA members are under 50 years old; 33 is their median age.

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DSA membership has roughly doubled since Trump returned to the White House. And, thanks to the support of highly-educated, relatively-affluent, urban and suburban, white liberal professionals, DSA candidates have been winning primary elections in symbolic economy hubs nationwide …

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Put simply, although they’re largely absent from the streets, early-career symbolic capitalists are not disengaged. It’s just that, instead of joining demonstrations, they’re working aggressively to transform the Democratic Party.

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Although there are many disagreements about which direction the Democratic Party should head, there is broad agreement across America that its current form is terrible. In one recent poll, the Islamic Republic of Iran was the only political entity ranked lower among Americans than the Democratic Party. Even Democrats are lukewarm about their party and its leadership.

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Younger voters rallied strongly behind the Democrats in 2018 but then became less likely to vote, and shifted increasingly towards the GOP, in every election since. Given Trump’s consistently dire favorability ratings among these voters, that trend seems to be driven more by increased alienation from the Democratic Party than growing affinity with Trump.

Critically, even as younger voters moved away from the Democrats since 2018, voters over 64 have moved towards the party from 2020 forward.

The Democratic Party’s leadership is increasingly gerontocratic and has grown increasingly appealing to older voters. However, the party itself seems sclerotic – unable to check Trump’s growing authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence – even as party leaders have grown further out of touch with shifts in mainstream attitudes on foreign policy issues, economic preferences, and beyond. Seeing modest growth with senior citizens while increasingly alienating the rest of the public is not a formula for long-term relevance or success. Something must change. The good news is, we’ve been here before.

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In the aftermath of the first Great Awokening of the 1920 and 1930s, FDR took the wind out of socialist parties and movements in the U.S. by integrating their best policies into the New Deal. In the process, he successfully converted most American socialists into banal Democrats while also improving the lives of most Americans and significantly broadening the appeal of the Democratic Party with normie voters.

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In the wake of the second Great Awokening from the mid-1960s through early 1970s, young professionals carried out a successful coup and attempted to reposition the party around the values and interests of people like themselves. They failed to consolidate these constituents but did alienate working class voters, leading to the party into decades in the political wilderness.

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However, in the aftermath of the third Awokening of the late 1980s through early 90s, the party was revolutionized once again, this time at the hands of Bill Clinton.

“Bubba” focused aggressively on pocketbook issues, and in a manner that radically enhanced the position of symbolic capitalists relative to other workers. He expressed sympathy towards minority populations and the poor but repudiated left-wing extremism on ‘cultural’ issues without hesitation. Simultaneously he emphasized public safety, public order, and border control. He was highly-educated but talked in a direct and plainspoken way.

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Conceding to normie voters on cultural positioning allowed Bill Clinton to hold Democrats’ margins with minorities and partially reverse attrition with working-class voters. His simultaneous and ruthless pursuit of symbolic capitalists’ economic interests on trade policies and social safety net reform — which helped lower the price of goods and services professionals use most heavily while making life more precarious for blue collar and working-class constituents — this allowed Democrats to gain with relatively affluent and highly-educated voters (thereby, belatedly realizing the objectives of the late 1960s coup: their mistake was focusing on symbolic capitalists’ cultural views instead of their pocketbooks. As my book elaborates, when the two come into conflict, it’s usually the latter that runs the show).

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However, by 2012, it was clear that a dramatic change was underway amongst symbolic capitalists – putting these professionals increasingly out of step with the rest of society.

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At present, though Americans continue to hold the party in low esteem, and despite their ongoing internal dysfunction, Democrats will likely see gains this November. If they do manage to win back one or both houses of Congress, it would be a mistake to interpret this as a sign the party is doing fine.

Rather than growing affinity with the Democratic brand, any gains are likely to be driven by regular thermostatic electoral movements interacting with Trump’s deep unpopularity. Coasting these negative partisanship currents might work fine for the midterms, but it’ll likely be insufficient to carry the Democrats into the White House in 2028.

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… older Democrats have largely rallied behind an unsustainable status quo. To defang the threat to liberal democracy in the longer term, there needs to be an opposition party to Trump’s GOP that is actually appealing. Younger activists are correct to dedicate their energies to this broad goal. It is an open question as to how appealing the DSA-inspired alternative will be nationwide, but proponents are correct in their assertion that the party must evolve.

How the establishment responds to these demands for change will determine if the Democrats transform in a manner that is closer to the 1930s, 1970s or 1990s: will they attempt to co-opt the backlash against “wokeness” like Bill Clinton? Will they embrace the best ideas of the insurgents and try to establish a new social contract like FDR?

Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI and liberal democracy share the same crisis: ‘there is a tendency to escalate everything’
By Nick Lichtenberg

According to Acemoglu’s book, liberal democracy used to rest on more than elections and constitutional rights. “Shared prosperity” was the glue, the “main promise” that held the system together. Somewhere in the transition to what he calls the “postindustrial economy” that bargain fell apart.

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The center-left is silent as inequality grows, separating the groups by class, while cultural politics divide them in social views — “that destroyed the communal roots of liberal democracy.”

Liberalism Is Worth Saving. Here’s How.
By Daron Acemoglu

Liberalism changed as the college-educated seg­ment of society became more dominant, and this made liberal democracies less likely to seek solutions to the postindustrial challenges that heavily afflicted the less educated.

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Postindustrial society undermined liberalism. Automation eroded the natural pathways to shared prosperity and solidarity. Regulation drifted away from those it was meant to protect. Social engineering became more intense and turned its back on some of the foundational liberal values, building up a powerful backlash.

Is This Liberalism’s Last Stand?
By Thomas B. Edsall

Is liberalism an endangered species?

By liberalism I mean the combination of carefully regulated free markets with individual and intellectual freedom — the liberalism that drove unparalleled growth and prosperity here and abroad.

Under threat from both its left and its right, has American liberalism — once an insurgency challenging corporate monopolists, segregationists, the patriarchy, corrupt politicians and, most broadly, entrenched economic power — been corrupted by its ties to the establishment?

Is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America less a demand for socialism than a plea for a party of the left that represents the middle and working classes, the precariat and the losers under global competition?

As liberals have gained control over major institutions — universities, major nonprofits, the media, Hollywood — are they no longer insurrectionists but rather ripe targets for insurrectionists? Have their elevated standing and growing affluence turned them into proponents of the status quo?

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In a wide-ranging response to my questions, Edmund Fawcett, the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” argued that

liberals could recover if they became, as once, inclusive, democratic. If, that is, they made their promises for everyone, not just a few. They’d also need to relearn how to talk of their principles as if they mattered and we should care about them.

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Fawcett’s argument is premised on his belief that there are four basic liberal principles:

Unchecked power can’t be trusted (whether of state, wealth or conventional opinion); life for people can get better; society is never harmonious but always in conflict; and everyone merits respect whatever rank, status, group, etc. they’re put into or they choose — the democratic seed in otherwise undemocratic creed.

…

Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, put her finger on a core internal conflict facing those seeking to restore liberal credibility:

We still live in a world built on liberal principles: our main political, economic, and social institutions — democracy, markets, universities — are based on its principles.

The problem is that as more people have come to see these institutions as corrupt, dominated by out-of-touch elites, and no longer delivering for them, liberalism and in the United States the Democratic Party, which is most associated with it, has come to be seen as the embodiment and defender of an inept, ineffectual status quo.

While critics on the far left and right argue that the “fault lies with liberalism itself,” Berman wrote,

…

Liberals have long supported market economies because they rest on individual choice and reward individual effort, and since they are suspicious of concentrated power, they have viewed too much government control over economic life as dangerous.

But during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, liberals and the parties associated with them fell prey to a warped version of this view, promoting free markets above all else and forgetting that without careful government intervention, markets can threaten rather than support individual liberty and societal thriving.

Berman’s list of liberalism’s errors doesn’t stop there:

Rather than striving for government of, by and for the people, liberals allowed democracies to become dominated by out-of-touch elites and moneyed and organized interests, and producing policies that reflected their preferences rather than those of average citizens.

Key societal institutions, most notably, K-12 schools and universities, came to be seen as dominated by elites promoting ideas many of their fellow citizens do not share, and by diversity bureaucracies that too often judge people by group identity rather than individual character, rather than by a meritocratic ethos and a commitment to cultivating democratic citizens.

In other words, if liberalism began as a reformist movement challenging aristocracy, entrenched power and a social order favoring the few, it now faces a tougher challenge: itself.

“So where does that leave liberals?” Berman asked.

Liberalism can once again become a radical, progressive force but only if it is again willing to take on established power and the status quo, even though today that status quo is largely of its own making.

Liberals must show they recognize where the system they created went wrong and are willing and able to use their own distinctive principles to fix it: building a fairer, more just and more productive economy; a democracy responsive to average citizens rather than moneyed interests, organized minorities and out-of-touch elites; and civil society and cultural institutions that constructively engage dissent rather than censoring or punishing it.

Reclaiming “Populism”: On Thomas Frank’s “The People, No”
By L. Benjamin Rolsky

… Frank documents varied but similar moments of “Democracy Scare” and subsequent anti-populist sentiment across the 20th century in order to highlight just how wrong “the experts” were when it came to populist demands in a given moment of historical time. “This is the core assumption of what I call the Democracy Scare,” Frank explains. “If the people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because something has gone wrong with the people themselves.”

…

“Indeed,” Frank assures us, “it seems that whenever we find someone attacking populism, their underlying purpose is to shore up the legitimacy of whatever system it is that has made them an elite.”

Recovering the lost genius of liberalism, with Adrian Wooldridge
By Geoff Kabaservice

Geoff Kabaservice: I think it was George Bernard Shaw who made the witticism about Americans and the Brits being two peoples divided by a common language, and there are a lot of problems with titles making the transition from one side of the ocean to the other. One thinks of the play which was called The Madness of George III on the stage. But when it came time to be made into a movie, Hollywood thought, “Well, that sounds like a monster movie. And since the American public won’t have seen the films Mad George I or Mad George II, we’re going to have to call it The Madness of King George.” There are various misunderstandings, as you say, between us. But both titles of your book and indeed the name of this podcast point toward what I think is our shared belief that centrism can and should be vital and even revolutionary in its defense of liberalism properly understood.

Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. There is an assumption that the center is flaccid or floppy or incapable of taking tough decisions — that it’s a mush, as you were saying in your introduction. And one of the central claims in this book is that that really isn’t so, that this has been the most powerful, revolutionary and coherently thought-out philosophy that has been developed in history. It’s the one philosophy that really deals with the problems and opportunities of modernity in a coherent way, and we should be embracing it and proud of it.

As you say, there are two different titles for the book, but they both share the same subtitle, and the subtitle is much more what the book is really about. The subtitle is The Lost Promise of Liberalism. So in Britain, Centrists of the World Unite! In America, The Revolutionary Center. What is the revolutionary center? What are centrists uniting behind? And what I think they should unite behind is the genius of liberalism. And that genius, unfortunately, has been a bit lost at the moment, but throughout history it has always managed to reassert itself.

Geoff Kabaservice: Since we’re talking about the lost promise or genius of liberalism, can you give me a very bare-bones definition of what you understand liberalism to be? “Mere liberalism,” perhaps, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis.

Adrian Wooldridge: “Mere liberalism” is a very good phrase. Let me start off by clearing up a misunderstanding. A lot of people on the neoliberal left would say that the essence of liberalism is about the size of the state or the relative role of the state compared with the role of the market. A lot of people on the left-liberal side of things, would say liberalism is in essence about being generous to people; it’s about being nice, it’s a nice philosophy. And I think both of those things are sort of secondary characteristics.

Yes, I quite like the idea of having more market and less state. And yes, I think being nice to people is generally good. But being nice to people is not a governing philosophy, and the size and scope of the state is not absolutely central. Hayek was a liberal and he believed in the market and in a smaller state, but Keynes was undoubtedly a liberal and he believed in a bigger, more active state. So that’s secondary, it’s not a primary thing.

I think the primary thing that really defines liberalism is three things: one, individualism; second, tolerance; and three, a skepticism and worry about power. By individualism, I mean that the world starts with the individual and works upwards to the collective — the opposite of high Tory views and the opposite of socialist views. And by “the individual,” I don’t mean the notion of just allowing people the freedom to go shopping and to choose whatever they want in a free market. I think liberal individualism is a much richer and more profound philosophy than that. It’s about being our best selves. It’s about self-improvement, self-control, self-development. The essence of liberalism was to do with self-help, self-improvement, self-education. It’s a very questing, striving sort of notion of individualism.

Secondly, tolerance, that you must be tolerant of other people’s opinions. And the reason for that… It might sound like a nice thing to be, but the reason for that is a philosophy of knowledge: that we don’t know what is true, and we definitely don’t have the right to impose our theological views on other people. So the right thing to do is to be tolerant, is to be skeptical, is to be pluralistic about different knowledge claims.

And thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, is worry about power. If you’re a liberal, you’re saying that power is in itself a dangerous thing. It needs to be constrained, it needs to be disciplined, it needs to be governed by rules.

And so I think those are the three things. So you can have big state government; you can have a big-state liberalism, small-state liberalism. You can have nice liberalism, you can have tough liberalism. But you can’t have a liberalism that believes in strongmen, that believes in imposing religious beliefs on other people, and that believes that collectives matter more than individual self-development.

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Geoff Kabaservice: I agree with you very much that liberalism has those three central concerns, which are a flywheel, I suppose, into which different gears could be plugged depending on whether one has a preference for a more left or right, conservative or progressive kind of society. But this does to some extent beg the question, then; Why did you address your book toward the center, toward moderates? What is the special calling of moderates or the center toward liberal democracy?

Adrian Wooldridge: The main reason is that at the moment the center is demoralized and it’s intellectually a bit vacant. All of the energy in politics is on the extremes: it’s on the woke left and it’s on the Trumpian or the populist right. So we’ve got these two forms of populism coming together, and liberals, partly because they’ve been in power for so long and partly because they are not adjusting their philosophy to new problems, are feeling rather lackluster. And what I say at the moment is you shouldn’t be feeling lackluster. You should be reviving your beliefs, you should be fighting back. And this is the way to do it, by looking back at the liberal tradition.

Because what’s happened to the liberal groupings at the moment is they are the establishment. Davos is a bunch of centrists gathering together, trying to order the world and not doing it particularly well.

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Geoff Kabaservice: … So in very broad strokes, what went wrong to bring us to today when we have this embattled liberalism you’re writing about?

Adrian Wooldridge: Two things went wrong. One was that the liberals became the establishment and they began to have all of the congenital failures of an establishment, which is that they became self-serving, self-indulgent, nepotistic, and cut off from the average person. And I think a classic example, a perfect example of that is what happens at Davos. … And they’re insulated in ways that they don’t quite understand, and they’re also stuck in time in ways that they don’t quite understand.

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Geoff Kabaservice: And decadence does seem like an appropriate label to apply to those liberal leaders.

Adrian Wooldridge: This is a decadent class and it’s a decadent group of people. They’re people who are very strange in the sense that… We have a whole set of problems that are quite obvious to everybody.

…

One was the financial crisis, obviously. The deregulation of finance went to such a point, and the Ponzi scheme in the financial sector went to such a point, that it came crashing down. This was a sector which basically was making enormous amount of money, which was looking after itself, and then it all came crashing down, and these people were all bailed out by the state because there was too much systemic risk. And that created for the economy a big drag that lasted for a long period of time, but it really, really shattered people’s faith in the system. People who believed in markets until markets turned against them, people who played with other people’s money until it was set on fire — that really shattered people’s faith. And I think that was a long-term thing.

…

And then of course there was the question of the Iraq war. Many people might find it strange to think of George W. Bush as a liberal, but he was — not just in his rhetoric but I think in his actual belief that we were going to spread democracy to the Middle East: Democracy was a good thing, the reason why the Middle East was such a mess was that you had all these frustrated people being sat upon by these kleptocratic dictators, and all you needed was democracy, and that would sort out those problems. … So I think it was a liberal overreach. It was an assumption that the world just consists of liberals wanting to be free. I think that was naive.

So cocooning plus overreach was how things went very wrong.

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Geoff Kabaservice: I think this is why I raised the 1990s, because it felt to me then that history was moving in the right direction. It certainly does not feel that way now. I suppose I should add that when we use the term “decadence,” we’re not necessarily referring to moral depravity — although of course the revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails have shown that there was in fact quite a bit of that in the Davoisie. But really what we’re thinking about here is decadence in the sense of a historical forgetting and a going through the motions — and forgetting particularly that the achievements of liberalism were gained only through lakes of blood.

Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. One of the assumptions that certain liberals make — and I think to some extent Francis Fukuyama, who I admire enormously, to some extent he makes this assumption — is that liberalism is somehow natural. Fukuyama, in The End of History, is almost saying that we will reach the end of history and the end of history will be a bit boring, but that’s where we’re going. And I think it’s not boring — for many reasons, but one of the reasons it’s not boring is that all of these liberal virtues are very hard to create.

People with power like to hoard it; dividing power and making sure it’s transmitted is very difficult. People with opinions like to impose them on others, so encouraging a regime of tolerance is quite difficult. And the same with individualism. Societies become like group entities, and encouraging people to be individualistic, to be different, to challenge conventional opinion, to live in a different way — all of these things are quite hard. So a liberal society involves pushing against certain of our more general instincts.

But I wanted to come back on the decadence issue because I think that… I don’t want to disassociate myself from a pejorative use of the term “decadence.” Because I think one of the things that happened in the 1990s was that you had this alliance of bourgeois bohemians: the “Bobo” alliance. And basically the argument was, “Let’s have free markets and permissive morality, and that’s great. That’s wonderful, and that is what a mature society ought to have.” And so there was a denigration of regulations and constraints on the way that the market would operate. There was also a denigration of Victorian values and all of those terrible things. They said, “Let’s all be individuals, we’re all mature, it’s only sex,” et cetera, et cetera. And what you have in Epstein Island is — I don’t want to say the logical conclusion of this, but it’s one possible conclusion of this. And it shows what happens when people are just looking after their own egos, when they’re just making as much money as they can and having as many girlfriends as they can. That can lead to a very, very dark place, I think.

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Geoff Kabaservice: … And what you’re talking about in the case of Epstein is a liberalism that overthrew the moral restraints of Victorianism (or whatever you’d like to call it), and that is playing out in ways that we’re seeing now are devastating for liberal societies. And therefore there needs to be some conservative restraint on the liberal impulse, even as there needs to be a stimulus to progress for conservatives.

Adrian Wooldridge: … I think we need to start moving a little bit to the left and little bit to the right. We need to appreciate much more the importance of cultural tradition. We need to value much more things like art, beauty, culture, ballet, all the rest of it. But we also need to start taking left-wing arguments seriously as well, particularly about constraints on opportunity or about exploitation and things like that.

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The liberal consensus from the 1980s on was very pro-business, and it would make any possible excuse for the business world. You have Robert Bork saying mergers are fine, it doesn’t matter how big companies are as long as there’s some sort of consumer benefit. And I think we liberal centrists need to be much harder on business in two senses. One is about concentration. We need to revive the Brandeis tradition rather than the Bork tradition in terms of worrying about concentrations of ownership.

But secondly, in terms of what the tech companies are doing to our powers of concentration, to our powers of thinking, to our news sense, things like that. There are these companies which are pursuing profit through information manipulation, which entails a great many worrying things. The sacred center of the liberal world is the individual. It’s the individual as a rational, considerate being capable of thinking ahead, capable of focus, capable of self-reflection. And all of those things are being eroded by these tech companies at an incredible rate. We see IQ going down, we see reading abilities going down, we see concentration rates going down. The very essence of liberal capitalist society — the responsible individual — is being undermined. And I think that’s not a small criticism of what’s going on. That’s quite a big criticism. It’s a way in which we have to reconfigure what we consider to be liberal in quite a big way, not forgiving business everything.

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Up until about 1900, liberalism was very much the philosophy of laissez-faire. It was a philosophy that “The market always works best, and any interference with the market has all sorts of perverse consequences which we must avoid. And if you’re kind to people who are poor, you’ll end up harming them much more.” And then these new liberals come along and they say, “Actually, this is based on too cynical a view of the state and it’s based on too optimistic view of individual opportunities. What we must do is construct a welfare state, and particularly an educational system that means that people can learn to read and write. In order for people to be free and to make sensible choices, they need to have input from education, and they need to have healthcare,” and all of those sorts of things.

So you begin to move from a world in which liberalism means doing nothing except letting the market work, to a world in which liberalism means being much more active: the state taking a more active role in education, in welfare, in providing a safety net. And these people who go through this revolution in liberalism, moving from one sort of liberalism to another, have a very longstanding impact on society. One of them is William Beveridge, who was at Balliol, and he eventually designs the welfare state in Britain. The Beveridge Report comes out in 1942 and lays the foundations for the welfare state. Another is John Maynard Keynes in King’s College, Cambridge. He again goes through the same transformation from pure laissez-faire liberal to somebody who believes in the more active role of the state; obviously, he creates the Keynesian revolution.

What I’m saying in a long-winded way is partly that this creation of a new ruling class might seem: “Well, it’s a bunch of privileged people holding onto their power and looking after their interests.” No, these people go in and actually change the nature of the state because they begin to have a more benevolent notion of what freedom means and how you attain a free society.

So this is how liberalism, confronted with its own obsolescence — and it began to look as though was dying in 1900 because the world of the nineteenth century individual, the capitalist individual was dying — and then it resuscitated itself. I think in some ways we’re in the same moment now.

…

And I think that it was very much the case that the United States had exactly such a class — I know you’ve written extensively about this — after the Second World War. These were people pretty much in the Anglo-Saxon educational and Protestant tradition who believed in public service, who believed in elites, and who believed that the best of us must construct a liberal order both at home and abroad. And you had this extraordinary action after the Second World War… After the First World War, America sort of retreats back into itself. It doesn’t want to deal with this messy Europe. After the Second World War came this extraordinary realization that America is now top dog, and in order to be top dog, you don’t just eat what you want but you have to act in a benevolent way for the rest of the world. You have to try and run the world.

And something happened to that elite, to that process of creating an elite. The Vietnam War divided that class into very antagonistic factions. They hated each other, they disagreed — George W. Bush disagreed with Bill Clinton, there was a lot of fighting — but it survived. It survived, but more and more fissiparous and more and more bad-tempered. Now it’s gone. Now you have a system really in the United States where you have two gangs of people: I mean the woke left and the Trumpian right. Whatever their social class backgrounds, whatever their monetary position, their hatred of each other matters more to them than anything else. And that’s a very, very dangerous position for the world’s leading hegemonic power to have.

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Geoff Kabaservice: … As we look at liberalism having failed (or seeming to fail), being challenged by the postliberal right as well as an emerging postliberal left, as it seems that people have lost faith in any of the liberal leaders of countries including Britain and the United States, what might revolutionary-minded insiders who prize the liberal heritage do at this present moment to bring us a better future?

Adrian Wooldridge:

My optimism comes from the fact that every time liberalism has looked as if it is dying, it has revived itself. So on the grounds that history repeats itself, I’m an optimist. I also think that there’s a lot of intellectual energy now flowing to the center, and there’s a lot of willingness to admit that we’ve made mistakes in the past.

…

So there are a lot of people who are liberals who are willing to question shibboleths, slaughter sacred cows.

…

What most worries me is that there is an elite that’s there that’s hard to budge. That it’s been there for a long time. It’s very powerful. In some ways it’s richer than it ever has been, and it’s more capable of insulating itself from the consequences of its bad decisions than it ever has been before. It’s an enormously powerful group of people. One would have thought Davos might have imploded, but it goes on and on and on, preaching an incredible lot of clichéd nonsense to the world.

…

It is a very, very decadent elite. So what we need to have is insiders fixing it: a revolution from below, people younger than myself coming up who imbibe this liberal idea and conduct a revolution from the center.

…

… what happened in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that the Liberal Party was visibly dying. It was just old. And then a bunch of intellectuals came along and presented a blueprint, and it was that blueprint that ignited a political revival.

So I think you have to get the ideas there, and then the politicians, I hope, will come along.

Democrats Need to Stop Seeking Oppressors — Real or Imaginary
By Daron Acemoglu

Populism enables politicians to speak for ordinary people, in a language that is familiar, clear and appealing. It can be an effective means of building a mass movement that can obtain power and produce leaders who govern in a way that tackles the key issues in our economy and society.

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A big tent, when erected, has enabled some of the biggest progressive successes of the past century. The Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAP) pioneered modern social democracy, by abandoning its Marxist roots and appealing to the middle classes as well as to workers and farmers. Though SAP remained closely integrated with the labor movement, it also strove to work with corporations to improve the lives of ordinary people. Social democracy took its modern form after the historic 1938 Saltsjöbaden accord between trade unions and business interests — a bargain made possible because the party had worked to build bridges with corporations in the 1930s. This laid the foundations of the corporatist model, with high wages and high investment, that defined the Swedish economy for the entire postwar era.

The situation in America around the same time was different, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were backed up by another broad coalition of strange bedfellows that included the educated progressives in his brain trust, the labor movement and conservative Southern Democrats.

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Big-tent populists don’t have to forgo combativeness. Opponents, even enemies, can be useful for a mass politics movement. It is always easier to define what you stand for by contrasting it with what you stand against, and sometimes this is a good method for building motivated coalitions. Roosevelt, for example, took aim at the big corporations that criticized his agenda: “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he said in a 1936 address. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Critics called him a “traitor to his class” — but he did work with corporations and the rich, and it was clear that he was striving not to tear down the system but to better it.

A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready.
By Margaret MacMillan

What happens to those who refuse to adapt, and insist that a crumbling system can carry on? Consider three revolutions that were, and one that wasn’t.

On the eve of the French Revolution, France, Europe’s greatest land power, was probably bankrupt, in large part because of the enormous amounts it had borrowed to help defeat the British in the American Revolution. Extravagant and corrupt ruling elites had lost their way, and a growing middle class, excluded from political power, was demanding change. At the bottom of society, workers and peasants faced starvation and were increasingly desperate.

Powerful new Enlightenment ideas were circulating — some of which were imported from the American Revolution — about human rights and new forms of government that would give power to at least some of the people.

The French kings and their courtiers misunderstood the depth of the discontent and assumed that nothing could shake them from their privileged position. They were wrong: The monarchy was overthrown, and a chaotic, violent republic was born. Within a decade, Napoleon would be emperor.

There is no single pattern for revolutionary change, but those at the summit of a regime often fail to recognize how brittle it is. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the consequence of defeat abroad, rather than a costly victory. But Czar Nicholas II also insisted, against all evidence, that no reforms were needed because Russians still adored him. In 1930s Germany, Hitler was invited into power by elites who thought, wrongly, that they would be able to use him, and that the existing system was strong enough to box him in.

Each of these revolutions had profound international ramifications. Napoleon led France to dominance over the continent, smashing old institutions and ideas like the divine right of kings to rule. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia, preached and fostered revolutionary internationalism, waging war worldwide on capitalism and democratic nations. Hitler rearmed Germany, conquered most of Europe and murdered millions of Jews and many others in the name of Aryan dominance.

Sometimes, though, nations and their leaders read the tea leaves in time. In the 1820s, the British government was facing pressure from the middle classes, newly created by the Industrial Revolution, but shut out of political decision making. The British elite, attuned to the recent catastrophe in France, knew that it needed to adapt in order to survive. The 1832 Great Reform Act served as a pressure valve that widened the franchise sufficiently to avert a wider crisis.

…

Those who choose to ignore the warning signs and dismiss history as irrelevant for the present might find themselves surprised and appalled when unwanted events happen to them anyway.

Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order
By Stacie E. Goddard, Ronald R. Krebs, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen and Berthold Rittberger

In the late 1940s, Western leaders were gripped by a sincere desire to avoid the self-interested and shortsighted mistakes that had given rise to fascism and World War II. Led by the United States, they created institutions such the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to protect state borders; encourage the freer flow of goods, money, and ideas; promote economic development and monetary stability; and beat back communism and other illiberal political forces. These norms and institutions established an international order that defined legitimate state behavior in line with liberal commitments. For a time, according to the dominant accounts of its demise, the postwar international order largely succeeded, especially in the West. And its acknowledged leader, the United States, was a remarkably benevolent hegemon.

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American power built and sustained the international order that took shape after World War II, but liberal rhetoric defined its purpose, underpinned its design, and gave the order legitimacy. Its defenders argued that an international order would advance the universal interests for which all rational individuals yearn. Because all people crave the freedom to pursue their interests as they see fit, the order would remove the economic and political impediments to that freedom.

The order’s founders and backers also maintained that its institutions were necessary because the public goods they ensured would otherwise be in short supply. Consistent with individualistic liberal premises, supporters maintained that even if everyone wants common goods, such as collective security and free trade, they would prefer that others pay the costs of providing those goods. This appeared to be the clear lesson of interwar international politics, when beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies led to self-defeating protectionism, and shortsighted self-interest undermined the League of Nations.

Finally, the postwar international order would, like liberal national constitutions, invoke the rule of law to tame power politics. Its institutions would be transparent and its rules binding, even for those who wrote the rules. Decision-making and enforcement would be shielded from countries’ naked exercise of power. According to the historian Mark Mazower, the postwar order envisioned “the possibility of carving out a politics-free zone.”

These arguments, derived from liberal premises and framed in liberal language, cropped up across policy domains. A rules-bound international trading regime, U.S. President Harry Truman declared in 1949, would mean that “all countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources.” Collective security organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, were founded because of the universal truth that, as Carlo Sforza, Italy’s minister of foreign affairs, put it at the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty signing ceremony, “no nation in the world can feel secure in its prosperity and peace if all its neighbors are not as safely marching towards the same goals of prosperity and security.” Because NATO advanced the good of all, Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak declared, all “the peoples of the world have . . . the right to rejoice over it.”

…

Many of these claims were aspirational, and some were hypocritical. Empires—both liberal and communist—dominated huge swaths of the globe, pervasive poverty and inequality belied the promise of economic prosperity for all, and protectionist carve-outs were built into the emerging trading regime. At times, the Anglo-American architects of the postwar order embraced power politics even as they cloaked their exercise of might in a rhetoric of liberal rights.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss the liberal language that legitimized the postwar order as mere rhetoric. Liberal principles dictated how the order’s defenders reacted to and channeled demands for reform—and ended up undermining the order’s ability to adapt to the changing tectonics of world politics. The international order’s liberalism became its undoing.

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All international orders are contested; even the most inclusive order distributes costs and benefits unevenly. In the 1970s, critics from what was then known as the Third World saw the global trading system as skewed in favor of the wealthy and advocated for what they called a New International Economic Order, which would address economic inequality by improving the terms of trade, allowing poorer countries greater access to the markets of richer ones, and promoting development aid and technology transfer. Later, as China became an economic powerhouse, it demanded more say in the World Trade Organization (WTO). More recently, India’s leaders have asked why their country’s growing wealth has not resulted in a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After globalization transferred manufacturing jobs out of wealthy, industrialized economies, populists in those countries promised to use state power to rein in markets.

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Justifying the order in terms of universal interests and public goods meant that those charging it with systemic injustice could be—and often were—dismissed. If all rational, moral individuals wanted what the order provided, then critics were either irrational and uninformed or immoral and disingenuous. When critics from the global South advanced a competing vision of trade centered on developing countries’ national interests, defenders such as Peter Thomas Bauer, a prominent British economist, sneered at them as “intellectual barbarians” who failed to grasp the “basic tenets of economics.” When the entrepreneur Ross Perot assailed the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement in his 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, predicting in a debate that year that it would result in “a giant sucking sound going south,” mainstream economists such as Paul Krugman accused him of “telling malicious whoppers.” Al Gore, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, alleged that Perot was merely selling a “politics of negativism and fear” for his own benefit. Twenty-five years later, Trump’s protectionism was part of what made him and his backers “deplorables.” Countries that sought nuclear weapons, regardless of their very real security concerns, were frequently stigmatized as “rogues,” “outlaws,” “mavericks,” “renegades,” or even “demons.”

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If the aggrieved are denied the opportunity to express their discontent within institutions, they will seek solutions elsewhere. To distance international institutions from the pitfalls of power politics is also to divorce them from the rejuvenating spring of national politics. Politics, as the democratic tradition rightly stresses, is a critical source of legitimacy. It connects policy outputs to the interests of individuals and countries. … Absent a steady stream of feedback from national politics, absent forums and procedures that permitted adjustments on that basis, international institutions became rigid sites of rules application.

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Rhetorically grounding the postwar international order in the provision of global public goods also created space for narratives of victimhood to arise in the order’s core. If a cooperative global order served the global good, and if constructing it was an act of global generosity, could it really be in core countries’ national interest? Critics of multilateralism, detractors of foreign aid, and skeptics of free trade had long advanced this claim. As liberal order morphed into global governance, and as international law became more elaborate and enforceable—in domains as diverse as trade, investment, human rights, and nuclear materials—this line of argument found greater support in wealthy countries. The costs of providing a growing array of public goods seemed endless, and the benefits to the country appeared more amorphous.

How Geopolitics Overran Globalization
By Eswar Prasad

International trade and financial flows began expanding rapidly around the mid-1980s as governments dismantled barriers between them. Technological developments, including the widespread use of shipping containers and improvements in trade logistics, lowered transportation costs and boosted international commerce. The notion of a unified global marketplace for goods and services, in which each country would be able to specialize in whatever it was relatively better at producing, no longer seemed far-fetched. A broad consensus emerged that commercial interests keen to build global supply chains and sell their products and services worldwide would serve as the glue binding the world closer together.

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But not everyone appreciated the way that globalization rearranged the domestic economies of wealthy countries. The large aggregate benefits generated by free trade were not distributed equally; some labor-intensive industries such as footwear, furniture, and textiles were decimated, while others were forced to retrench under the pressure of foreign competition. Opening U.S. automobile markets to imports from Japan in the 1970s, for example, brought significant benefits to American consumers in the form of more choices and lower prices. But it didn’t seem that way to autoworkers in Detroit who lost their jobs as foreign competitors overtook American companies. Indeed, there is no simple way for those who benefit from globalization to compensate those who face its direct costs. Fraying social safety nets in wealthy countries, not to mention technological advances that allowed manufacturing firms to reduce their labor forces, added to workers’ woes.

Public dissatisfaction drove a devastating rhetorical turn in the domestic politics of wealthy countries. Blaming globalization, or specific trading partners, rather than flawed domestic policies or technology became a politically expedient way for politicians to tap into the anger of voters whose lives had been affected by deindustrialization. Tax policies that favored the rich and lax regulatory policies contributed to the concentration of wealth, while cuts to social spending fueled economic despair. Globalization came to serve as a convenient bogeyman for rising inequality, shrinking job opportunities, and government policies that failed to ameliorate the accompanying sense of economic despair. The domestic fallout from the backlash to globalization in the United States eventually resulted in the election of Donald Trump as president.

Politicians who rode the wave of the antiglobalization discontent into power felt pressure to turn rhetoric into policy. Taking their cues from Trump, they pursued protectionist policies such as tariffs on imports, which they claimed would revive domestic manufacturing and increase employment, but which in fact only raised prices and reduced choices for consumers, while disrupting trade and hurting economic growth. In tandem with globalization’s failure to deliver expansive and equitable benefits, the antiglobalist turn in domestic politics strained relations between countries, intensifying geopolitical rivalries.

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Beijing and Washington’s increasing reliance on export controls typifies the new unstable equilibrium. The United States previously pursued a more cooperative, if still competitive, tech policy with China, marked by the free two-way flow of technical know-how, personnel, materiel, and funding. The Biden administration attempted to limit China’s access to technology and advanced computer chips, an effort the Trump administration has intensified. After years of U.S. export controls, Trump’s tariffs in April 2025 were the final straw for China: Beijing retaliated by restricting its exports of rare-earth elements, which U.S. manufacturers of advanced technology sorely need. With every move and countermove, the prospect of a mutually beneficial economic relationship recedes further into the background of the intrinsically competitive geopolitical relationship between the two. And without an economic counterweight against that competition, one country’s rising influence necessarily comes at the expense of the other’s.

The Look of Empire
By Krzysztof Pelc

For most of modern history, territorial control was the most reliable way to secure strategic advantage. In a world of weak international enforcement, fragmented markets, and rudimentary infrastructure, planting a flag did real work. Establishing a fortified port, a colony, or a resource basin under a state’s sovereignty secured access to trade routes and raw materials, provided defensive depth, and just as importantly, denied rivals the same advantages. Ownership was not symbolism; it was an enforcement mechanism.

If a state possessed the resources to take and hold territory, conquest could therefore be an effective way to achieve geopolitical goals. That logic underpinned imperial expansion across centuries. The British Raj structured the Indian Ocean economy; French possessions in Africa were promised strategic access to the continent; the Dutch expansion into the East Indies anchored a global trading network. In each case, sovereignty over land translated directly into control over flows of goods and capital that could not be achieved otherwise.

In the 21st century, however, outright ownership of land and resources rarely delivers the same payoff. The central features of modern capitalism—multinational firms, integrated global markets, enforceable contracts, and transnational legal regimes—have displaced much of the rationale for territorial control. That even proves true of oil. Once the quintessential imperial prize, it is now extracted by publicly traded multinationals that are owned by dispersed shareholders and priced in global markets. Sovereign ownership does little to increase pricing power.

Interestingly, one way in which territory does still matter is control over the world’s financial plumbing. The global economy may look immaterial, but its infrastructure is stubbornly physical. Data centers occupy physical space; undersea cables make landfall on real coastlines. This has given the U.S. tremendous leverage over other countries—not so much because the United States owns all the assets of the global economy, but because so much infrastructure for that economy passes, routinely and invisibly, through American-controlled choke points.

But that only reinforces the point. This is not empire in the classical sense. No land was seized; no populations were governed; no flags were planted. Leverage arose precisely because the U.S. did not pursue territorial control, but instead presided over institutions, markets, and networks that others found useful to adopt. What matters today is not owning space but getting others to join your networks.

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What displaced empire was not, at least initially, was a moral awakening. It was an accounting insight. Over the course of the 20th century, powerful states gradually discovered that the objectives once pursued through conquest—secure access to markets, predictable returns on investment, and influence over other countries’ economic policies—could be attained more cheaply, reliably, and with less political friction through institutions rather than claims of outright ownership. Stable courts, arbitration mechanisms, trade agreements, and credible commitments did not merely civilize international politics; they streamlined it. Empire was brutally effective, but as it turns out, it was also ruinously expensive.

Territorial control requires armies, administrators, infrastructure, and constant coercion. It invites resistance, imposes reputational costs, and binds the occupier to the governance of distant populations whose compliance is never voluntary. Institutions, by contrast, allowed powerful states—and the firms based within them—to secure many of the same benefits without the costs of direct rule. Enforceable contracts replaced garrisons. Arbitration substituted for annexation. Access replaced ownership. The result was a transformation in how power worked. States like the United States learned to project dominance through networks rather than maps.

This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat
By Christopher Caldwell

American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.

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As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.

Anglo-American family structures, for example, have traditionally been less patriarchal than those almost anyplace else in the world. As it has modernized, the United States has come to espouse a model of sex and gender that conjugates poorly with those of traditional cultures (such as India’s) and more patriarchal modern ones (such as Russia’s).

Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.

Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”

For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam. Mr. Baritz concluded, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.” Had Lyndon Johnson managed to impose his will on the Vietnamese, Mr. Baritz reflected, “an entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart.”

One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.

Iran and the New Rules of Global Power
By Robert A. Pape

Major military victories do not often create new international orders. Wars can end with altered borders but they tend to leave the larger structure of world politics intact. The 1991 Gulf War was different because it transformed the world’s expectations. The gargantuan gap between what analysts predicted before the war and how the United States won a decisive and rapid victory convinced governments, markets, and societies that a new reality had emerged.

That reality rested on four assumptions: The United States could effortlessly impose military outcomes. Washington possessed unmatched escalation dominance, the capacity to quickly and cheaply defeat major threats. American power guaranteed the flow of goods through the world’s commercial arteries. And resistance to American power was ultimately futile.

These assumptions reinforced one another. Because American military superiority appeared overwhelming, allies reduced their own defense burdens and deepened their dependence on Washington. Because American power discouraged other actors to risk confrontation and escalation, investors discounted geopolitical risk. Because maritime commerce appeared secure, corporations stretched supply chains across continents and minimized their inventories at home. Because American power appeared unrivaled and implacable, most states sought to accommodate the United States rather than resist it.

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Only a handful of “rogue states” and actors, such as North Korea, Iran, and Somali pirates, dared to ignore what all could see.

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After 1991, European countries slashed defense budgets while increasingly integrating their economies. They signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, laying the groundwork for a shared currency and the flattening of borders among EU member states. Formerly communist countries competed for entry into Western institutions. NATO, which had 16 members in 1991, expanded eastward, eventually incorporating much of the territory that had once belonged to the Warsaw Pact. Countries that only a few years earlier had feared NATO now sought protection within the U.S.-led order.

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Confidence in American power affected economic decisions as much as military ones, encouraging one of the greatest expansions of economic interdependence in modern history. Merchandise, capital, energy, and information crossed borders with unprecedented speed. Trade as a share of global output rose from roughly 38 percent in 1990 to approximately 60 percent two decades later. Manufacturers embraced just-in-time production. Supply chains spanned continents because firms increasingly assumed that wars among major powers were unlikely and that future disruptions to maritime commerce would be only temporary.

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In 1998, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the United States as the “indispensable nation,” capturing a widely shared assumption that international stability ultimately depended on American power.

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The first precision revolution displayed over Baghdad in 1991 depended on capabilities available only to a handful of advanced states. Precision-guided munitions, satellite navigation, secure communications, infrared sensors, and advanced processors required industrial ecosystems that few countries possessed.

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Over the following three decades, globalization transformed these scarce military assets into mass commercial products. … The same supply chains producing advanced processors for commercial markets also feed the manufacture of components used in cameras, navigation systems, and edge computing devices (small computers that process data locally rather than in distant cloud servers).

A modern smartphone contains more computing power than many military systems possessed during the Gulf War and cameras that were once reserved for intelligence satellites. Civilian markets created enormous economies of scale for miniaturized inertial measurement units (devices that track location, speed, and direction), GPS receivers, lithium batteries, and optical sensors—technology of the kind that would previously have required state sponsorship.

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Small drones assembled from electronics acquired in the commercial market can now produce effects previously associated with sophisticated weapons made only by states.

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The same global economy that rewarded efficiency also rewarded accessibility. Firms competed by lowering costs, expanding production, and distributing technology across international markets. Every improvement that made smartphones cheaper, batteries more efficient, and processors more powerful simultaneously increased the capabilities available to weaker states and even nonstate actors.

Yet the same globalization that generated extraordinary prosperity also created interconnected systems in which local disturbances produced global consequences. Highly optimized systems are often fragile: a disruption in one region generates repercussions thousands of miles away. A shortage of semiconductors during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, affected automobile production across multiple continents. And in 2024 and 2025, the Iranian-aligned Houthis in Yemen staged numerous attacks on shipping through the Red Sea, which leads to the Suez Canal and connects Europe to Asia, as part of their broader confrontation with Israel.

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… the success of the post–Cold War order contained an unexpected contradiction: the economic forces that strengthened the system gradually produced many of the technologies that would make sustaining it increasingly expensive.

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The swift and emphatic U.S. victory in the Gulf War suggested that precision warfare allowed great powers to control contested territory relatively cheaply. The Iran war, by contrast, suggests that the diffusion of precision technology is confounding great powers and making it much harder to control contested space.

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Future conflicts could increasingly occur around the world’s principal economic chokepoints—including the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz itself. Higher insurance rates, more expensive shipping, duplicated supply chains, the need to maintain larger inventories and strategic stockpiles, and political pressure for domestic production would gradually raise the costs of international commerce. A world flattened by globalization would once again be creased by bumps and fissures.

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American intervention, meanwhile, no longer assures economic stability in the targeted region. For three decades, markets assumed that American power helped reduce risks. Today, U.S. interventions instead stoke uncertainty. Globalization created extraordinary prosperity, but it also created vulnerabilities that military power alone cannot easily eliminate. Weaker powers now see that it is possible to defy the United States—that resistance is no longer obviously futile. These actors do not need to defeat the United States in order to frustrate it. They merely need to erode confidence, impose costs, and outlast expectations of their defeat. The objective is no longer conventional victory on the battlefield but rather creating leverage through disruption.

Trump’s Recipe for Accelerated U.S. Decline
By Howard W. French

… the White House announced that it intended to seek a 40 percent increase in the country’s military spending in its 2027 budget—totaling $1.5 trillion—which would lift the Pentagon outlay to historic heights, including during times of world war.

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Turning the United States into a modern Sparta through unbridled armament would weaken the country’s social welfare, including health and education, both of which are important and yet overlooked components of comprehensive power. Meanwhile, it would also weaken the country economically, accelerating growth in the national debt for unproductive purposes.

Beyond what a reasonable assessment of national defense needs deems necessary, buying weapons systems ceases to be an investment and is akin to burying capital. In other words, it does not contribute meaningfully to the growth of productive sectors of the economy.

At a time when China is increasingly outcompeting the United States in a growing number of frontier industries, from electric vehicles to batteries to renewable energy, the diversion of the country’s resources into over-armament amounts to a foolish choice. Add to that the fact that the United States seems unable to invest in the upkeep of critical national infrastructure—including roads, rail, bridges, tunnels, power grids, air traffic control, and the water supply—and the request for a gross over-investment in weapons systems begins to resemble a recipe for accelerated decline.

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The historical piece of this involves great-power competition and how the Soviet Union fell into irrevocable decline. Experts differ on the extent to which arms outlays contributed to this, but there is a widespread consensus that the vastly more productive U.S. economy allowed Washington to force the Soviet Union into what became for it a ruinous arms race.

The contrast with what is taking place at present is instructive and should worry even the most ardent proponent of increased U.S. military spending. Although its military is large and its defense spending has steadily increased in recent years, Beijing appears less vulnerable to the kind of trap that Washington laid for the Soviets.

For one, the Chinese economy is far more modern and diversified than the Soviet economy ever was. China has not only proved capable of rapid innovation across many domains, but it also ranks as the world’s leading industrial power, far ahead of the United States. At the same time, even as its military strength grows, China seems wary of trying to match the United States system for system. Even after many years of expansion, its power projection remains largely regional in scope, and its nuclear deterrence, though growing, shows little sign of prioritizing matching the U.S. arsenal for sheer size.

This leads us to the ironic conclusion that it is the United States, not China, that most risks failing to learn the lessons of recent history, which saw the dissolution of an overextended superpower.

After the Nation-State
By Michael Hirsh

Riven by deepening inequalities in education, opportunity, and income, plundered by powerful oligarchs who extract wealth and then move on, corrupted institutionally and constitutionally, the nation-state is failing badly as a guarantor of individual rights, liberty, and prosperity, writes the British Indian author Rana Dasgupta in his new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order.

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For the economist Eswar Prasad, the world is caught in “the doom loop”—the title of his book—in which economic instability fosters political instability and populism, which in turn produces even more economic disorder, with no end in sight. In another new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, Yale University historian Odd Arne Westad fears we are slipping heedlessly into unstable world disorder that resembles nothing so much as the jostling imperial kingdoms of Europe shortly before they immolated themselves in World War I.

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In the United States and in Europe—the West, in other words—we are no longer even pretending that progress is the goal. On the contrary: As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, it almost resembles the late stages of the Roman republic—a once-proud land of crumbling institutions, dashed promises, and seemingly permanent disunion. Congress is divided between sycophancy and paralysis and, except for some hopeful court rulings in defiance of Trump’s autocratic exercise of power, the checks and balances of the system—the Constitution itself—seem to be failing.

And if empire is now the goal, with the U.S. president launching unprovoked wars from Venezuela to Iran, Americans aren’t very good imperialists either, it turns out. Trump, who for the past month has proved incapable of explaining why he just started a major new war in the Middle East that threatens the global economy, is certainly no Augustus Caesar.

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It is at this point that Dasgupta really sticks the knife in: We in the West were always kidding ourselves about all that progress anyway, he writes. Marshalling an impressive array of historical evidence, Dasgupta exposes the ugly downside of Western history and shows how our proudest advancements going back to the Enlightenment—the very concept of the nation-state and international law—have been fatally tainted from their beginnings.

Dating from the Spanish conquest of Latin America, Western scholars developed international law mainly to further “private interests, whose concerns have usually been acquisitive,” Dasgupta writes.

The writings of Hugo Grotius—the “acknowledged father” of international law—were largely intended to justify the predations of the Dutch East India Company and defy the imperialist designs of Spain and Portugal. Even the great John Locke, the father of liberalism who influenced the American Revolution, is portrayed as developing his theories of natural rights in part to defend the greed and acquisitiveness of his boss, the Earl of Shaftsbury, and other English colonizers. “Lockean ideas established for the English elite a global infinitude of property rights: land had only to be seized for propertied Englishmen, arguing for their superior powers of commercial exploitation, to claim legal title,” Dasgupta writes.

For Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, the Christian God was also invoked as the guardian of private property and the system of rights and laws, as well as the nation-state that upheld it. Thus the idea of Western liberalism that sprang out of these trends “was too imperial, too partial and too Christian to function as a universal faith,” Dasgupta writes.

For Dasgupta, Westad, and most of these other authors, the main obstacle to any future progress—and the chief solvent pulling the world apart—is the cult of the nation-state. “From Xi Jinping’s quest to regain China’s glory, to Vladimir Putin’s attempts at a new Russian empire, to the rise of populist anti-foreign attitudes in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France,” writes Westad, “such sentiments make major war more possible,” much as in the pre-1914 era.

What is perhaps most unnerving, Westad writes, is that the complacency among major governments that they can weather the storm today is eerily similar to back then. “We are shocked, even today, to see how quickly that notion unraveled in July 1914,” Westad writes. “There is no reason to believe that [control of crises] is more applicable in our own time. The speed of communications and news cycles, and the efficiency of twenty-first century weapons, not only reduce the time available to make decisions even further but also increase the distrust and fear of what others may be doing.”

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What is worrisome is the condition of the really big nation-states, what you might call the world-historical ones. In particular, it’s no longer possible to lay any hopes on the future of the United States, which engendered and maintained the postwar global system but appears to be a rapidly failing nation-state caught in a doom spiral of its own making.

Ironically, the American people’s lack of faith in their political system is what led to the rise of Trump, the most powerful demagogue in U.S. history. But rather than answer those concerns and find a solution to the problem, Trump has exacerbated the crisis of faith in Washington by empowering more oligarchs and corporate interests, at the expense of any pretense of pursuing social equity.

Dasgupta notes that, in 2025, seven Silicon Valley companies had a combined market valuation of about $17 trillion, equivalent to nearly 60 percent of U.S. GDP—and that number is far greater than any corporate control of the economy in the past, even Standard Oil in the Gilded Age or during the 1960s, when U.S. industry was globally dominant. At the same time, these tech companies employ far fewer people—a number getting smaller all the time, thanks to artificial intelligence—and pay far less national tax, meaning the economic power that drives the U.S. economy has less interest than ever in making U.S. society a stable and equitable place.

The bottom line is that a smaller number of U.S. oligarchs—many of whom have made their way, obsequiously, to Trump’s White House, to do his bidding—control a much larger proportion of the U.S. economy even as they’re less responsible for the country’s overall prosperity and social stability.

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Perhaps nothing is more compelling than Dasgupta’s recent observation that Americans’ “intellectual grasp of what’s going on in the world is hugely diminished.” This is no longer a problem of the average undereducated American; now it is our elites in Washington who don’t understand the system that their forebears designed. And that is likely the most decisive death sentence of all to the old system.

Carney says old world order ‘is not coming back’
By Nadine Yousif

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the “old order is not coming back” and urged fellow middle powers to come together in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said on Tuesday, adding that he believed powerful nations were using economic coercion to get what they want.

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“Great powers” are often defined as countries with permanent seats on United Nations Security Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – which shows their economic and military dominance in the world.

Middle powers, such as Canada, Australia, Argentina, South Korea and Brazil, are nations that still exert large influence in global politics, even though their economies are smaller.

In his speech, Carney said the world is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said.

The ways of empires
By Branko Milanovic

The English, and later British, society is seen as having developed on two historical tracks: the first historical track was oligarchic expansion to the rest of the world where the East India Company, whose income at one point equalled 15 percent of British GDP, and similar company running Africa, were used to enormously enrich a small minority. That minority controlled the state and were shareholders in the companies (one-quarter of Members of Partliament were shareholders). They despoiled not only the rest of the world and most notably India through deindustrialization of its textile production and China through Opium Wars, but despoiled too, or were equally indifferent to the fate of the domestic population. To quote Adam Smith, on the former: “It is a very singular government [merchant companies] in which every member of the administration wishes to get out of the country, and consequently to have done with the government as soon as he can, and to whose interest, the day after he has left it and carried his whole fortune with him, it is perfectly indifferent though the whole country was swallowed up by an earthquake.” Regarding the latter, British population lost access to communal lands, were forced to sell their labor and were stamped (in many cases laterally on the body) by the epithets of idleness, laziness and stupidity when they refused to play according to the system and to be herded, free of almost any right, into factories or poor houses. They were politically ignored and economically oppressed.

Reading Dasgupta’s, and similar books that abound today, one cannot but be totally struck how the contrary narratives of the British rise and the Industrial Revolution, some “crowned” by the Nobel Prizes, succeed in almost completely erasing the aspects of domestic and foreign terrorism, enslavement, beatings, outright piracy, compression into Navy services, enclosures, fabulous enrichment of political elites, military suppression of revolts, famines and executions under the beautifully sounding title of “Glorious Revolution”.

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The second track appeared only in the latter part of the nineteenth century when material prosperity of the people began to be seen as necessary in order to wage victorious wars. Political rights ensued. They were not, Dasgupta argues, obtained though revolution and even less through threat to the elite; rather, they were voluntarily conceded by the elite to insure its continued rule: in order to have a well-fed and reasonably educated population capable of winning mass warfare.

Why the British Were Afraid of Winning World War II
By Kevin Peraino

In the annals of finest-hour mythmaking, there are two abiding articles of faith: first, that the United Kingdom bravely fought on “alone” after the fall of France, and second, that the New World ultimately came to the rescue of the Old.

The British prime minister Winston Churchill is the primary author of this narrative. In his memoirs, he claimed that not until Pearl Harbor had he recognized that Britain would survive the Nazi onslaught. With the United States finally involved, “we had won the war,” Churchill wrote. “The Empire would live.” Fighting alongside the Americans, he wrote, had proved “the greatest joy.”

Alan Allport skillfully subverts both these myths in “Advance Britannia,” the second volume of his elegant and unsparing history of London’s role in World War II. As he shows, Washington’s involvement was not an unqualified boon. Churchill had wanted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s help in Europe — not in the Pacific. Since their meeting aboard the U.S.S. Augusta in the summer of 1941, the American president had been urging Churchill to abandon Britain’s “backward colonial policy.” Compared with the conservative Churchill, Allport writes, Roosevelt was “a thoroughgoing Robespierre, a world revolutionary.”

Churchill’s “small island,” as the prime minister liked to call it, also never truly fought alone: To help pay for the war, it ruthlessly exploited its worldwide empire of more than 13 million square miles and 491 million people. Britain’s haughty imperiousness, along with the financial strain it caused, left the colonies vulnerable and meant fighting in East Asia would almost certainly menace London’s positions in Burma, India and elsewhere. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces swiftly fell upon Britain’s Asian colonies, including the vital island of Singapore.

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Churchill had vowed that no British dominion would be “overwhelmed by a yellow race.” But the empire’s entrenched bigotry blinded it to the vulnerability of its Asian possessions. Still, Allport writes, “the problem with focusing exclusively on Churchill’s personal sins is not that it is unfair to him: It is that doing so lets the rest of the British people off the hook.” A racist imperial politics suffused every aspect of British life. Scottish soldiers harassed Black servicemen for dancing with white women; a senior British officer derided Japanese soldiers as “subhuman specimens.”

Roosevelt’s intentions were not entirely pure either. In Allport’s telling, the American leader’s rhetoric about self-determination, while genuinely felt, also masked his ambitions to dominate the postwar order. An increasingly assertive Washington had come to resent “the last tiresome motions of an independent British foreign policy,” Allport writes.

Again and again Washington clashed with London over policy in Asia and the Mediterranean. American efforts to bolster Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist forces, for instance, were partly motivated by a desire to control trade in the region. By the final years of the war, Allport observes, the so-called special relationship had morphed into one of “patron and client.”

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“Our Oriental Empire has been liquidated, our resources have been squandered,” Churchill later remarked. “Our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.” Allport’s unblinking history shows us why that happened: Having treated so many in foreign lands with neglect instead of generosity, as vassals instead of partners, the British had ensured their own decline before the fighting began.

American “Micro-Militarism”
By Alfred McCoy

Arguably, when it came to imperial decline, however, the most revealing date was 1956. The place was London, the seat of the once-proud British Empire, where the suffocating stress of a painful, protracted global imperial retreat had pushed British conservatives into a disastrous micro-military intervention at Egypt’s Suez Canal, leading to what one British diplomat would term the “dying convulsion of British imperialism.”

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By the end of that micro-military disaster, Britain would be reprimanded by the United Nations; its currency would require an International Monetary Fund bailout to save it from utter collapse; its aura of imperial majesty would have evaporated; and the once mighty British Empire would be on the road to extinction. In retrospect, the Suez Crisis would not only expose the full-scale decline of British power, but also show the world that the country’s ruling Conservative establishment, with its illusions of imperial and racial superiority, was no longer capable of global leadership.

…

Like Britain at Suez in 1956, Washington will likely pay a heavy price for its “micro-militarism” in the Strait of Hormuz. Close allies, the bedrock of U.S. global power for 80 years, have refused any military support for Washington’s war of choice, prompting Trump to call them “cowards.” In response to his thundering threats of civilian and civilizational destruction (both war crimes), Trump has been condemned by world leaders. Oblivious to the dangers of war in a region that is the epicenter of global capitalism, Washington is now proving ever more dangerously disruptive of the global economy, making China look like a far more stable choice for world leadership. Moreover, while the U.S. military has proven its tactical agility in destroying targets, it clearly can no longer capture meaningful strategic objectives.

With its alliances in tatters, its world leadership forfeited, and its aura of military might evaporating, the only trajectory for U.S. global hegemony now seems to be downward (like so many great powers of the past). By the time Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Strait of Hormuz is over, the decline of U.S. global power will have accelerated drastically and the world will be trying to move beyond the old Pax Americana toward a new, distinctly uncertain global order.

After America
By Alfred McCoy

Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.

Writing in a May 2026 edition of the New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of U.S. global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”

…

Britain’s sprawling global empire lasted just 90 years (1857-1947) and France’s African empire, covering a quarter of that continent, was about the same, while the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe barely lasted 40 years (1945-1989). So, for the U.S. global imperium to have survived for 80 years (1945-2026) should be considered the most anyone could realistically expect for a modern empire.

Since the U.S.-led global order — exemplified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) — had indeed presided over 80 years of sustained global economic growth, there is a distinctly American twist to the British concept of the “self-liquidating concern.” As the rest of the world enjoyed a rapid economic recovery from the ravages of World War II, America’s share of the global economy declined from an overwhelmingly dominant 50% in 1945 to less than half that figure today. Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic growth, the IMF calculates that, in 2026, China is producing 20% of global economic output, the U.S. just 15%, and the European Union (EU) 14%.

But the relative economic decline of the United States should by no means be the crucial measure of its failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. It should be considered a tribute to Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity. In those 80 years since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has grown fast, but many other nations have grown faster still.

…

… a world without active U.S. international leadership will not necessarily be a better place. Without a single superpower or set of superpowers to backstop otherwise toothless resolutions from the United Nations, international relations in a post-American world order will likely be both more complex and possibly more conflict-ridden as well.

…

… in the future regional rivals will likely wage bitter local wars in hot spots around the globe over boundaries, the control of minerals, water rights, or climate-change refugees. To take but one example, Ethiopia, an arid, landlocked, overcrowded nation of 140 million people in East Africa, faces potential conflicts with Egypt over the Nile’s headwaters, with Eritrea over port access, and with Somalia over the fate of the breakaway state of Somaliland.

Though their scope might be narrow, regional wars can potentially cause massive human carnage, as shown by the Second Congo War (1998-2003) that ravaged eastern Congo, as neighboring states like Rwanda and warlord armies like the murderous M-23 militia battled over mineral rights, killing an estimated 5.4 million people. That made it the world’s bloodiest (if least noticed) armed conflict since World War II. Even today, more than 20 years later, warlord armies are still battling for control of the eastern Congo, capturing cities and displacing more than a million refugees.

…

Despite its many excesses and a frequent failure to honor its own principles, imperial America did offer this planet more chances for change than the great powers that preceded it and possibly the ones likely to succeed it as well. For all those reasons, I say, “Requiescat in pace (rest in peace), Pax Americana, you will be missed.”

The Abandoned Order
By Mark Leonard

Gone is the idea that the United Nations or even the United States could oversee comprehensive peace deals that successfully address territorial claims, postwar justice, and reconstruction. … The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty could cease to function as a meaningful constraint, and Germany, Iran, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea could move to acquire nuclear weapons within two decades.

Also gone is the notion that consistent rules ought to govern the global economy. Economic nationalism and protectionism are on the rise … The dollar’s dominance will erode more rapidly, with its share of global foreign exchange reserves perhaps falling below 50 percent as bilateral currency arrangements proliferate and the pricing of commodities diversifies. U.S. borrowing costs will rise, and global transaction costs will balloon as incompatible systems multiply.

Another big challenge is contagion. International law and norms formerly put limits on states’ actions. Great powers might not always have adhered to the rules, but they were imposed on smaller powers and set expectations for how business would be conducted. But in this era of disinhibition, crises no longer stay in their original domain, and actors no longer feel constrained by norms governing proper conduct—indeed, many of the world’s most powerful actors no longer even seem aware that they are breaking rules.

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The taboos against assassination, targeting civilians, and embarking on wars of territorial conquest are vanishing. According to reporting in The New York Times, Israel planned to assassinate the Iranian foreign minister and speaker of parliament while the two were conducting negotiations with the United States. Throughout its war in Gaza, Israel attacked people and facilities that were previously not considered legitimate targets: journalists, hospitals, cultural sites, religious institutions, and civilian infrastructure; Israel claimed that Hamas used such targets as covers. Russia regularly targets civilian infrastructure in its war in Ukraine, and both countries are killing each other’s citizens in third countries in targeted assassinations.

This kind of uncontrolled escalation will almost certainly lead to more wars.

…

… in today’s geopolitics, states are increasingly turning the systems that once connected them—energy routes, semiconductor supply chains, financial infrastructure, shipping lanes—into weapons. A country’s control over chokepoints is becoming a key marker of its power, just like its GDP and the size of its military.

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Even before Iran shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, bringing 20 percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipping to a near halt, the Houthi militia in Yemen was using cheap drones and missiles to block transit through the Red Sea.

Such exploitation of chokepoints will soon be universalized. The consequences could be extraordinary, because the potential bottlenecks are innumerable: they exist not only in physical waterways but also in the supply chains for weapons as well as food, health care, and basic technology—all the essentials people need for everyday life. The United States might prevent Europeans from using its AI models or even block their access to Microsoft’s products. China could further restrict the rare earths used in U.S. and European weapons systems and high-end technologies or leverage its control over the global electric vehicle, solar, and wind industries. And because it makes the vast majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients, Beijing could even constrain the production of vital medicines. The food supply would be particularly easy to throttle: over 55 percent of globally traded maize, wheat, rice, and soybeans pass through at least one maritime chokepoint, and energy disruptions can become food-price crises within weeks.

…

The closure of any single chokepoint might be manageable. But numerous lockdowns would not be.

…

The old rules-based order was never, in fact, just about rules. It proffered rules backed by a specific power willing to bear disproportionate costs to maintain them. The United States and its European allies were the architects of the postwar and post–Cold War orders, but they no longer have the resources to maintain them. And middle powers cannot simply pool their resources and replicate the past.

…

… the forces of disruption are likely to accelerate. The next decades will be defined by explosive changes and waves of crises, not a reversion to the old order or the creation of a new one.

The Iran War Has Escaped Its Authors
By Robert A. Pape

A particular kind of confidence precedes wars of choice. It belongs to leaders who believe they can calibrate violence: The strikes will be sharp, the aims limited, and the escalation controlled. The adversary will be chastened rather than provoked, and the war will remain obedient to those who began it.

…

Historically, strong states take their greatest risks when they are coming off a run of apparent victories. Successes such as the Venezuela raid in January helped cement for Trump the impression that force could be used cleanly, predictably, and without long-term cost. Perceived success produces an illusion of control, expanding leaders’ tolerance for risk and driving escalation.

This is the dynamic now shaping the United States and Israel’s war with Iran. What was presented as a campaign of precision increasingly looks like a familiar story of strategic overconfidence. Washington has mistaken its early military gains for political traction and confused its tactical success with a path to durable order. Iran may have lost its supreme leader, commanders, nuclear facilities, and military assets. But the larger question was never whether it could be hurt but whether this pain would lead to the government’s capitulation.

There is the illusion of air power at work. Regimes under attack often harden rather than crack. Societies under bombardment do not always turn against their rulers; often, they first turn against the foreign power dropping the bombs.

Iran is no exception. Before this war, the Islamic Republic faced profound domestic discontent, much of it justified. But outside attack has a way of rearranging political emotion. Nationalism is starting to fill spaces that dissent once occupied. A state that looked brittle in peacetime is appearing sturdier once the nation itself is under siege.

…

Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. military outright. It needs to make the exercise of that military advantage more expensive and more politically fraught.

This is where the Iranian perspective is often missed. Tehran’s objective is not simply to retaliate. It is to force a new strategic equation. That equation runs through geography as much as through missiles. The Strait of Hormuz has always been central to Iran’s deterrence doctrine, but this war suggests Tehran may be trying to turn abstract leverage into practical bargaining power. If passage through the strait increasingly depends on Iranian tolerance—or if states begin seeking side arrangements to secure safe transit—that would amount to a quiet acknowledgment of something Washington has long tried to deny: that Iran retains meaningful coercive influence over one of the world’s central economic arteries.

…

Air power can disrupt and degrade, but it cannot secure territory or impose lasting political outcomes. And when it fails to achieve those goals, pressure builds for ground forces. Once that threshold is crossed, the structure of the conflict changes.

…

The United States and Israel can win every exchange of force and still lose control of the conflict’s trajectory and aims. That is the core danger of wars driven by the illusion of control: Each step appears justified by the last, even as the overall path becomes more dangerous and a U-turn more difficult.

…

The most dangerous moment when countries succumb to the illusion of controlled war is not the opening strike. Rather, it is the moment after apparent success—when leaders believe the next escalation will work for the same reasons that the last one did. That is how countries become trapped by their own strength and how wars escape their authors.

Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?
By Greg Myre

MYRE: With an emphasis on military power over diplomatic deals, the U.S. keeps expecting wars that will be brief and relatively low cost. That’s according to Paul Salem, a Middle East analyst in Lebanon.

PAUL SALEM: The U.S. has an imperial appetite but a tourist’s approach to it.

MYRE: Salem is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. He says this contradiction defined the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a similar scenario is playing out in Iran.

SALEM: Their recent history is not one of stability and deep institutions that you can just come in and change somebody at the top and everything works out.

MYRE: Peter Bergen reinforces that idea. He says the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.

BERGEN: Empires typically require people to learn languages, stay there for a long time, not be there on just short tours. We don’t do the kinds of things that would be necessary to hold on to territories for a long time. We’re very reluctant to do it.

MYRE: President Trump promised to keep the U.S. out of forever wars, yet, in attacking Iran, he’s taking on the largest and most powerful U.S. rival in the region. And the president is trying to do it without ground troops, which has limited U.S. casualties. Douglas Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general, does not support using ground troops, but he says it’s important to recognize that without them, the U.S. needs to scale back its goals.

DOUGLAS LUTE: When we launch only a bombing campaign but we retain maximalist goals, like regime change, you don’t have any prospect for success unless you’re just lucky. And being lucky is not the place to start a military campaign.

MYRE: Trump has called, at various times, for eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, toppling the government, destroying its air force, navy and missile program. Lute sees parallels to earlier wars when he served as the so-called war czar, coordinating efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama.

LUTE: We’ve had repeated disconnects between ends, ways and means. We’ve had a lack of sufficient understanding of what we were getting into.

…

MYRE: These analysts say there is a Middle East war that offers valuable lessons – the first U.S. war against Iraq back in 1991. The goal was limited – drive out Iraqi troops who’d seized Kuwait. President George H. W. Bush rallied support at the United Nations and built a large international force. Again, Douglas Lute.

LUTE: I count that war as the last time that we really had realistic objectives.

MYRE: He was then an army major in a cavalry unit that took part in the swift, decisive ground campaign.

LUTE: We had admittedly limited objectives – right? – which was to liberate Kuwait. But it was not to take on Baghdad, not to overthrow Saddam, not to replace the Iraqi government.

Why the United States Keeps Losing Wars
By Stephen M. Walt

… the real reasons that the United States keeps losing wars are strategic and structural. The country has been waging wars of choice that combine modest U.S. interests with extremely ambitious goals, such as trying remake a foreign society in the U.S. image. The result is that opponents tend to be much more highly resolved than Washington is, because they have far more at stake. They are fighting to survive or at least preserve their independence and autonomy, whereas, in most cases, the United States is fighting to achieve arguably desirable but ultimately less-than-vital objectives. Under these conditions, it is to be expected that opponents will be far more willing to make sacrifices than the United States is. As in most if not all asymmetric conflicts, the weaker side wins not by outright victory on the battlefield but by not losing and waiting for the stronger power to realize that pouring more soldiers and money into a quagmire just isn’t worth it.

This simple formula tells us a lot about all these recent wars. The United States was defending significant interests on the Korean Peninsula, as an uncontested Communist victory there might have affected the Cold War in Asia significantly. But China saw U.S. efforts to unify the peninsula as an existential threat, and eventually sacrificed at least 200,000 troops (and probably far more) to prevent that outcome. After three bitter years of fighting, the result was essentially a draw.

In Vietnam, the United States faced the fierce nationalism of the Vietnamese Communist movement, a force that had previously defeated French colonial power and proved impossible to extinguish. Although U.S. leaders were able to persuade Americans that preventing a Communist victory was a vital interest for some time—mostly by invoking exaggerated fears of falling dominos and lost credibility—in the end, the public turned against the seemingly endless war, forced a U.S. withdrawal, and paved the way for Hanoi’s eventual triumph.

Much of the same fate drove the unfortunate outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was a serial troublemaker, but he was contained by 2003, his weapons programs were dismantled, and he had played no role whatsoever in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Toppling him was not a vital U.S. interest, therefore, no matter what U.S. neoconservatives dreaming of transforming the Middle East into a sea of pro-American democracies might have said. Getting rid of Saddam was easy (which underscored how little danger he actually posed), but the occupying forces soon faced a powerful insurgency that was opposed to foreign domination and aided by both Iran and Syria, which had no desire to be next on Washington’s hit list. Another ambitious war of choice turned out to be a costly debacle. Sound familiar?

The Old Man Dreaming Up Wars for Young Men to Fight
By Nicholas Kristof

I was a child during the Vietnam War, and it was impossible to miss antiwar protests. I remember a common sentiment best expressed by Senator George McGovern: “I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight.”

And here we go again.

President Trump has reached a fork in his Iran war. One path would be diplomatic, and Trump has tried to reassure financial markets that we’re headed that way. Iran is “‘begging’ us to make a deal,” he claimed.

The problem is that Iran is not in fact begging for a deal. On the contrary, it has found fabulous leverage by closing the Strait of Hormuz to most traffic other than its own.

…

I’m in favor of the diplomatic path, but let’s be honest: Any deal would be a pretty bad one and would strengthen a brutal regime that oppresses its people and menaces the region.

…

Iran’s regime may also have more strategic patience than we do. Remember that after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Iran recovered its territory by 1982 but was so enraged that it refused a cease-fire and spent another six years fighting in the hope of overthrowing the Iraqi regime. Do we have the same staying power?

Trump should know the folly of meddling in Iran
By Stephen Kinzer

History serves a stark warning against violent intervention in Iran. Most previous interventions have ended badly, both for Iran and for the intervening power. This is an exceedingly difficult country to reshape from outside. Outrage at the bloody repression of recent weeks should not tempt Americans into what might well be a self-defeating attack on Iran.

For nearly all of the 19th century, when Iran was ruled by a weak and corrupt dynasty, rapacious foreign powers picked it apart. Britain sliced off Iran’s entire northeast and incorporated it into Afghanistan, which it controlled. Russia took the Caucasus. Iranians were also forced to accept humiliating “capitulations” that exempted foreigners from Iranian law.

Foreigners came to control much of Iranian life. British consortiums bought the exclusive right to establish banks, prospect for minerals, and run ferry service. Russia took the exclusive right to Iran’s caviar fisheries. In 1901 the regime sold a London-based financier the “special and exclusive privilege to obtain, exploit, develop, render suitable for trade, carry away and sell natural gas [and] petroleum … for a term of 60 years.” Then Britain and Russia signed an accord dividing Iran into three pieces. Russia controlled the north, Britain the south, and Iranians were left with a “neutral zone” in between.

In 1906, influenced by ideas of democracy emerging in Europe, Iranians exploded in revolution. A constitution was proclaimed, a Parliament was elected, and a new social and political order began taking shape. It ended abruptly when a Russian force bombed the Parliament building and executed leaders of the constitutionalist movement.

Iran was on the verge of disappearing as a nation when the archetypal man on horseback, a fiery tyrant who proclaimed himself Reza Shah, seized power in 1925. He launched a program of radical reform — even forbidding women to veil themselves. But he was never able to escape from the power of the British, who after tolerating him for 16 years finally deposed him.

Democracy reemerged after World War II. The elected government confronted the great injustice of Iran’s national life: Britain thrived on Iranian oil while most Iranians lived in misery. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil reserves, but in 1953 the American and British secret services organized a coup in which he was overthrown. This fateful intervention ended the only period of democracy Iran has ever known.

Until that moment, many Iranians idealized Americans as anticolonialists who had thrown off British rule, as they themselves wished to do. The coup destroyed that image. Half a century later, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a semi-apology. “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh,” she said. “It is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs. Moreover, during the next quarter-century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime.”

The shah the Americans imposed after the 1953 coup, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was the son of the shah the British had deposed a decade earlier. During his increasingly repressive 25-year reign, the United States supported him lavishly. In 1979 he was overthrown in a popular uprising aimed in part at pulling Iran out of America’s orbit. Soon afterward, Iranian militants, fearing that the CIA would repeat its 1953 intervention and stage a coup to bring the shah back, took American diplomats hostage in what became a searing 444-day crisis. To this day, it shapes America’s perception of Iran as a barbaric enemy that deserves punishment.

Over the last 45 years, Iran has become one of the most sanctioned countries in history. Its economy has been devastated and its middle class has all but disappeared.

Yes, the Iran War Really Is Similar to Vietnam
By Howard W. French

Much has changed about the United States and the world since the Vietnam War, which was a human tragedy and a profound debacle from the perspective of U.S. power. But many of the basics of the cognitive blindness that Washington displayed in pursuing that conflict are on exhibit in the Iran war today. They have even deepened and become more glaring.

…

Each was pursued with ill-defined and frequently shifting goals. Each proceeded on the basis of designs drawn up by ideologically driven people bereft of expertise in the country that Washington had decided to go to war against. The planning of each was conducted largely in secret, with little public airing of strategy or aims, let alone consultation with Congress or with allies. Each gave almost no room for dissenting voices to be heard. Each placed unshakeable faith in the ability of superior U.S. technology and overwhelming firepower to ensure victory. Neither White House thought clearly about what victory would look like, or how to know when and how to get out.

The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US
By Nahal Toosi

When I asked current and former U.S. officials what had to be done to win, the most common first response was a primal scream of sorts that translated into, “We never should have started this war.” That was followed by: “What do you mean by ‘win’?”

…

Among some at the lower levels of the administration, there’s a sense of despair.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” one U.S. official familiar with the administration’s Middle East strategy told me. The official argued that the Trump team “fundamentally misunderstands” Iran’s rulers. Trump and his aides “have always felt like they can just keep applying pain and Iran will crumble, but the regime is not going to crumble.”

…

Iran analysts, some of whom are in touch with regime officials, tell me that Tehran appears to believe that Trump isn’t interested in a serious peace pact and can’t be trusted to uphold one anyway.

Why the United States Can’t Quit Its Wars
By Greg Jaffe

The long war in Afghanistan raises hard questions for the generals and policymakers contemplating the way forward in Iran: Why was quitting in Afghanistan so hard? What does the long struggle to accept defeat there say about the Trump administration’s predicament in Iran?

…

Political and foreign policy leaders fretted about U.S. credibility on the world stage and the costs that they could pay at the ballot box for losing a war.

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“They’re like a doctor in a critical care ward that knows the patient is going to die,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the Middle East program director at Defense Priorities, which promotes a more modest U.S. foreign policy. “They’re just hoping the patient dies after their shift is over. They don’t want it to be on their watch.”

Trump Needs to Defy History to End the Iran War
By Will Walldorf

If history is any guide, it’s unlikely. U.S. presidents are virtually never able to end the stalemated wars they start.

…

What history shows us is that when presidents take the nation to war, they feel they have a unique stake in the conflict, whether politically, psychologically, or reputationally. Things like sunk-cost thinking (“we’ve invested so much, we need to show some kind of gains”) and worries about credibility (“backing down will hurt our image abroad”) push out good cost-benefit thinking and lead them to try to salvage something that approximates a win before making peace.

Especially when facing a highly resolved foe like Iran, this usually means the stalemate drags on as the clock runs out on the president’s term.

This pattern has played out in every stalemated U.S. war since World War II. After the Korean War deadlocked in the summer of 1951, President Harry Truman’s concerns about looking tough on communism at home, U.S. credibility, and sunk costs pushed him to pursue rigid terms in armistice negotiations. He left office with no peace treaty.

After the 1968 Tet offensive, President Lyndon Johnson’s concerns about his standing at home, sunk costs, and U.S. credibility pushed him to likewise take a rigid position in peace talks. “I can’t get out, I can’t finish it with what I have got,” he bemoaned. “So what the hell do I do?”

…

Stalemated wars don’t last forever, of course. But it’s generally the successor to the war-initiating president who brings about a resolution.

Why? Because successors tend to be freer from the constraints of their predecessors. They didn’t start the war, so they feel less obligation to continue it, find more space to admit failure, and can more easily adjust negotiating terms to get a deal. Trump and former President Joe Biden both campaigned on ending the unpopular Afghanistan war, then followed through on their pledges when they came to office.

Given that Trump is arguably the most unconventional president in U.S. history, he could break the mold of his predecessors. Last year, for instance, he set aside concerns about credibility and looking weak when he ended the futile air war with the Houthis, and he has refused to insert U.S. ground troops into the Iran conflict. In both instances, Trump rightly focused on costs and benefits to U.S. national security.

“The beginning of a world war”
By Emmanuel Todd

Weltwoche: When did you realise the significance of the war in Ukraine?

Todd: When I managed to determine the number of engineers in the United States and Russia. The American population is two and a half times larger than the Russian population, but America trains fewer engineers. John Mearsheimer, whom I admire, believes that Ukraine is of existential importance to Russia. That is undoubtedly true. But unlike Mearsheimer, I am convinced that Ukraine is even more important for the United States: the defeat of the US reveals the weakness of its system. It has a completely different significance than the defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The US loses, leaves chaos behind and withdraws. In Ukraine, it is waging war against its historical enemy since 1945. Losing that war is unimaginable.

Weltwoche: Donald Trump wanted to end it within 24 hours.

Todd: That was his sincere intention. Trump’s vulgarity and amorality are unbearable for a European bourgeois like me. But he also represents some perfectly reasonable concerns. The MAGA project, ‘Make America Great Again’, consists of representing the interests of the nation. After a year, Trump had to admit that despite protectionism with high tariffs, reindustrialisation is not working. There is a shortage of engineers, technicians and skilled workers. The proportion of illiterates among young people aged between 16 and 24 has risen from 17 to 25 per cent over the last ten years. America is dependent on imports; it cannot do without them. It was pure madness for the world’s leading power to outsource its industry to China. Even in agriculture, the foreign trade balance is in deficit. Tariffs have become a threat to the dollar. It is the weapon of an empire that lives on credit from the labour of other countries. The desolate state of American society makes it impossible to implement MAGA. It lacks the necessary economic and intellectual dynamism.

Weltwoche: And that’s why Trump has to wage war reluctantly?

Todd: That’s his dilemma. He has been caught up in the maelstrom of American foreign policy over the past decades. The US was concerned with expanding and strengthening its empire. Trump has not slowed down this development, but accelerated it. Joe Biden compensated for the decline of the empire with the war in Ukraine. Trump is multiplying the theatres of war. He sought a showdown with China, which brought him to his knees with its embargo on rare earths. He is threatening Canada and Cuba. He wants Greenland and is humiliating the Europeans. In Venezuela, the imperialism of an empire in its final stages manifested itself in the form of kidnapping and raiding. His customs policy is a form of blackmail. In virtually every area, he has achieved the opposite of what he set out to do.

INTERVIEW/ Emmanuel Todd: ‘Madness’ under Trump pushing U.S. to third major defeat
By Shinichi Ikeda

Question: What are the effects on the world of the attack by Israel and the United States on Iran?

Todd: As a historian, I want to start from a bigger picture. This war in Iran follows two major defeats already experienced by the United States.

The first defeat is, as I told you in our interview in February 2025, the virtual defeat of the United States against Russia in Ukraine.

The United States, with its declining manufacturing base, turned out to be unable to provide the Ukrainians with sufficient weapons and munitions, revealing the fact that the American industrial system cannot sustain a major war.

The second defeat, which became apparent afterwards, is even more important: the defeat against China.

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened China with tariffs, but when the Chinese threatened the United States back with an embargo on rare earths, he very quickly had to back down.

Therefore, you can understand that everything he does now is a diversion to make us—and himself—forget about these major defeats.

Q: During your last visit to Japan last autumn when you took part in the Asahi World Forum, you indicated the possibility of a U.S. attack on Venezuela. Well, that has now happened, and the U.S. has shifted its focus of attack to the Middle East. What are your thoughts?

A: Yes. The attack on Iran by Israel and the United States started in the same way. But since Iran didn’t collapse, things got out of hand, and it might turn out to be the third major defeat for the United States.

…

Q: What is your take on what is occurring in the world?

A: What is happening now is not limited to the United States possibly experiencing its third defeat. It might be the collapse of a huge empire itself.

The ideals and structures that we have been familiar with and that have supported the world for a long time are collapsing with a loud crash.

The Warmongers Are Getting History All Wrong
By Stewart Patrick

The most famous vignette in Thucydides’ “History” is the Melian Dialogue. In it, an Athenian delegation delivers an ultimatum to the island of Melos: Submit to the superior power of Athens and become a tributary state in its war against Sparta, or face destruction. The Melians plead to remain neutral but are rebuffed. “You know as well as we do,” the Athenians explain, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Melos is vanquished, its adult men put to death and its women and children sold into slavery.

The second Trump administration has embraced the logic of the Melian Dialogue with gusto. It echoes in the president’s blunt declaration to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that “you don’t have the cards,” his browbeating of Denmark to cede control of Greenland, his unilateral imposition of tariffs on smaller nations, his threats to “take” Cuba at a time of U.S. choosing and his demands that NATO allies — who were not consulted before the war in Iran — help open the Strait of Hormuz. These are the actions of a rogue superpower that has abandoned any pretense of enlightened leadership or aspirations to legitimacy in favor of pure global dominance.

The Trump administration’s relentless bullying ignores a central lesson from classical antiquity: Athens’s shift from benevolent hegemony to malevolent empire paved its road to ruin.

From the seventh century B.C. onward, the city-states of ancient Greece recognized one of their number as their natural leader, entitled to pre-eminent status and special rights for its disproportionate contribution to collective defense. They called this power the hegemon. Such leadership was often contested, however. The most famous such clash was the Peloponnesian War, which pitted Athens against Sparta. Ultimately, Athens was vanquished.

“What made war inevitable,” Thucydides wrote, “was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Many contemporary scholars have latched onto this line as a succinct explanation for the inevitability of great power war. Like Athens and Sparta, we are told, the United States and China risk falling into a “Thucydides trap.”

But, as the historian himself makes clear, the war’s causes ran deeper. What made Athens’s surging power so worrisome was its violation of Hellenic norms, in seeking to transform its consensual leadership into a coercive empire. During the Spartans’ debate over whether to go to war, a visiting Athenian delegation justified their own country’s imperial turn: “It was not we who set the example, for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.” The gambit backfired, confirming suspicions of Athens’s imperialist intentions and leading the Spartans and their allies to approve a declaration of war.

What made war inevitable, in other words, was not merely the presence of rival great powers, but the fact that one of those powers was abusing the rules of the system that had enabled its rise to greatness in the first place.

The Real Thucydides Trap
By Joshua Rovner

Few issues capture observers’ attention like the rivalry between China and the United States.

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The political scientist Graham Allison famously warned that the two countries could fall into what he called “the Thucydides trap,” based on the idea that war is likely when a rising state threatens to overtake the leading power. This idea was an homage to the ancient historian Thucydides, who documented a great and terrible war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC. Although Allison provoked an important debate about whether China’s rise foreshadows a similar catastrophe, his assessment missed the true warning of the Peloponnesian War, because in fact no power transition was underway before the conflict began. Instead, in the decade leading up to the war, Athens and Sparta had settled into a stable balance of power: Athens dominated the sea, and Sparta dominated the land.

What happened next was a different kind of tragedy. Even as a political crisis deepened and diplomacy broke down, Athens and Sparta each understood the nature of its rival’s comparative advantage, but both still imagined they could win a war quickly. When fighting broke out and these hopes were exposed as illusions, the great powers found themselves mired in a long and ruinous war. This was the real Thucydides trap.

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Leaders who commit to war often entertain fantasies about rapid victory, in part to help cope with the psychological weight of their decision. Instead of anticipating a costly campaign with no certain outcome, they expect to beat the enemy without even attacking its primary forces. But the experience of war proves those ideas to be illusions. Early encounters with capable rivals demolish prewar expectations, leaving the combatants in a bind. High political stakes at the outset of the conflict encourage both sides to fight on, yet neither side can win. If the United States and China fall into this trap, the result will be an exhausting, protracted war that leaves them both worse off.

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Sparta finally defeated Athens in 404 BC—after 27 years of war. It was a hollow victory. The costs of protracted fighting and the political turmoil that followed made Sparta vulnerable to predation from other great powers, such as Thebes and Macedon. It soon had to worry, too, about a revanchist Athens, which scrambled to restore its position in the Greek world. Sparta endured a succession of wars, ultimately succumbing to Alexander the Great as he expanded his Macedonian empire a century after it took up arms against Athens.

Thucydides was not around to witness the subjugation of Sparta, but he anticipated the coming disaster. He was particularly alert to the ways in which the chaotic rush to war encouraged strategic fantasies—with predictably terrible results.

The Great Unraveling Has Begun
By Oona A. Hathaway

For centuries, war was perfectly legal. It was, in fact, the main way in which states resolved their disputes. Countries could force one another into treaties at the point of a gun and then enforce those very same treaties with war if they were broken. States that won wars had the legal right to keep what they took — land, goods, people. States rose and fell, took land and lost it, and the people living in the territory over which they fought suffered the consequences.

That system of legal war began to end after World War I, when, in 1928, states renounced the act of war in the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. That commitment was reaffirmed in 1945 in the U.N. Charter, which placed the commitment to renounce war at the center of a new international legal order. Territorial conquest and gunboat diplomacy, once legal, became illegal; economic sanctions replaced war as the main tool of international law enforcement; and waging war could be criminally prosecuted, as it was in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II.

The peace was never perfect. Conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia were early and terrible failures. The number of states in the world multiplied as decolonization took hold, and civil wars, which are not regulated by the charter, became more frequent. Yet the pact accomplished something remarkable: Conquest, once common, became rare, and fewer people died as a result of nations joining in conflicts outside their own borders.

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There were a few exceptions. In 1991, over 20,000 people died as a result of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the response from the international community. In 1992, over 20,000 died in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in 1999 and 2000, tens of thousands died in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There was a rise in deaths, too, in 2003, when the United States launched the war against Iraq.

But beginning in the early 2000s, the legal constraints on war began to erode. After Al Qaeda’s devastating attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States began to use force throughout the Middle East against those it deemed to be a terrorist threat. To justify continuing the strikes and extending them to a range of terrorist groups in what some would later call “the forever war,” the United States claimed a novel legal right under the U.N. Charter: to defend itself against nonstate groups that it said posed a threat.

Up to that point, it had been generally accepted among U.N. members that the right of self-defense in the charter extended only to threats posed by other states. By expanding this claim to threats posed by nonstate groups, the United States opened the door for other states to use unilateral force internationally under a legal guise. Over the next decade or so, more and more governments adopted the theory.

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… war between states, which had fallen to new lows after 1945, is back. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians each year. That same year, people were killed in state-on-state conflicts in Syria, Poland, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In 2024, conflict broke out between Iran and Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the United States and several allied states used deadly force in Yemen.

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As the United States fails to abide by the underlying principle of the international legal system it once championed, the already ailing system faces total collapse.

The World Will Come to Miss Western Hypocrisy
By Matias Spektor

The defining feature of the current moment is not that the United States violates the principles it once championed but that it increasingly dispenses with the need to justify its actions in those terms at all. Whereas earlier administrations cloaked U.S. power in the language of law, legitimacy, or universal liberal values, Washington now defends its foreign policy in bluntly transactional terms.

This shift was already visible during Trump’s first term. When he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018, Trump did not argue that Tehran had violated international norms or that the agreement endangered regional stability. He dismissed it as simply a bad deal for the United States. Likewise, when confronted with the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump defended continued U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia not by appealing to strategic necessity, but by pointing to arms sales and jobs that benefited the United States financially. In both cases, Washington did not deny the underlying facts. It denied that moral justification was required.

In his second term, Trump has stripped away the language of justification altogether. When he threatened Denmark and seven other European allies with tariffs over their opposition to his bid to acquire Greenland, he framed the dispute not in terms of shared interests or alliance obligations but explicitly as leverage—a transactional demand to extract territorial concessions. Similarly, in February 2025, Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court not because he contested its legal authority or offered an alternative framework for accountability, but because the ICC had investigated his ally Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Perhaps most starkly, when asked in an interview with The New York Times in early January whether Chinese President Xi Jinping might move against Taiwan, Trump replied that although such aggression would make him “very unhappy,” the decision was up to Xi. These are not violations of stated principles that appeal to necessity or higher purpose. They are naked assertions of interest, unadorned by even the pretense of principle.

Washington’s refusal to cite principle when making foreign policy fundamentally alters the terms of contestation for weaker states.

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When great powers no longer feel compelled to justify their behavior, disputes that once unfolded as arguments over legitimacy increasingly become tests of leverage.

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In such a system, bargaining replaces persuasion, and compliance depends less on consent than on coercion. International politics loses the language through which disputes can be negotiated—allowing the stronger parties to determine outcomes as they please.

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The rules-based order was never as principled as it claimed to be, and hypocrisy often concealed injustice as much as it constrained power. But by pretending to act in the name of universal values, powerful states conceded that those values mattered. When those states no longer feel compelled to legitimize their authority, the international system once sustained by consent devolves into one where power operates without restraint, making conflict more frequent and harder to contain.

I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era.
By Omer Bartov

How do genocides end? In most cases, there are two options. Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues.

In 1904 the Imperial German Army began a campaign that nearly wiped out the Herero and Nama peoples in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia, through fatal expulsions into the desert, incarceration in forced labor camps and outright murder. No one intervened. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire murdered vast numbers of Armenians it sought to remove from the heartland of Anatolia or caused their deaths by forced marches. Feeble efforts to bring former Ottoman leaders to account were quickly abandoned. To this day, Turkey denies the genocide.

Conversely, because the Nazi regime was defeated in World War II, its genocide of the Jews and its other mass crimes were adjudicated at Nuremberg. Other genocides that also ended with the military defeat of the perpetrators — such as in Cambodia in 1979, in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 — culminated in some sort of reckoning, however belated and incomplete. Denial of what occurred thus became impossible.

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What we have seen unfold in Gaza, where Israel stands accused in the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, appears to portend a new future for the crime.

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Since the current cease-fire in Gaza went into effect on Oct. 10 and President Trump’s 20-point plan was endorsed by the Security Council on Nov. 17, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks. The military now controls nearly 70 percent of the Gaza Strip. Two million Palestinians, who previously lived in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are now confined to a third of it, trying to survive in devastated spaces lacking the most basic humanitarian infrastructure.

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A collection of real estate moguls — possibly including Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump himself — or companies they promote would in that way reap a financial bonanza for businesses and investors, transforming the erasure of the Gaza Strip into an international investment opportunity. While the coastline would be dominated by prime real estate made up of mixed-use towers seemingly for foreign purchase and tourism, providing profits for developers, Palestinians would almost certainly be priced out of housing on what used to be their land. The plan would not only all but eradicate Gaza’s history and society but also transform it into a free-market economy for foreign corporations being offered “amazing investment opportunities,” as Mr. Kushner put it.

Building Mr. Trump’s so-called Riviera of the Middle East would depend on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states putting up vast amounts of money on the promise of ensuring even tighter strategic and economic links with the United States.

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Other nations, by declining to hold Israel accountable, would also benefit. Germany is Israel’s second-biggest supplier of arms, after the United States, and has signed major contracts purchasing military technology from Israel. Germany is defending itself at the International Court of Justice against accusations by Nicaragua of facilitating genocide in Gaza by funding Israel and cutting aid to the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, so it has every political and economic interest in taking the issue off the table. (Germany has denied the allegations.) Britain is believed to have used its military bases in Cyprus to support Israel and is laboring to improve its relations with the United States. France is trying to maintain its political influence in the Levant and to move on from the question of genocide in Gaza, which, according to President Emmanuel Macron, will be determined by “historians, in due time.”

Israel, too, is profiting. Even though some European governments have canceled weapons deals and imposed sanctions on Israeli military firms in response to Israeli violence in Gaza, business has remained brisk for Israel’s arms industry. Israeli export arms sales rose by 30 percent last year over 2024, to a record $19.2 billion, according to Calcalist, an Israeli financial news site, and the battle testing of weapons systems in Gaza serves as a selling point, Calcalist reported. In other words, wreaking destruction brings profits.

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Some may argue that the case of Gaza is singular because Israel enjoys a unique international position, thanks to its tight alliance with the United States and its reliance on the legacy of the Holocaust. Perhaps other states cannot expect to be rewarded and may even be punished for genocide. Yet what we are seeing today sets an extraordinary precedent, one that has the potential of undermining the entire premise of genocide as a crime punishable under post-World War II international law.

If the plans that are being elaborated for Gaza go forward, genocide may come to be seen by some nations as the legitimate and lucrative extension of politics by other means. At the least, other nations that benefit in some way from the genocide may be less likely to hold future perpetrators accountable. Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term in 1944 and fought for the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide four years later, had hoped to prevent exactly this outcome. It may well be the future of genocide.

Biden and Trump Called It a Genocide and Then Turned Away
By Nicholas Kristof

After the Holocaust, after the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, the (not entirely honest) refrain among leaders was: If only we had known. In Sudan, there is no such excuse. World leaders are well aware of these mass atrocities, yet their response has been largely to carefully avert their eyes and remain silent.

There is overwhelming evidence, reinforced by a U.N. report this month, that the United Arab Emirates arms and backs the R.S.F., yet Biden refused to publicly call on the Emirates to halt these arms shipments. Trump, whose family has benefited financially from business ties with the Emirates, has been even less willing to hold the Emirates accountable.

It’s not just the Emirates. Other countries, including Egypt and Iran, are reportedly supporting the Sudan Armed Forces, the other side in the civil war, and it too has committed atrocities — and, as The Times and The Washington Post recently reported, may have used chemical weapons. Both sides in this war will be remembered for their cruelty, just as ordinary citizens will be recalled for their heroism and world leaders for their indifference.

A New Era of World War Has Arrived
By Paul Poast

The past two years brought more war — both within and between countries — than in any years since the end of World War II. A new normal of rising conflict had arrived.

Now, as the war in Ukraine drags on and the American and Israeli war against Iran is paused under a fragile cease-fire, we are watching another unwelcome phenomenon return to the global stage: the world war. Two large conflicts on different continents have become theaters for strategic competition between major powers. Each war’s dynamics have had a direct impact on the other’s, and both have dragged ancillary states into the fray. And while the combined scale and intensity of the conflicts falls far short of the two devastating world wars fought last century, they have arisen from the same dangerous reflex: competing nations fully embracing military force as the first and primary means of exerting power.

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In a few short weeks, the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran became expressions of the great power competition underway. In both theaters, Russia and the United States have backed each other’s adversaries. The United States continues to provide arms, intelligence and planning to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and Russia was reported to be doing the same for Iran by providing targeting information and mapping on U.S. military positions and sending drones to Tehran. While the United States and Russia aren’t directly firing on each other, the powers have essentially loaded and pointed the guns being fired by others.

Each war has affected the other. The shock to global oil prices induced by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has become a financial windfall for Russia, both in higher prices for its own oil and through the easing of sanctions on that oil by a Trump administration desperate to lower global prices. As attention and resources are diverted to Iran, Russia has launched a spring offensive aimed at consolidating and expanding its territorial gains in Ukraine. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered the expertise in drone defense it has acquired in its fight against Russia to the United States and the Arab nations being targeted by Iran.

Both conflicts have pulled in other countries. In Ukraine, Russia’s war effort has long been enabled by the economic and technical support of China, the direct manpower contributions of North Korea and drones from Iran. European allies have played an increasingly important role in helping arm Ukraine, even taking the lead in that effort over the past year. And while NATO countries have not answered Mr. Trump’s call to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open, last month NATO-run missile defense systems shot down Iranian missiles directed toward Turkey. Iranian missiles aimed at several Gulf states have dragged those nations into the fight, while Israel has attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have launched missiles at Israel.

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Looking at how the wars are connected shows the necessity for our leaders to think globally in an emerging multipolar world where powers vie for control of regions or spheres of influence. A conflict in one region almost certainly will spill over into another. Resources allocated to one fight may mean fewer resources for another, undermining efforts to deter a threat or assist an ally in need. Failing to recognize the global span of security issues is exactly how states can stumble from a limited war of choice into a world war they did not intend.

America’s Pro-War Elites Must Be Held Accountable
By Stephen M. Walt

The United States is still good at many things, but holding elites to account is not one of them. President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush pardoned the officials responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal, and Barack Obama declined to prosecute the men and women who had authorized the illegal use of torture. The architects of the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq remained respected members of the establishment for the rest of their lives, in some cases occupying leadership posts or comfortable sinecures at prominent institutions and continuing to opine on foreign-policy matters whenever they wished. Nor were the fraudsters who brought us the 2008 financial crisis ever held to account—we just turned the page and moved on. Given that record, it isn’t so surprising that the United States tends to repeat past errors.

The war with Iran is a case in point. It remains to be seen whether the cease-fire announced on Tuesday will hold, but it is already clear that going to war again was a terrible blunder. Two months ago, the Strait of Hormuz was open, Iran was contained and its leaders were unpopular, oil and gas prices were lower, and its U.S. weapons stocks were fuller. Today, oil and gas prices have soared; inflation is rising; Iran controls the strait and is earning money from tolls; and its government is younger, more hard-line, and enjoying greater public support. U.S. missile stocks are depleted, and some key facilities in the region have been severely damaged. And the entire world has been shown that the United States is led by an impulsive old man who has no idea what he is doing. At this point, there’s no reason to delay imposing accountability on those responsible for what has been an unnecessary strategic disaster.

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In democracies, the road to foolish wars of choice is paved by pundits, lobbyists, advisors, and other alleged experts who sometimes spend years working to convince policymakers that unleashing the dogs of war will make a vexing foreign-policy problem disappear. Their efforts gradually normalize the idea of using military force, making a momentous and fateful decision on which thousands of lives depend seem like just one option among many.

The formula for war is almost always the same: After portraying the chosen enemy as the epitome of evil and incapable of reform, the war party assures us that the campaign will be quick, easy, cheap, and bring far-reaching and long-lasting benefits. They repeatedly warn that time is running out and failure to act now will have dire consequences. They tend to be studiously silent about the innocent civilians who will be killed and the hardships survivors will face after we’ve blown a lot of stuff up, and they confidently predict that the populations we are attacking will welcome our actions. This familiar recipe is then endlessly repeated until the stars line up and some foolish leader decides the warmongers are right.

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If Americans want to stop making the same mistakes, they need to pay far less attention to such chronic purveyors of bad advice. To be sure, the desire for accountability can be taken too far, because foreign policy is an uncertain business and nobody gets everything right all the time (including me). Sensible people admit their mistakes and learn from experience, however, while ideologues and activists tend to double down. When someone keeps offering the same prescriptions, gets the same bad results each time, and never seems to learn, it is time to look elsewhere for guidance.

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Looking forward, one might hope that reporters seeking expert guidance for a story might turn to other voices more often, instead of reaching for the same familiar names in their Rolodex. Journal editors might treat the warmongers’ submissions with greater skepticism, and news networks and podcasters seeking enlightened commentary might showcase these failed prophets less often than they currently do. Most important of all, policymakers seeking wise counsel on tough foreign-policy problems should rely on others for insight and advice.

Ding dong the legacy media and its slavish war reporting is dead
By Patrick Sullivan

In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.

It’s been a long road.

In terms of foreign policymakers being able to control the message, the first Gulf War in 1991 was a high-water mark in retrospect. At that point, Americans were getting their national news almost exclusively from corporate sources and especially the evening news, with the young CNN (launched in 1980 the only cable alternative) adding to network coverage. With such a narrow band of options, narratives could be foisted upon the American public by the Washington establishment and their compatriots in the media, who largely shared the same social circles, backgrounds,and career interests.

Such fanciful and self-serving narratives (babies stolen from incubators and “liberating” Kuwait, the Iraqis, and especially the Kurds from the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein) were accepted by the public pretty much without question. There was an anti-war movement in those days, but it was disorganized, and considered by the mainstream to be vaguely unpatriotic. There was a heavy Pentagon hand, if not outright censorship in the coverage of the war, a deliberate reaction to the independent and more impactful reporting of the Vietnam War a decade before.

In the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003, TV host Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for hosting antiwar voices and, according to an internal NBC memo at the time, giving the network “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” This from a network that was itself owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, which profited hugely from the invasion of Iraq.

The media fired and marginalized its dissenting voices, including Ashleigh Banfield, a rising star who said she was “banished’ by NBC after making comments in 2003 about how Americans weren’t getting the full picture of the Iraq War. She criticized the network embeds, which ensured only compliant reporters would be allowed into the war zone. The corporate media became handmaidens of the U.S. military and the powerbrokers in Washington, allowing the war there and in Afghanistan to continue for decades, without a serious questioning of the logic.

Then something unexpected happened: public trust in media plummeted from approximately 72% in 1976, to 28% today. Part of this public mistrust may have resulted from the fact that so many of the media narratives of our century, devised in concert with the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, have turned out to be wildly wrong (for example, that the Iraq invasion would bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, and would end a threatening WMD program; that the NATO bombing of Libya was necessary to prevent a “rape army” fueled by Viagra and methamphetamines, and would bring, again, a democracy to Libya).

But the other obvious reason for the collapse in public trust in corporate media and, by extension, for policymakers’ ability to sell a chosen narrative, is the rise of independent media in the years during and following the wars. The general acceptance of blogs and social media as a source of information coincidentally took off around 2007 — at the very moment that Washington and the corporate media’s lies and misdirections were breaking down and destroying American faith in their institutions writ large.

Quote Origin: The Duty of Newspapers Is To Comfort the Afflicted and To Afflict the Comfortable
By quoteresearch

… Chicago humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote a popular syndicated column featuring the distinctive voice of Mr. Dooley. The fictional character’s pronouncements used Irish dialectal speech and spelling. The following appeared within a 1902 column titled “Mr. Dooley on Newspaper Publicity”. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI: …

Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, conthrols th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.

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Finley Peter Dunne was not solemnly describing the duties of a newspaper; instead, he was comically outlining the comprehensive power of newspapers of that era.

Today in Media History: Mr. Dooley: ‘The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’
By David Shedden

Charles Fanning wrote about Finley Peter Dunne in the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

“Born to Irish immigrants on Chicago’s West Side in 1867, Finley Peter Dunne began a career as a newspaperman in the city in 1884. After working on six different dailies, he settled in as the precocious editorial chair at the Chicago Evening Post in 1892. There, he imagined himself into the character of Martin Dooley, whose 750-word monologues became a Chicago tradition.

…. Mr. Dooley’s perspective was consistently skeptical and critical. The salutary effect of most pieces was the exposure of affectation and hypocrisy through undercutting humor and common sense. The most frequently quoted Dooleyisms indicate this thrust.

…. his pioneering realistic sketches … includes some of the best social and political commentary ever written in America.”

Stalking, Scientology and sex: Gawker’s biggest moments
By Mae Anderson

Founded in 2003 as a gossipy blog about Manhattan’s media elite, Gawker pioneered the irreverent, snarky tone that has become ubiquitous online.

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In 2006, Gawker combined its “Gawker Stalker” celebrity sightings section with a Google map of New York that was updated in real time. Critics of the feature, notably Jimmy Kimmel, said the feature endangered the safety of celebrities by publishing their whereabouts. The map was eventually taken down.

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In 2010, again pushing the boundaries of gossip about public figures, the site published an anonymous account of a tryst with Christine O’Donnell, a conservative Tea Party activist who ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware. After an outcry that the post was misogynist and unnecessarily violated O’Donnell’s privacy, Gawker went on the defensive and published a follow-up post to explain why it published the account. Gawker also published O’Donnell’s response .

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In 2012, in a move that would ultimately cause the site’s demise, Gawker published a tape of Hulk Hogan having sex with his friend’s wife. Hogan sued the site for invasion of privacy and, bankrolled by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, won a $140 million judgment that led to Gawker’s bankruptcy filing. Thiel was outed earlier by Gawker’s now-shuttered Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag and had complained about Gawker and Valleywag’s journalism tactics.

Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit had a lasting effect on cases involving celebrity privacy
By Russ Bynum

The case put media outlets on notice that “the public doesn’t necessarily like the press,” especially when reporting intrudes into intimate details of even public figures’ private lives, said Samantha Barbas, a University of Iowa law professor who writes about press freedoms and First Amendment issues.

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The jury ultimately rejected arguments by Gawker’s attorneys that Hogan’s sex tape was newsworthy and that publishing it, no matter how distasteful, was protected speech under the First Amendment.

Actually, Gawker Media Got Rid of Fleshbot a Long Time Ago
By Adam Clark Estes

Despite the media-gazer chatter about Nick Denton selling Fleshbot as his company’s next grown-up move, the porn site hasn’t legally been a part of Gawker Media for two years. In 2009, Denton’s company made a grown-up decision to bring in payroll giant ADP to handle its human resources duties. But because ADP’s guidelines forbid partnering with porn sites, the firm wouldn’t agree to cut checks for Fleshbot. Denton’s solution was to take ownership of the site personally. For at least the first few months after the move, Denton paid the salaries of Fleshbot staffers with his own personal, handwritten checks.

So why does Denton want to sell Fleshbot now? So far the official reason is fairly vague. Fleshbot has been absent from Gawker Media’s lineup since 2009, and in The New Yorker‘s 2010 profile of Denton Ben McGrath wrote that the porn site was “a drag on the reputable kind of advertising that Denton now covets.”

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Looking back at that New Yorker profile, there’s also this line of McGrawth’s: “Denton used to tell people who asked what he did for a living that he was a pornographer…” but “On his Twitter feed, Denton identifies himself as a ‘gossip merchant.'” And after hosting a mediastar-studded party for the editors of The Guardian‘s new U.S. venture at his apartment on Wednesday night, Denton tweeted a photo of himself and the other new media moguls. The labeling is telling of the heights Denton hopes to reach.

Drawing the Line on Gossip After the Gawker Trial
By Jim Rutenberg

Interestingly, one of Gawker Media’s first big hits was a Paris Hilton sex video, which ran on its Fleshbot site in 2003. (Mr. Denton sold Fleshbot in 2012.) Far from threatening to bring the house down, it helped solidify Mr. Denton’s company as a real web player. The tape fit with Gawker’s sensibility — punching up at the arrogance of wealth and celebrity (in this case an heiress who was famously famous for being famous) in the media pirate’s tradition of its forebears at Spy magazine.

But Spy, as its co-founder Kurt Andersen pointed out to me, was not in the constant-search-for-clicks business. And as Gawker’s web traffic grew, it got into trouble when it seemed to be meanly punching down, exposing secrets about people who were not so obviously newsworthy.

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Suddenly, it was not just the fabulously famous — Michael Jackson and John F. Kennedy Jr. — whose lives we were being invited to peer into; it was people just like us.

Journalist apologizes for #HasJustineLandedYet Twitter uproar after PR exec’s AIDS joke
By Michael Walsh

The journalist responsible for pushing a young woman into the crosshairs of Internet outrage says he has apologized and made peace.

Sam Biddle, then editor for Gawker’s technology site, Valleywag, saw public relations executive Justine Sacco’s ill-conceived tweet before she boarded a plane for Africa on Dec. 20, 2013, to visit her family for Christmas.

It read, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

The tweet, Sacco says, was supposed to mock how many Westerners think of HIV/AIDS as an “African thing,” despite the fact there is also an epidemic here in the United States.

It was intended as an ironic statement that her roughly 200 followers would understand to be a joke at the expense of racists, in the style of “The Colbert Report” or “South Park.”

But Biddle took her tweet at face value and posted it to the popular Gawker blog under the sarcastic headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke from IAC’s PR Boss.”

It quickly went viral and spawned the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet, which people used to vent their anger and attack Sacco.

“Not knowing anything about her,” Biddle wrote in a Gawker article published Saturday morning, “I had taken its cluelessness at face value, and hundreds of thousands of people had done the same: instantly hating her because it’s easy and thrilling to hate a stranger online.”

Aboard the flight, Sacco was completely unaware of the media firestorm surrounding her — until she landed.

She was branded a racist by countless strangers and lost her job as global head of communications for the American Internet company IAC.

A comprehensive timeline of Gawker’s internal breakdown
By Danny Funt

Thursday, July 16, at 8:26pm — Gawker staff writer Jordan Sargent authors a post on a media executive who, the headline states, “Tried To Pay $2,500 for a Night With a Gay Porn Star.” The story outs the publishing bigwig, who is married to a woman and exchanged text messages with a male escort to arrange a meetup that eventually fell through. Gawker Media Executive Editor Tommy Craggs contributed editing, and Heather Dietrick, president and chief legal counsel, cleared the post for publication, according to Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter.

Later that night — Sargent arrives at a cocktail party hosted by Gawker Founder and CEO Nick Denton, where he is congratulated on the post by some Gawker staffers, observed party guest Peter Sterne of Capital New York. Other editors are “glued to their phones, checking Twitter and Chartbeat to stay up to date on the angry tweets from other journalists.”

…

Friday, July 17 in the morning — “Criticism of Gawker’s decision to publish the story was swift and mighty,” notes New York Magazine’s Jessica Roy, while Gawker.com Editor in Chief Max Read continues to defend publication. As Craggs later puts it, the piece “had become radioactive. Advertisers such as Discover and BFGoodrich were either putting holds on their campaigns or pulling out entirely.” Craggs warns corporate leadership that if the post is deleted, he may resign.

Friday at 2:30pm — Denton releases a statement soon after Sargent’s story is removed:

“The point of this story was not in my view sufficient to offset the embarrassment to the subject and his family. Accordingly, I have had the post taken down. It is the first time we have removed a significant news story for any reason other than factual error or legal settlement.”

Gawker Media’s managing partners had voted 4-2 to pull the post, with Dietrick and Craggs, the sole editorial representative, dissenting.

Then, at 5:55pm — Gawker Media editorial staff, who unionized in June, release a statement in which they “condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.”

Saturday, July 18 — Read announces that if Craggs quits, he will, too. “I obviously would be gutted if Tommy left,” he writes in an email to Gawker.com staff, “and am desperately hoping he can be convinced to stay, maybe if we can make assurances of editorial protections in a union contract, or some other kind of ironclad guarantee that his power will not be diminished. I will be calling him all weekend and begging him to reconsider.”

Monday, July 20, at 11:05am — Craggs posts a receipt on Instagram from Balthazar, a ritzy French restaurant a few blocks from the Gawker office. The tab, with tip, was more than $500 — paid to his Gawker American Express card.

Monday, July 20, at 11:55am — Craggs and Read resign. In a memo to Gawker Media editorial staff, Craggs writes:

“The message was immediately broadcast to the company and to its readers that the responsibility Nick had vested in the executive editor is in fact meaningless, that true power over editorial resides in the whims of the four cringing members of the managing partnership’s Fear and Money Caucus.”

Within half an hour — Denton sends another memo to editorial staff, which states:

“The insistence the post remain up despite our own second thoughts: that represents an extreme interpretation of editorial freedom. It’s an abuse of the privilege. And it was my responsibility to step in to save Gawker from itself, supported by the majority of the Managing Partners.”

…

At 11:22am — Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak recalls his decision not to out an NFL player. Of the deleted post, he writes, “The story, in my view, wasn’t anti-gay, but it was inhumane,” adding, “Ultimately, I would rather work at a place that’s bold enough to fuck up than one that is too afraid to ever risk it.”

Tuesday at 12:30pm — The managing partners hold a staff meeting at Gawker’s Manhattan office, where they explain, “This was not a vote. This was support for a decision that Nick made that Nick has the absolutely right to do” (per Capital New York). Tensions boil over when advertising interests versus editorial freedom come up. “Make this into an advertising company then! Say what it really is! It’s not a place for journalism!” Features Editor Leah Finnegan reportedly says to Denton.

Then, at 2:26pm — Denton tweets, “Confused about the culture clash at Gawker? Here’s an explainer.” He links to a January article by Finnegan, “Zoe Saldana Gives Birth to Hipster Scum.” Denton had commented on the post, “I know you’re joking, but to anybody but your hardcore fans, this is just nasty. You’ll regret writing that headline.” Responded Finnegan at the time: “I never regret speaking my truth and criticizing a poor celebrity naming choice, Nick.”

Gawker on Drugs (Literally!)
By Foster Kamer

On Monday, Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio unrolled a fairly epic foray into the world of stunt journalism: an attempt to re-create Major League pitcher Dock Ellis’ infamous no-hitter of June 12, 1970 against the San Diego Padres, pitched while tripping on LSD. He did so by taking LSD.

…

Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton declined to comment when asked about his editors dropping acid.

Yet: This is not the first time Gawker Media has engaged in stunt journalism or discussed the imbibing of drugs in a candid, familiar manner; in fact, precedent for the latter started when current Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers interviewed an East Village yuppie on the quest for the perfect cocaine dealer (a torch then carried by the next editor, Choire Sicha, who interviewed a Manhattan mairjuana delivery dealer).

Gawker websites have often been a place where taboo topics (such as drug use) are given the illumination of first-hand experience (“Writing on drugs is my drug,” “Cocaine is cheaper than its ever been, and let us just tell you that we think that’s really great“), yet treated somewhere above the lowbrow regard of High Times or VICE.

The site was an early adopter of recreational Adderall usage and bemoaned the loss of their beloved drug dealing networks. They have delivered important verdicts in matters such as Xanax vs. Kolonopin and the question of whether or not everyone they know pops pills.

More recently, Adrian Chen wrote about a website where you can buy drugs with digital currency BitCoins, Silk Road (thus provoking an intense interest in BitCoins, obviously) while Deadspin writer Emma Carmichael was sent to the Cannabis Cup to turn in a full report on a candid excursion into what is essentially the World Series of Marijuana.

Gawker Ex-Editor A.J. Daulerio: The Worldwide Leader in Sextapes
By Gabriel Sherman

When Deadspin launched in 2005, it followed the original Gawker template: snark-laced riffs on other people’s reporting, driven by the editor’s voice. Leitch published a dozen carefully crafted posts per day, almost all of them commentary. But by March 2008, when Leitch poached Daulerio from Philadelphia magazine, Denton’s focus had shifted. To build traffic, he insisted that his editors post far more often—up to forty times daily—and he expected them to break news, not just react to it.

…

Perhaps Daulerio’s darkest moment came last spring, when he posted a video of an obviously drunk college girl having sex in a bathroom stall at a sports bar in Bloomington, Indiana. At the time, he was thinking of it as part of a series on fans having sex in bathrooms. (In the fall of 2009, he’d posted a clip of a couple getting it on in a stall at the new Cowboys Stadium.) On May 11, a few days after the video went up, Daulerio received an e-mail from a woman imploring him to take it down. “I know the people in it and it is extreemly [sic] hurtful. please, this is completely unfair,” she wrote. In separate responses, both Daulerio and Darbyshire, the Gawker lawyer, refused to comply. “Best advice I can give you right now: do not make a big deal out of this because, as you can tell, the footage is blurry and you are not identified by name,” Daulerio wrote, assuming the e-mailer was the girl herself.

For the rest of the afternoon, Daulerio and the woman traded five e-mails. Finally, before handing the matter off to Darbyshire, Daulerio wrote, “It’s not getting taken down. I’ve said that. And it’s not a very serious matter. It is a dumb mistake you (or whomever) made while drunk in college. Happens to the best of us.”

The next day, though, he and Darbyshire decided that removing the video was “the best course of action,” Darbyshire says. But by then it had migrated to other sites.

…

Deadspin’s remarkable growth is a direct result of Daulerio’s willingness to push himself harder than is probably healthy and to run the kinds of stories that would cost most journalists more than a few hours of sleep. He’s certainly not doing it for the money.

…

“He needs the next story like an addict needs their next fix,” Denton says.

Andy Coulson guilty in phone hacking trial: ‘We need a hit. Badly’ How culture of News of the World’s glory days led to its downfall
By Cahal Milmo and James Cusick

In April 2005, an email from Andy Coulson landed in the inboxes of his News of the World staff. Times were good for the Sunday tabloid, which had battered its red top rivals with a succession of scoops and just been named Newspaper of the Year.

But if journalists were expecting a paean of praise from their driven young editor, they were to be disappointed. Coulson felt his title was not reaching the heights of the previous 12 months, during which “the Screws” had broken stories including an affair involving Home Secretary David Blunkett as well as allegations about the marriage of David Beckham. And he was not afraid to instil a bit of fear.

Coulson wrote: “The truth is we’ve not fulfilled our brief this year. I’m not for one moment doubting your efforts but we need a hit. Badly.”

…

Rupert Murdoch’s papers didn’t come second. That wasn’t how they did business.

But on the NOTW, the nation’s biggest-selling paper and fearsome leveller of reputations, the pressure to deliver that “hit” – a scoop exposing the moral turpitude and hypocrisy of fallen celebrities, sportsmen, lawmakers, preferably with a whiff of criminality – “the DNA of the paper” – was all-consuming.

…

In order to release that high pressure of commercial expectation, the paper had become steadily and fatally infected by the very same turpitude, hypocrisy and criminality it was sworn to expose.

…

Rather than an aberration, hacking became symptomatic of the singular atmosphere that presided at the NOTW – a toxic mixture of bravado, arrogance and paranoia that made techniques such as eavesdropping on private messages and paying public officials for information as the default means of survival.

As one member of staff put it: “Nobody ever felt secure there and that’s the way they liked it. On the edge, scared and insecure.”

The deliberate creation of a “shark pool” of ruthless competition in the NOTW newsroom, by which reporters’ continued employed depended on the so-called “byline count” of how many stories they managed to get in the paper, led to the deployment of ruthless, and ultimately illegal, dog-eat-dog tactics.

No ordinary newspaper
By Dominic Casciani

The News of the World wasn’t an ordinary newspaper when Andy Coulson was its editor. It had another team you didn’t find in your average tabloid newsroom.

Alongside the news reporters and feature writers, there was a department of criminality – a conspiracy at the heart of his newspaper to get the story at any cost.

The conspiracy reached the parts of people’s private lives that the competition couldn’t even know about.

…

And that conspiracy brought down a British journalistic institution that was read and loved by more than three million every Sunday. The last edition rolled off the presses on Sunday 10 July 2011. The full-page editorial declared: “Quite simply, we lost our way.”

…

Bethany Usher was a News of the World reporter during Coulson’s time. She grew up in a working-class area of Sunderland and says she believed the newspaper spoke to, and for, people from her community.

Now a journalism lecturer for Teesside University, she says the reality of the newspaper was completely different – it was obsessed by celebrities and scandals, rather than stories that mattered to real people.

…

Despite being a prosecution of exceptional complexity, hampered by huge chronological gaps because critical internal emails are missing, the trial came down to three words which appeared in an email from Andy Coulson to one of his news editors: Do His Phone.

A trial that was all about power
By Nick Davies

Somebody called it the trial of the century. That worked well enough as an indication of its scale and of the highly unusual status of some of those in the dock. But it was more accurate in another sense, that, as the weeks went by, this trial came to embody the peculiar values of this particular century – its materialism and the inequality which goes with it, the dominance of corporation over state.

…

Rupert Murdoch’s money flooded that courtroom. It flowed into the defence of Rebekah Brooks and others, because he backed them; and to the defence of Andy Coulson, because Coulson had sued and forced him to pay. Lawyers and court reporters who spend their working lives at the Old Bailey agreed that they had never seen anything like it, this perfectly tuned Rolls Royce engine purring through the proceedings. Soon we found ourselves watching the power of the private purse knocking six bells out of the underfunded public sector.

…

There was no doubt at all that the News of the World had been involved in crime on a massive scale. Before the trial opened, three former news editors and the specialist phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire had pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept voicemail. By the time it finished, News International had paid compensation to 718 victims of the hacking – an average of nearly three agreed victims for every week during the five years for which patchy evidence of Mulcaire’s work has survived. Hundreds more alleged victims were still being identified by police. Similarly at the Sun: a shuffling line of police officers and other public officials had already appeared in court and admitted being part of the alleged ‘network of corrupted officials’ which the head of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers, described at the Leveson inquiry.

…

As tabloid newspaper bosses, Brooks and Coulson ruined lives. They did it to sell newspapers, to please Rupert Murdoch, to advance their own careers. One flick of their editorial pen was enough to break the boundaries of privacy and of compassion. The singer’s mother suffering from depression; the actress stricken by the collapse of her marriage; the DJ in agony over his wife’s affair: none of their pain was anything more than human raw material to be processed and packaged and sold for profit. Especially, obsessively if it involved their sexual activity.

With all the intellectual focus of a masturbatory adolescent, their papers spied in the bedrooms of their targets, dragging out and humiliating anybody who dared to be gay or to have an affair or to engage in any kind of sexual activity beyond that approved by a Victorian missionary. They did it to friends: like David Blunkett, for example, sharing drinks and private chats with him and then ripping the heart out of his private life, sprinkling their story with fiction as they did so. And to Sara Payne: befriended by Brooks in her campaign to change the law about publication of the home addresses of sex offenders; investigated by her paper on the false suspicion that she was having an affair with a detective.

But above all, they did it to their enemies. Among the politicians who they exposed for being gay or for having affairs, the left-wingers easily outnumbered the occasional stray right-winger. In amongst them were the special enemies who dared to challenge News International. In the early stages of the hacking story, there was only one frontbench politician from any party who was willing to attack the News of the World – the LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne. In June 2010, when Brooks was chief executive of News International, it was the News of the World which exposed Huhne’s affair, leading to the end of his marriage; and then the Sunday Times which handed police emails which they had exchanged with their supposedly confidential source, his wife, Vicky Pryce, leading to the imprisonment of both of them.

The News of the World also targeted the private life of their most outspoken critic in Parliament – Tom Watson. Brooks had loathed Watson since he took part in the ‘curry house’ plot in 2006, attempting to engineer Gordon Brown into Downing Street at the expense of her favourite, Tony Blair. News International reporters say that during the hacking saga, she called in reporters to ask if they had any dirt on Watson. The News of the World put a private investigator on his tail, hoping to catch him having an affair.

They did all this with breath-taking hypocrisy. While Coulson and Brooks were using their front pages to expose public figures for having affairs, they were themselves having an affair and keeping that information very private. Behind the scenes at the trial Brooks took the hypocrisy a step further. Although her newspapers had frequently attacked the Human Rights Act, she tried to use Article Six – on the right to a fair hearing – to prevent her ‘affair’ letter to Coulson being put before the jury.

…

Their willingness to ruin lives was directly linked to their political power. MPs feared that they might find their own private behaviour being monstered on News International’s front pages. This is the power of the playground bully: he has only to beat up one or two children for all of them to start trying to placate him. Beyond that, government collectively feared having its agenda destroyed, its daily activity destabilised, its future terminated if Murdoch’s editors turned against them. Former ministers and senior Whitehall officials all tell the same tale – that as Murdoch increased the size of his empire, governments became obsessed with newspaper coverage, particularly that of the Sun.

‘This is the dark art’: new book claims pattern of personal attacks by Murdoch media empire
By Amanda Meade

In Getting Murdoched, Australian journalism academics and former employees at The Australian newspaper Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson claim personal attacks like this are part of a pattern in the 95-year-old Murdoch’s sprawling global media empire, which today operates under News Corp and Fox Corporation. “As former reporters we get that good journalism and editorial abuse share many of the same characteristics. For example, good journalism requires lots of persistence. Bullying entails too much of it,” they write. And while they say that “of course good journalism has been published and broadcast in News outlets”, they argue that in many cases a line has been crossed.

“Murdoched”, a term Dodd and Ricketson coin for the book, means to be “editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media proprietor’s programs or publications”.

The book examines “murdoching” across the US, the UK and Australia, including dozens of interviews with prominent people and ordinary citizens about the way they were treated in newspapers, such as the Sun and the New York Post, and cable television network Fox News.

Dedicated to “the bullied”, the book focuses squarely on Murdoch’s “way of doing journalism”, Dodd and Ricketson write. The techniques include unleashing a torrent of articles against particular targets “contesting even the tiniest of points, so as to wipe the critic’s original ideas from everyone’s mind”. Another is to attack the critic personally, “pitilessly and repeatedly”. When all else fails, “murdoching” is “simply continuing to assert something as true as if no one has ever shown it was false”, they write.

“Murdoch perverted the fourth estate function of journalism,” Dodd and Ricketson write. “Instead of it being a way to hold power to account, Murdoch saw it as a means of holding individuals to account, especially those who held views contrary to his own.”

News of the World scandal reverberates beyond the Murdoch empire
By David McKnight

Freedom of the press is a much sullied notion in democratic countries. But for all its titillation and populism, the core practices of journalism have until now managed to avoid credible legal charges of criminality and conspiracy. More importantly, journalists who sometimes bend or break the law, are usually vindicated, legally and/or morally, by an appeal to the notion of a public good.

This is the justification which, for example, is at the heart of the action of Wikileaks and its sources. It is a justification used frequently to defend legal attacks on investigative journalists.

But in this case, no appeal to a higher, public good is possible. The “public right to know” cannot conceivably cover the hacking the phones of murder victims, nor of the relatives of those killed in terrorist attacks nor of the families of dead soldiers.

So in the long term, the worst damage which Murdoch’s newspaper may have done is harm the relative freedom of speech and of the press which invisibly underpins a democracy like our own.

How the Gawker trial was the gateway to Trump.
By Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

In 2007, Valleywag, Gawker’s gossip column devoted to Silicon Valley, published a short piece about a then-little-known venture capitalist and tech founder, under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel’s sexuality wasn’t a secret, nor was the piece mocking. “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay,” it read. “More power to him.” But it was the first time this information was made public, and Thiel didn’t welcome the attention. He vowed privately to get revenge on Valleywag, which he described as “the Silicon Valley equivalent of al Qaeda,” a “Manhattan-based terrorist organization” that was apparently terrifying tech bros into conformity. It took him almost a decade for his quest to succeed.

At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing
By Frank DiGiacomo

In 2020, as the pandemic gripped the world, Cord Jefferson, Max Read, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann spent their days in a Zoom writers room immersed in a project that hit close to home.

All four had worked at the groundbreaking digital blog Gawker in its final years and experienced, as Jefferson put it, the “roller coaster of high highs and low lows” that came with the job, as well as the controversy and criticism that dogged the site because of its no-holds-barred reporting and essays. During its run from 2002 to 2016, Gawker regularly exposed the hubris, hypocrisy and misdeeds of the famous, wealthy and powerful. That those stories were often steeped in snark only added to the fury they sparked.

Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season.

…

Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season.

…

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

…

… a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

…

Gawker, which shut down 10 years ago this August, was guilty of lapses in judgment — former staffers interviewed for this story admit as much. It could be withering, puerile and gratuitously nasty. But, at its best, it rebelled against media piety and the growing, often indiscriminate power of the digital world and the hubristic entrepreneurs who were shaping it. As print and television media fumbled their way online, Gawker used the internet to pull back the curtain on celebrity, mainstream media, politics and creeping commercialism.

It also, Jefferson says, “played a large part in disseminating what would eventually become the default voice of the internet: sarcasm, skepticism, urbanity, Black/queer slang, message board slang, exclamation points, etc.” In the process, he adds, “It fostered some of the most vibrant voices in journalism.”

“Gawker was bleeding edge in every way,” says Jessica Coen, Gawker’s editor-in-chief from 2004 to 2006. “From professionalization and monetization of blogging, to scaling, to the introduction of renegade journalism on the web — the idea of moving fast, asking questions later and writing with voice. These all became media norms, but Gawker took the lead.

“And then you’ve got the most tragic bleeding edge of all,” Coen continues. “Which is, it was put out of business by a billionaire with an ax to grind.”

…

“There was one principle that everybody seemed to follow, which was if it’s true, we publish it. You weren’t supposed to go in thinking about whose feelings might be hurt,” says Jefferson. Denton did not consider himself exempt from that kind of truth-telling. In a 2016 Medium essay about the demise of Gawker, Denton wrote that his “friendship with [former NBC News anchor] Brian Williams went cold after Gawker published a private email I had forwarded as a tip, in a demonstration by Gawker’s editor that even the publisher was fair game.”

…

By then, the mainstream media was paying close attention to Gawker with a mix of fascination over its scoops and chatty, compelling voices, and condescension because its journalistic standards were not as strict as theirs. Denton asserted in a 2016 Medium essay that journalists were “obsessed” with Gawker because it was “calling out the absurdities of the industry,” adding, “Never underestimate the power of narcissism.”

…

The Hulk Hogan sex-tape story went up shortly after Jefferson arrived at Gawker, and he says, “If you would have told me that would be the story that would bring down the entire thing, I would have never believed you.”

There were other stories that bothered him more, like a post by a writer who recounted a chaste one-night stand with Tea Party activist and Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell that described her pubic hair.

“Gawker eventually became like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, where it didn’t understand its own power,” Jefferson says. “It started out as this little blog published out of Nick Denton’s living room. Everything he was doing was punching up because nobody had ever heard of it or him. By the time I got there, it was a powerful entity that could rattle and affect lives. But people continued to write as if they were still in a living room when they should have started thinking, ‘The story’s true, but is it a story we should be sharing?’ “

…

Some of the fallout was payback. In the 2016 story he wrote for Medium, Denton recounted that on the day Gawker filed for bankruptcy, then-New York Post editor Col Allan, who had been deemed a “pig fucker” by the site after the tabloid misidentified two men as suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, emailed Gawker’s tip line with the screed, “Squeal, pig fuckers, squeal.”

…

“People in the media who got a kick out of Gawker dying should feel ashamed today,” Jefferson says. “You can draw a direct line between Peter Thiel funding a lawsuit to shut down Gawker and Donald Trump suing all of these news outlets. Billionaires own The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and Twitter,” he adds. “We have allowed billionaires, many of whom are also right wing, to control the means by which information is conveyed to the populace. That is a very scary thing, and it has a direct connection to Peter Thiel and Gawker.”

A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial. I’m Its First Target
By Gary Baum

… on April 21, I received a remarkable email. “Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup — fittingly called Objection — to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I’d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier.

Livingston, a young staffer who describes his job on LinkedIn as, simply, “creating shareholder value,” noted that an AI tribunal would attempt to “adjudicate a determination of truth,” and that the announced outcome “will also affect your Honor Index score, a measure of the veracity of your published work.” He went on, adding, “You can argue your side by uploading your evidence and suggesting your interpretation of the allegation.”

I perused the web page, designated “Sackler v Baum (2026).” It featured a countdown clock ticking toward an apparent verdict. Then I read up on the company, which is backed by the prominent right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him. The effort led to the outlet’s demise. At first glance, Objection seemed to be a kangaroo court catering to rich and infamous plaintiffs, the latest service in the lucrative sector of digital reputation management.

…

Objection assigns a human investigator — at the $2,000 price tier, a college graduate; for $10,000, a former CIA or FBI agent — to gather evidence, which is displayed as exhibits. In my case, just about all of it appeared to be extraneous documentation, like incorporation paperwork for Sackler’s firm, which seemed irrelevant to the matter at hand. Then it prompts a group of AI models (including the name-brand ones such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok) to act as its jury, analyzing the evidence.

The Peter Thiel Ally Who Helped Kill Gawker Wanted to Save Journalism. Then His Site Went Dark.
By Tekendra Parmar

Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.

“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza.

…

… when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric.

“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”

When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.

“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”

When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.

There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”

…

Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media.

…

It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.

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D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen?

One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.

Peter Thiel’s secret lectures on Antichrist in Rome spark debate
By Christopher Lamb

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and MAGA donor, is in Rome this week for a series of private lectures on the Antichrist. It’s an event that the Vatican, and the pope, are treating with caution.

Thiel’s talks are closed to the media and taking place at an undisclosed location. An invitation, seen by the Associated Press, says the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies will focus on the Antichrist, a figure in Christian teaching who comes to oppose Jesus Christ before the Second Coming.

But the appearance of Thiel on the Vatican’s doorstep has raised eyebrows, given the tensions between Thiel’s thinking and that of Pope Leo XIV. Two Catholic institutions have distanced themselves from the lecture series, which continues through Wednesday.

Thiel has previously written and lectured on the subject, arguing that the Antichrist is not necessarily a person but could come as a global government system. It would take control, he has argued, by exploiting people’s fears around artificial intelligence, climate change or nuclear war.

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist
By Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr and Nick Robins-Early

Thiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.

Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.

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He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

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As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused.

The Catholic principle guiding popes through tech upheavals, from the Industrial Revolution to AI
By Walter Scheirer

Since the start of his papacy, Leo has spoken about the risks AI presents for broad swaths of society. As a computer scientist interested in how Catholic teachings can shape digital technology, I’ve followed his statements closely. In May 2026, he released his first encyclical,“Magnifica humanitas” – “Magnificent humanity” – which describes how the Catholic Church should respond to the AI era.

While the technology might be new, the principles guiding the pope’s perspectives have deep roots. In particular, the encyclical invokes the concept of “subsidiarity,” a core tenet of Catholic social teaching that has guided the church’s response to technological upheavals for almost a century.

Simply defined, subsidiarity means that, whenever possible, decisions should be made by the people most affected by them. In the United States, for instance, the Department of Education may set federal assessment guidelines, but cities and states are in charge of many aspects of public education.

AI increasingly shapes the lives of Americans, whether we want it or not. Yet platforms such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT are proprietary black boxes, under full control of the corporations behind them. What “Magnifica humanitas” suggests is putting control of AI at the “closest level possible to the persons involved” in its use.

Subsidiarity has a long history in Catholicism, extending back to Pope Pius XI. In 1931, he released an encyclical called “Quadragesimo anno,” or “In the 40th year.”

The title was a reference to the first encyclical on Catholic social teaching, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. Although the earlier encyclical did not mention subsidiarity by name, it advocated for harmony between different levels of society – an idea that Pius would further develop into the full-fledged concept.

Both texts were responding to their era’s own technological inflection point: the Industrial Revolution. Church leaders were deeply troubled by a new, unrestrained form of capitalism that left laborers with few options other than working on mechanized assembly lines, under harsh terms set by corporate managers. In Pius’ words, “Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel.”

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“Quadragesimo anno” recommended that societies be restructured to prevent entire economies from falling into the hands of just a few very powerful corporations. This involved fair wages, workers’ participation in decision-making, and eliminating unfair competition that squeezed small- and medium-sized businesses out of the market.

In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for president, he embraced the encyclical’s call for subsidiarity. During a speech in Detroit, he declared the pope’s encyclical “as radical as I am.” Quoting Pius’ words, he rejected a world where “immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few” – views that trickled into his New Deal policies, although Roosevelt himself belonged to the Episcopal Church.

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Similar ideas worked their way into “Antiqua et nova,” – meaning “Ancient and new” – a Vatican document issued in 2025. Harkening back to Pope Pius’ encyclical, published almost 100 years before, “Antiqua et nova” condemns the monopolization of AI by powerful corporations. It recommends that everyday users, nonprofits, governments and international organizations also have a voice in creating technology that “promotes human dignity” and “the common good.”

“Magnifica humanitas” is the most recent attempt to reconcile AI systems with Catholic social teaching. AI should “not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner,” Leo writes, “but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation.”

Peter Thiel: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’ by criticizing AI
By Tommy Walters

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he also warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party.

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During the event, Thiel took direct aim at the Vatican, accusing Pope Leo XIV — the first pope from the United States — of unintentionally advancing Chinese interests by pushing for stronger international oversight of artificial intelligence.

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Because the pope’s message could influence some Americans, but is unlikely to be heeded by people in China, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatened to slow down only one side of the “race between the US and China” to advance AI.

In his own view, Thiel said, that means Leo is “working for the Chinese Communists.” The Aspen audience received his characterization of the pope as a Chinese agent with laughter.

Who is Elon Musk calling a ‘traitor’?
By Harmeet Kaur

“Traitor” — which derives via Old French from the Latin “trādēre,” meaning to hand over — was first recorded in English in the early 13th century to describe a person who violated another’s trust or a duty entrusted to them. By the end of the century, it also encompassed betrayals of one’s sovereign or government. Being a traitor is a mark of infamy that carries down through history, attached to the likes of Marcus Junius Brutus, who conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar; Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver; Benedict Arnold, who deceived George Washington and the Continental Army; and Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian military officer who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.

In the legal sense, a “traitor” is someone found guilty of the crime of treason, which also derives from the Latin “trādēre” and seems to have entered English around the same time as “traitor.”

Article III of the US Constitution stipulates that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” This narrow definition was a deliberate attempt by the Founding Fathers to shape political culture, said Thomas Main, author of “The Rise of Illiberalism” and a professor at Baruch College.

In “Federalist No. 43,” James Madison warned against “new-fangled and artificial treasons” invented by political factions to use against one another whenever power changes hands. “[T]he convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime,” he wrote.

“It’s because he doesn’t want newfangled definitions of treason to be used as weapons in everyday debate between political factions,” Main said. “The result of that is a political culture that is intolerant, which is not consistent with liberal democracy.”

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The mid-20th century saw the rise of the phrase “race traitor,” applied by segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan to white people who aligned themselves with the Civil Rights Movement. Catherine Fosl, a historian and author of the biography “Subversive Southerner” of white civil rights activist Anne Braden, said that when Braden and her husband bought a house on behalf of a Black family in 1954, the phrase appeared frequently in the hate mail they received.

“It’s often paired with charges of socialism, communism, outsider,” she said in an interview. “It connotes ‘They’re not like us. They’re not part of us, and they want to undermine our way of life.’”

Fosl, who has also taught South African history, said the word “traitor” was similarly applied to dissenters against apartheid in Musk’s native country, South Africa. The government there charged Nelson Mandela and more than 150 other anti-apartheid activists with treason in a multi-year mass trial that ended in acquittal in 1961.

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With the rise of modern conservatism in the ’70s and ’80s, Main said influential figures on the right began to approach politics as war.

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“If you then say, ‘Well, all politics is war,’ that means everybody who doesn’t agree with me politically is a traitor,” Main said.

Why Silicon Valley’s Vision of the AI Future Should Worry You
By Liz Bucar

Everyone has a vision of the ultimate future, some picture of what the world looks like at its best (or worst), and whether that future is even reachable. In religious studies, we call this an “eschatology.”

Eschatology isn’t just the Book of Revelation or the Rapture. The Greek meaning of eschaton is “last things,” and today the word captures the set of beliefs a person holds about where things are headed and what that implies for the present.

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Silicon Valley has an eschatology too, and some of its leading figures have been pretty candid about what it is: AI surpasses humanity, humans become obsolete as a species, and what matters is making sure your version of AI is the one that wins. Understanding that vision as an eschatology, not just a business strategy, explains why some of the most powerful people alive seem so unbothered by what we seem to be losing—our attention spans, our critical thinking, our basic competence at things we used to just know how to do—and so uninterested in being accountable to anyone about it.

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Let’s start with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, because he was explicit about where he believes AI is going years before most people had even heard of a chatbot. In 2015, at a startup conference, he told the audience: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” This doomsday eschatology was the basis for his business plan: race to the top because extinction is coming.

Since then, Altman’s views have shifted widely. “Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for me,” he wrote in an April 2026 blog post. “AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI, and we must figure out how to make it happen.”

This is a very different eschatology and a very different business pitch: we must invest in AI because it will help humans do powerful things.

And then there’s the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, whose life’s work makes sense once you see the eschatology underneath it. The OpenAI co-founder has said that human extinction is a very real threat that he’s personally trying to prevent. “If you think about the future of humanity, it’s going to fundamentally bifurcate in two directions,” he said back in 2013. “Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to be confined to one planet, until some eventual extinction event.”

You could argue that SpaceX exists as insurance against that second path, a hedge against asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics, or an AI that decides to take us out. In this case, his eschatology is that salvation is possible if we can colonize space, but only for those who can get there. This may also be why he has said empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” As bleak as I may personally find this perspective, it is in line with his eschatology. After all, it is illogical to care for others when most of humanity won’t survive.

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Entrepreneur Peter Thiel has arguably taken eschatology the furthest. He’s taken to giving lectures arguing that the Antichrist of the 21st century is a “Luddite who wants to stop all science.” And he gives examples: AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and climate activist Greta Thunberg. In his framework, caution and regulation are the apocalyptic threat. This is perhaps why, when Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical this year to call for international AI oversight, Thiel said the Pope was effectively a “Chinese communist agent,” restraining America so that China can beat us in the technology arms race. That seems like a strange thing to say about a pope, until you realize in Thiel’s version of the future anyone suggesting limits is getting in the way.

Three tech leaders, three different pictures of humanity’s ultimate destiny—resignation, survivalism, apocalypticism. But I would assert that they share the same consequences. For one, in each version, the future isn’t something we build together. It’s something they get to build on our behalf.

And notice who is left out of each version. Altman’s future has room for “great companies” and “expanding human capability,” but arguably less concern for the people whose jobs AI might make irrelevant in the process. Musk’s future may have some room for wealthy people who can book a seat on a colony ship but less for the rest of us. Thiel’s future has room for innovation, but little for those who want to question what we are innovating for and towards.

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Musk, Altman, and Thiel aren’t theologians speculating about the end times. They’re building the thing their theology tells them is coming, funding the politics that protects their ability to build it, and treating anyone who asks them to slow down as a luddite or Antichrist rather than a citizen with a legitimate concern.

Techno‑utopians like Musk are treading old ground: The futurism of early 20th‑century Europe
By Sonja Fritzsche

Techno-utopianism emerged in its modern form in the 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution ushered in a set of popular ideas that combined technological progress with social reform or transformation.

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Enthralled by inventions like the telephone, automobile, airplane and rocket, those futurists found inspiration in the concept of a “New Human,” a being who they imagined would be transformed by speed, power and energy.

A century ahead of Musk, Italian futurists imagined the destruction of one world, so that it might be replaced by a new one, reflecting a common Western techno-utopian belief in a coming apocalypse that would be followed by the rebirth of a changed society.

One especially influential figure of the time was Filippo Marinetti, whose 1909 “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” offered a nationalistic vision of a modern, urban Italy. It glorified the tumultuous transformation caused by the Industrial Revolution. The document describes workers becoming one with their fiery machines. It encourages “aggressive action” coupled with an “eternal” speed designed to break things and bring about a new world order.

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Marinetti’s vision later drove him to support and even influence the early fascism of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons From the First Hackers’ Conference
By Fred Turner (PDF, 176KB)

In the mid-1990s, as the Internet and the World Wide Web went public, a utopian near consensus about their likely social impact seemed to bubble up out of nowhere. The Net would level social hierarchies, distribute and personalize work, and dematerialize communication, exclaimed pundits and CEOs alike. The protocols of the Net were said to embody new, egalitarian forms of political organization. They offered the technological underpinnings for peer-to-peer commerce, and with them, claimed many, an end to corporate power. And well above the human plains of financial and political haggling, suggested some, those same protocols might finally link the now-disembodied species in a single, harmonious electrosphere.

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… scholars have pointed out that new technologies as diverse as telephones and airplanes have always generated utopian hopes … . “The basic conceit is always the same,” writes Langdon Winner …, “[N]ew technology will bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfillment.” In the second, critics have read techno-utopianism as the self-serving ideology of an emerging “virtual class” … . Some, like Barbrook and Cameron … , have focused on the ways in which versions of techno-utopian discourse have helped managed the structural and cultural contradictions of working in high-tech. Others, such as Kroker and Weinstein … , have asserted that a new, transnational class has emerged alongside networked computing machinery, and that its members have developed a techno-utopian ideology to support their class position.

Each of these perspectives has substantial analytical value. The first reminds us that the Internet and the Web were not the first “revolutionary” technologies and it invites us to compare our digital present to a steam-powered or newly electrified past. The second points to the ways that emergent social groups have turned networked computers into ideologically charged symbols and asks us to keep our eye on the ways that new media can be recruited into ongoing power struggles.

‘The Nerd Reich’ tracks the ‘unmasking of Silicon Valley’s true politics’
By NPR

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: … In his new book, journalist Gil Duran argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place.

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DURAN: I think we were witnessing the unmasking of Silicon Valley’s true politics. They finally were comfortable to reveal their full selves to everyone. And I think for many years, their democratic alignment was mostly self-interest because we had democratic presidents who had important contracts, government contracts, who had power. And so they needed to get along with whoever had power. And now that Trump was returning to power, they saw an opportunity to align with him and to try to realign the country’s politics to something more to their liking. I think it’s grown quietly, as we’ve seen many of these people become billionaires and multibillionaires and even one temporarily become a trillionaire.

Once you have people who have so much wealth amassed, then they want power. But for some people in Silicon Valley, specifically Peter Thiel, this idea of using technology to amass wealth and then turn that into monopolistic political power is something that was not accidental. It was something that was carefully cultivated over many decades. And as you said, none of my book came from secret documents, or it’s not guessing. This is stuff that these guys have been saying on the record very explicitly for decades.

MOSLEY: OK, let’s break this down a little bit more because, I mean, most people might assume that if democracy breaks under all of this tech money and power, it’s collateral damage because these are rich men chasing profit, and the country suffers along the way. Part of – a big part of what you are also arguing is the opposite of that, that the breaking actually is the goal.

DURAN: Definitely. My book is about a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that in the 21st century, technology will make democracy obsolete. And it goes back a few decades. In 1997, if you want to know the full root of it, there was a book that came out called “The Sovereign Individual” that predicted that in the 21st century, technology would result in the end of democracy and nation states like the United States. Specifically, the book said that two technologies – one, something called cybercurrency, which we would today consider crypto, and another called advanced automation, which is basically AI – would collapse the economy and thereby the government itself and would lead to the rise of a new cognitive elite, these sovereign individuals, wealthy individuals who, by making the right investments and the right moves, would be able to profit from the destruction of the United States and other democratic nation states.

And the book was very poorly reviewed and sounded like a conspiracy kook book to most people, but it had such a profound effect on Peter Thiel that he has credited for being one of the reasons why he started PayPal, as an effort to get ahead of this predicted cybercurrency that would transform politics in the 21st century.

MOSLEY: Right. Peter Thiel read it. He grabbed onto it. He, as you mentioned, is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and he’s a major funder of Facebook, which made him a billionaire. You know, in particular, when we talk about Thiel in the past, it has always been that some of his ideas around democracy and politics were strange and fringe. He’d written, among other things, that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. And part of what you’re saying here is this book, “The Sovereign Individual,” had a huge impact on his belief system. But how did that form his desires and aspirations?

DURAN: Well, in the decades after “The Sovereign Individual” was published, you see Thiel continue to make moves that are clearly based on the book. But, of course, you have to know the book in order to know that, and most people were not familiar with the book because while it became a cult hit in Silicon Valley later, at the time, it was sort of an obscure book that many reviewers dismissed as kooky conspiracy theory, apocalyptic. Yeah, right, the United States is going to be collapsing on the 21st century. This seemed like a joke back in the good old days of 1997. But in the subsequent years, Thiel goes on to give speeches and write essays where he talks about the rise of a digital currency that’s coming and then will subvert everything and cannot be stopped by Washington, which will have zero idea of what it’s really about.

In 2010, he gives a speech where he says that government is fundamentally evil. And this is weird because at the time, he’s a cofounder of Palantir, which was started with investment from the CIA and which is a major government contractor. So you usually don’t see government contractors calling the government fundamentally evil in public forums. And he goes on to become somebody who spreads these ideas to other important figures in Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen, like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. And in his book “Zero To One,” which is about startups and how to succeed in Silicon Valley and business, Peter Thiel says it’s important to start a business that runs like a cult because cults are organizations of total dedication, where people care about them more than anything else, and this is the way to really get things done, is to start your own cult.

And I would say that what Peter Thiel was able to do is take his fringe interest in these ideas and sort of start a cult where he spread them to other important people who are now mostly billionaires and who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our election and are aligned behind Trump. And if you look at what Trump is doing, a lot of the ideas that he’s pursuing are ideas that were first thought of and promoted by Peter Thiel and these billionaires.

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MOSLEY: … Now I want to talk about one of the other men you write about – Balaji Srinivasan. He’s a venture capitalist who writes, among other things, about replacing countries with privately-owned startup societies, which we’ll talk about at length a little later. But Srinivasan, in 2023, goes on a podcast and describes how tech is taking over San Francisco. You reported that out and the piece went viral. And there’s something very specific that he talked about regarding strategy, with the red and the blues and then the grays that he describes the tech world as. Can you explain that?

DURAN: Certainly. So Balaji Srinivasan is a protege of Peter Thiel who was turned on to the book “The Sovereign Individual” by Peter Thiel and considers it prescient – an important document that tells us where we’re going. And in 2013, he gave a speech in which he said that tech needed to secede, essentially, from the United States. That it was time for Silicon Valley to move out of this country, get away from democracy and develop its own new political systems, which raised some eyebrows at the time, but sort of seemed, I think, silly and eccentric to most people. Not like a – it wasn’t a serious idea. It wasn’t taken seriously, at least.

By 2023, Srinivasan had updated his idea to a new political strategy by which something called the gray tribe, which he defined as the tech people in politics, who were a rising force in U.S. politics – the CEOs, the founders, the billionaires – would form this tech gray tribe, and this gray tribe would partner with the red tribe – the Republicans – to basically oust and purge the blue tribe – the Democrats – from the city of San Francisco. He was using San Francisco as a test case. And this idea of the reds and the grays teaming up against the blues very much seems to be the strategy that’s being pursued in Silicon Valley. In fact, in 2024, there was a conference in San Francisco where – there was a conference where it was basically The Heritage Foundation – the right-wing Heritage Foundation – and the venture capitalists of San Francisco meeting to compare notes and share the stage. And the title of the conference was Reboot: The New Reality.

And the website for this conference said, the new reality is already here, it’s just not visible yet, and basically argued that tech was waking up to politics and we were about to see this new power unleashed. And that new reality ended up being very much what Srinivasan spelled out – combining behind the Trump administration to create an unprecedented disruption and attack on American democracy.

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MOSLEY: … I just want to spend just a little bit of time on Curtis Yarvin. He was a blogger. It was, like, the 2000s – right? – where he began writing under a pen name. And he was arguing even back then, that democracy had failed, that America should be run by a CEO who is essentially a dictator and that the entire federal workforce should be fired. And for years, the only people who really read him were kind of in certain corners of the internet. So how did he and Thiel find each other?

DURAN: In April 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy. At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about. Well, this caused a lot of outcry and criticism of Thiel, who had to go back and say, I didn’t mean to say – I’m not saying that women shouldn’t have the vote, etc.

But one of the people who publicly defended Peter Thiel at that time was Curtis Yarvin, who was writing at the time under the name of Mencius Moldbug. And sometime after Yarvin’s public defense of Thiel, the two met. And Thiel becomes an important promoter and funder of Yarvin’s work, which is very unusual because Curtis Yarvin is this computer programmer, and he writes these anonymous blogs where he calls basically for the end of the United States and the end of democracy and the installation of a monarch or a dictator and the purging of the federal government under a future administration, where a president would act as an authoritarian.

And no one should have ever heard of Curtis Yarvin’s name. But through Thiel, he meets people like Marc Andreessen, who helps fund his company. He has this company trying to remake the internet from scratch, hasn’t quite worked out. But Curtis Yarvin becomes a millionaire and becomes an important voice in what’s known as the tech right. And over time, his word spreads through Silicon Valley, and even JD Vance is quoting him before he runs for Senate in podcasts, quoting his idea specifically for a future president to take power and start acting like a dictator, starting with purging the government of massive amounts of federal employees.

MOSLEY: Right. This is where I want to slow down because he writes all of this stuff many, many years ago. But then, now we are here, Gil, this idea of RAGE, which you were just about to talk about, the retire all government employees. And 10 years later, DOGE actually fires hundreds of thousands of federal workers. And you write that it isn’t – it’s not even clear that Trump has ever heard of Curtis Yarvin. So how does a blogger’s idea become a federal policy?

DURAN: Through the Silicon Valley donors. They brought those ideas to Washington. Clearly, JD Vance helped bring those ideas to Washington. And that was one of those points, too, when I think even the establishment press finally realized – The New York Times and others wrote about this – that the idea we came to know as DOGE, where Elon Musk was installed basically as the CEO over the federal government to cut and purge and destroy as much of it as possible came from Curtis Yarvin’s idea of RAGE, retire all government employees.

And that’s – in early 2025, Curtis Yarvin becomes an international celebrity because it’s so clear that he’s the guy behind DOGE. In fact, The Washington Post had a story saying that this is the guy behind the DOGE idea, RAGE, and that even people in the Trump administration had said they’d all read Curtis Yarvin. So these crazy ideas move from the margins of society from these random anonymous weirdo blogs on the internet to federal policy under Donald Trump. Now, DOGE didn’t really last very long, and it ended up collapsing. You really can’t have a CEO ego challenging the president’s ego. But that wasn’t the only idea that Yarvin had.

He had also suggested that the United States should completely undo its diplomatic standing in the world, stop being the defender of freedom and democracy and specifically should cut international aid programs. And we saw that happen as well with the USAID cuts, which are predicted to cause millions of unnecessary preventable deaths in the poorest countries in the world. So that’s why I think it’s important to realize that the weird stuff these guys say in their blogs or in their speeches is not just eccentric fluff. Because they have so much money, they can turn these weird ideas into policy and cause tremendous damage. And I believe that that’s what we’re seeing now, is the execution of these bizarre and dangerous ideas on a scale that even I didn’t think was imaginable when all this first started.

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MOSLEY: … I want to break down this fascination with the idea of the network state and what we’re actually talking about here. So what is a network state? What does daily life inside of one look like?

DURAN: Well, the most basic definition of a network state, according to Srinivasan, is a community that forms online of like-minded people who then decide to go and crowdfund a new territory somewhere and start their own country.

And what does life look like in a network state? We don’t really have an answer to that because not many people spent much time in them, but the idea has manifested in two ways. One, one could say that the tech takeover of our current government, its alignment with Trump, is an attempt at the network state idea – using their money and influence to take over an existing government and turn it to their purposes. But we also see some projects around the world where they are trying to create new nations. One of them is in Honduras, called Prospera, where a group of tech billionaires have funded a new settlement that has, like, a office building and a hotel and some residences which they’re trying to develop into a new sovereign territory where the – where usual regulations and laws don’t apply.

MOSLEY: And Thiel has funded this, as well as a few others, like Sam Altman and Srinivasan.

DURAN: And Marc Andreessen, through a company called Pronomos Capital. They have a whole company, a venture capital company that’s dedicated to funding these projects around the world. And this is very unpopular in Honduras, where the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and the legislature passed a law saying that these kinds of projects are actually not allowed. So that’s one example.

There’s another example called Praxis, which is a proposed city, also funded by Pronomos Capital and a bunch of tech billionaires, that was originally going to build a new city somewhere in the Mediterranean, but after not finding anybody who wanted this tech city in the Mediterranean, decided it would be built in Greenland. And this coincided with Trump threatening to take Greenland. In fact, some of these guys went over there and toured Greenland and were making a lot of noise about how, if we take Greenland, we’re going to build this city here. So Trump also has this idea that he proposed in 2023 to build what he calls Freedom Cities on federal land – basically have a competition to see who wants to build a new city. And somebody wins the competition, they get federal land to build a new city.

So there’s this idea that billionaires need to fund the creation of their own cities so that they can govern them as they wish. We’ve also seen some efforts that seem very similar here in California. California Forever is this proposed city in Solano County, near San Francisco, where a group of billionaires secretly spent $900 million to buy up 60,000 acres of land in a place with no water, no infrastructure, no roads and a law that specifically prevents these kinds of projects from being built there. And now they’re trying to impose it on the people of Solano County, where 70% of voters oppose the project. And some people say, well, that’s not really a network state. But the question is, why do billionaires suddenly need to build a bunch of cities everywhere?

MOSLEY: That is the question. And also, if these cities get built, who gets to live in them and who gets to – who gets excluded? What is the world that they’re trying to build?

DURAN: A world that they fully control, a world where no one can question their authority and a world where they can exclude anyone they don’t want, they don’t like or they don’t have anything in common with. They are trying to build new territories from scratch. And this is not a new idea. It’s occurred throughout history – people trying to build new zones and territories where they can escape the regular rules, regular taxes, etc. The difference is that now, instead of just trying to escape taxes or certain laws, they want to build zones to escape democracy altogether. And it’s amazing the degree to which this is openly discussed, to the point that there’s even a company that’s funding these projects and an annual conference, the Network State Conference, which anyone can look up on YouTube, where they talk about their plans to create this new world of tech-controlled cities.

MOSLEY: The president in particular – you talked about those Freedom Cities that he was proposing. There were 10 Freedom Cities built from scratch on federal land, as you mentioned, a contest for the best designs. And he never really explained why the country needs these new cities instead of investing in the ones we already have. And you make this point – that the press that covered the announcement didn’t really ask the questions. This is – like, this idea has kind of moved on, but the president has even talked about this is a possibility for Gaza.

DURAN: Definitely. One of the places this popped up in the most absurd and shocking way was in Gaza, where President Trump posted a video – an AI-generated video – of a Trump casino in Gaza, on the beach, with money raining down and Elon Musk and this sort of fantasy of a future techno-utopia Gaza. And there’s a proposal to actually build this thing in Gaza. And everywhere you look, you’re seeing this idea that things will be replaced with new tech billionaire cities. In fact, there’s Gaza, some tech billionaires have proposed building a new Freedom City at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. When the United States invaded Venezuela and arrested President Maduro, someone chimed in and said, it’s time to build a Freedom City in Venezuela.

So this idea of Freedom Cities, which are network states, keeps recurring. And it’s not clear whether Trump will actually pull it off. We haven’t heard a lot about the 10 Freedom Cities on federal land, so I think that would be a disaster and he’s running out of time to do it. But you do see some of the most powerful men in the world calling for the creation of these new cities – Gaza, Greenland, Guantanamo, you name it. And that’s where I think it becomes most clear that they’re serious about this.

MOSLEY: These guys, not all of them are exactly happy with the Trump administration. You write about Curtis Yarvin in particular, who says the second Trump revolution is failing and that he has told his allies he plans to leave the country. Other tech billionaires also have homes and lands and trying to build other cities, as you said, like, in other places. What does that tell us, if the architects are also considering packing and leaving up – leaving the country?

DURAN: Curtis Yarvin is definitely panicking and saying it’s time to leave the country. But if you look at what he’s saying underneath that, it’s that Trump needs to go further – that Trump needs to be full authoritarian, full fascist and make it clear that this is no longer a democracy and that he won’t be letting go of power, and that if he doesn’t do that, there will be great punishment later for everyone who was involved in this. So it’s an argument for being more extreme.

In the meantime, Peter Thiel appears to be taking his advice. He recently bought a $12 million mansion in Argentina, which – and he seems to be spending time there now with his family. He was there for two months, now he’s returned for another visit. So in a weird way, you can always see Thiel pointing the direction to where things are going. And if Trump doesn’t go full authoritarian and seize power and keep it, then I think a lot of billionaires who participated in this are going to be nervous and fearful of the possibility of real accountability and might seek to escape elsewhere. Balaji Srinivasan, the network state guy, has fled to Singapore and is now planning to start his new nation in Kazakhstan, which is an authoritarian country. So they might end up – this handful of billionaires – floating out there, looking for something besides the United States.

The Nerd Reich: Are Silicon Valley billionaires building a new fascist world order?
By Kevin Truong

I think we have to start with the name “Nerd Reich.” What was the origin?

People often give me credit for coming up with it, but I didn’t. After I wrote a story about Balaji Srinivasan, which went super viral, he started attacking me for several days. Then a pretty well-known figure from the crypto world reached out to me over DM and said, “You know, we’ve been calling these guys the Nerd Reich for years.” And I was like, “What?” The URL was available, so I rebranded my newsletter as the Nerd Reich and announced it in dramatic fashion.

To me, the most important thing is that this is not a name I came up with. This is a name their own peers use. They are telling people what they are doing. They want people to know because they’re evangelizing to bring in more believers.

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Someone you identify as a foundation for the movement is Curtis Yarvin, who argues for the replacement of democracy with a kind of corporate-style monarchy where we’re ruled by a CEO.

Yarvin is this guy who was really good at math and skipped a bunch of grades, and then he did a tremendous amount of psychedelic drugs and wrote a new ideology while living off his wife and his mother. The importance of Yarvin is that if you want to know who Peter Thiel is, if you want to know who Marc Andreessen is, read Curtis Yarvin, or watch one of his interviews where he compares Africans to cattle and talks about making sure they don’t breed too much. This is someone these people regard as worth listening to, and who they’ve promoted to the point that even the vice president of the United States has quoted him.

You devote a chapter to JD Vance, who you describe as essentially a creation of Peter Thiel, what role do you see him playing in the implementation of the ideology?

It’s not just Vance. Bloomberg did a story at the beginning of the administration counting 15 of Thiel’s closest deputies spreading out through the administration. Elon gets all the credit and sucks up all the energy, but Thiel is the quiet power behind it.

And with Vance you have a man whose entire career was bankrolled and promoted by Peter Thiel sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency. This was the guy quoting Curtis Yarvin’s specific ideas: purging the federal government, and a president who defies the law. Those come from Yarvin, which in turn come largely from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher Vance has also talked about.

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What differentiates tech fascism from the original recipe developed in the early 20th century?

They have a lot more money. This is a story about the toxic effects of too much money in the hands of small-minded men who have way too much power in society because of it. Hitler and Mussolini had the radio. That was powerful enough to communicate with people everywhere at the same time. Now we have the internet, which goes beyond that, because it can also follow you around and constantly manipulate you.

I think one of the main innovations the tech fascists make is that instead of promising a return to a mythical past, they promise a mythical future: superabundance, interplanetary travel, eternal life, total efficiency. If you look at history, before the fascists you had the futurists, who believed in speed and violence as the ultimate beauty and technological acceleration as the thing that would win in the end. Filippo Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, then a decade later wrote the Fascist Manifesto. In his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen names Marinetti as a patron saint.

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Network state experiments like California Forever, Praxis, Esmeralda, Prospera have faced lawsuits, regulatory hurdles, and local pushback. Does that suggest the whole thing is failing?

They’re going to force this on people wherever they can, and everywhere they go they’re hated. Balaji just got kicked out of Malaysia. California Forever was initially going to get a vote of the people, after sneaking around buying up land and suing farmers, but the polls showed 70% opposed, including high levels of Republicans. They found a way to unite Democrats and Republicans. So what do they do instead? They creep around trying to pick off different cities with annexation deals, and now they’re angling for some kind of special zone where they’re exempt from the rules and can do what they want.

Why do billionaires suddenly need to build new cities everywhere? Trump has freedom cities in his plan. Greenland, same thing. It’s this idea of new fortress societies to prepare for a dark future, when the wealthy and powerful need zones that are protected from everybody else.

There’s been a fast, bipartisan backlash against the AI industry. How do you read the opposition?

I think the majority of people are quickly realizing that Silicon Valley poses an existential threat to their interests, and politicians are moving too slowly to get on the side of the people. Someone online called them data center Democrats, people who see the public rising up against this stuff and for some reason want to be on the side of the companies and the billionaires. That’s because money is the mother’s milk of politics.

Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich
By David Lay Williams

In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city.

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Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution.

It’s no wonder that when Socrates reflected on inequality in Plato’s “Republic,” he observed that a state characterized by significant wealth disparity is not a state at all but rather “two states, the one of poor, the other of rich men, and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.”

For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.

Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”

The Founders’ Warnings About Excess Wealth Have Come Appallingly True
By Igor Volsky

… the Founders were deeply worried that concentrations of wealth would corrode self-governance and hollow out the republic from within. In their study of history, they saw how wealth inequality fueled political division, class conflict, and social unrest, eroding governance and ultimately contributing to failed states like the Roman Empire.

James Madison’s Federalist, Number 10 explicitly links political instability to economic disparity, citing the inherent tension between property owners and non–property owners. Madison saw a role for government to address economic inequality in his 1792 essay Parties, noting that it should do so “by political equality of rights … and by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” Madison warned that if the state favors financial speculation, it creates an artificial aristocracy that distorts public policy and subverts democratic representation.

Thomas Jefferson was even more full-throated in his warnings about concentrated economic power. Jefferson worried powerful employers could coerce workers’ votes, thus limiting their democratic power. In an 1816 letter, Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall take warning from the example [of England] and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson believed a concentrated financial class would inevitably capture government institutions, transforming a republic of equals into a playground for the wealthy. Because of this, he championed structural limits to inequality, for instance by advocating for the abolition of laws that kept massive estates intact across generations to ensure wealth was continually broken up and redistributed through inheritance. He even authored two laws as a Virginia state legislator banning feudal inheritance practices that were in place across Europe.

Today, the Founding Fathers’ worst fears are playing out in front of our eyes.

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Extreme wealth concentration has eroded the “one person, one vote” principle underpinning American democracy. In 2024, for example, Elon Musk personally financed the Trump campaign’s ground operations and gave individual Trump voters $1 million per day, a legally questionable scheme that some experts argued amounted to paying for votes.

That same year, 150 billionaires collectively spent a record-breaking $2 billion on federal races, and many have been rewarded with positions of real power in the government. Trump empowered Musk to gut essential workers and services through DOGE while securing new federal contracts and ending regulatory actions that threatened $2.3 billion in potential liabilities for his companies. Trump selected Cabinet members from the top 0.0001 percent of America, and his signature tax law will reward the richest 1 percent of Americans with $121 billion in net tax cuts in 2026 alone. Is it a surprise then, that in the first 16 months since Trump was reelected, the collective fortune of America’s 974 billionaires grew by $1.96 trillion, or 30.6 percent?

Today’s extreme wealth concentration is precisely the oligarchic threat the Founders envisioned. The American dream cannot survive when unlimited wealth for a few destroys opportunities for the rest of us.

What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World
By William Dalrymple

We still speak of the British conquering India. In reality, the conquest of the Indian subcontinent between 1756 and 1803 was the work not of a nation-state but of a private company, the East India Company. Headquartered in a small office in London, it was answerable to nobody but its shareholders.

While its original focus was the spice trade and then the export of Indian textiles, it was authorized from the start by its charter to found and run colonies and wage war. From its maiden voyage in 1601, it used violence to conduct its business and enhance its profits. By 1788, it was not just Britain’s biggest corporation and largest employer; it was the company that had conquered what was then the richest country on earth: Mughal India, whose bejeweled loot helped power Britain into the Industrial Revolution.

Here, as in so much of imperial history, commerce, colonization and brute corporate power walked in lock step. As Tolstoy later wrote in a letter published by Gandhi, “A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising 200 million people.”

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The East India Company was established in London in 1600, with a monopoly on all British trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. By the mid-18th century, the company had begun conquering great chunks of the most prosperous provinces of the Mughal Empire, which encompassed most of what is now India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh and half of Afghanistan. Before long, the East India Company was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times had led to a drain of Western bullion eastward. Now money flowed toward London, enriching both the government and the nation.

By the 1780s, the East India Company was ferrying opium east to China, and its troops participated in the Opium Wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong. Soon the company had become the largest drug cartel in history; by the 1860s, roughly a sixth of the revenue of British India came from narcotics, one of the largest sources of revenue after the land tax.

By the end of the 18th century, the East India Company had created a vast and sophisticated administration in India and built much of the London Docklands. Its annual spending in Britain — around 8.5 million pounds — equaled about a quarter of the British government’s total annual expenditure. In India it collected taxes, minted coin, administered justice, ran its own courts and diplomatic service, flew its own flag, negotiated treaties and made war on sovereign states, all in pursuit of increased dividends. An international corporation that began trading spices ended up transforming itself into a colonial superpower.

The East India Company operated from its headquarters on Leadenhall Street in London. For much of the 18th century it was staffed with as few as 35 people, in a building five windows wide. Yet in India the East India Company owned a private army that by 1803 numbered some 200,000 men — roughly twice the size of the standing British Army. Its stock was a pillar of British public finance, and its profitability and solvency were matters of state.

The parliamentarian and philosopher Edmund Burke, who led the impeachment of Hastings, saw the problem with perfect clarity: The company was “a state in the disguise of a merchant,” Burke said. “The constitution of the company began in commerce and ended in empire.”

The East India Company is often thought of as having the conquest of India as its primary focus, but in truth it always had two targets. One was the lands where its business was conducted; the other was the country that gave it birth.

Its lawyers and lobbyists and parliamentarian shareholders slowly and subtly worked to use its immense wealth to influence and subvert legislation in its favor. In 1693 the company was discovered to be using its shares to buy influence with prominent members of Parliament and ministers. The following parliamentary investigation, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the East India Company guilty of bribery and insider trading.

After that, the company became more subtle and instead backed candidates favorable to its policies. It arguably invented corporate lobbying, that alchemy by which the interests of a company somehow magically become the policies of the state. Around one in 20 members of Parliament sat on the East India Company’s board, and more than a fifth of the company’s directors sat in Parliament at some point; about 40 percent of members of Parliament were shareholders.

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In the summer of 1772, the greatest corporation on earth ran out of money. The East India Company had conquered Bengal, but the conquest had turned ruinous. A famine helped along by company negligence had killed perhaps a fifth of the province’s people, and the company’s share price had collapsed.

On June 8 a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce, having speculated heavily in East India Company stock, disappeared from his office, leaving debts of 550,000 pounds. His bank soon declared bankruptcy, followed by another the next week, initiating a financial crisis that spread across Britain into Europe. By the fall, company directors were asking for a bailout.

Parliament saved the East India Company because it could not afford otherwise. Like Lehman Brothers, the company really was too big to fail. Company stock was a pillar of British public credit and was held by around 40 percent of the members of the House of Commons. In 1773 the state advanced the East India Company £1.4 million, and then, casting about for some way to help it earn the money back, hit on the unsold tea sitting in its London warehouses. The Tea Act let the company ship it directly to America, undercutting the colonial merchants who had handled the trade.

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That December, men in Boston threw tea into the harbor. One of the principal fears of the American patriots in the run-up to the American Revolution was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

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Within three years, America declared independence.

This is how a corporation crosses the line from doing business with a state to becoming inseparable from it; how the state, once the corporation is large enough, finds itself legislating on the company’s behalf; and how the bill, when it arrives, is paid by the country rather than the shareholders. The government, under Prime Minister Frederick North, did not set out to lose America. It set out to keep a company solvent. The results were catastrophic for the British state and did much to diminish its power.

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The lesson of the East India Company is not only that corporations can behave monstrously abroad. It is that they can flex their powers at home, too.

Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
By Anthony Ha

At one point, you say the rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights, and it’s “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” Can you just say a little bit more about why you see it in such stark terms?

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I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well intentioned; they originate with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. And then, I think, only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation-state.

And that’s not my speculation. You hear a lot of a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation-state. […] A lot of futurists in the ’90s were libertarians, and they had a specific interest in using the advance of the internet and the successive innovations that followed as a means to eradicate the nation-state.

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I’m a historian. I’m not a tech writer. I’m not a tech journalist. I’m not a computer scientist. I’m a historian, and I’m chiefly a political historian, though I’m also a literary historian. And so, one of the things that I’m really interested in unraveling for readers in this book is all the what-ifs, all the alternatives, the paths along the road that were not taken and why.

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So to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]. Apple was really big on the idea that mainframe computers represented totalitarianism. They were trying to dismantle the giant gray IBM machines, as in representing them in that ad as a totalitarian state. And the lithe, beautiful, quick, adorable, personal Macintosh would be the ax that would destroy that machine and would usher in a new era in which “1984 would not be ‘1984.’”

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But if you wind the reel forward in time, down to 2026 — stops along the way include the 2016 election when Facebook News, in response to its critics, establishes a Supreme Court. You get to last year, when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution. You get to recently, when Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and said [in response to a question from Rogan], “Oh, an AI president would be a great idea.”

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They’re not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it’s like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously. And these companies have so much power.

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To what extent should we just dismiss all these claims out of hand, or are there ways that it might come true?

I mean, Twitter is actually a good example, right? When it was launched, when Jack Dorsey started it, it didn’t announce itself as, “We’re going to save humanity, we’re going to rescue human civilization from extinction.” It was kind of a goof, and I think people that used Twitter really early on were like, “You know what? It was actually really fun.” It was like, “I made a tuna fish sandwich today. What did you have for lunch?” Twitter as a company did not launch itself on a stage saying, “We’re here to save democracy.”

And really, what happened was that politicians, elected officials began using Twitter in ways that enhanced their political power, in ways that amplified their messages, in ways that allowed them to reach a younger audience, in ways that allowed them to have a constant connection with an audience. Politicians and political campaigns really kind of convinced Twitter — at least insofar as I see them, I don’t have an inside account of the company — but somewhat begrudgingly, Twitter came around to like, “Twitter’s gotten so big, and people post about politics so often that it’s almost like Twitter is a town hall.”

By the time you get to, I think it’s 2012 — many years into Twitter’s fairly short history — they publish this thing called the Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook, which is really a guide for political candidates and elected officials and how to most effectively use Twitter. And then they begin the rollout of, “It’s a town hall in your pocket, and it’s improving our democracies because we’re restoring the defunct New England town meeting,” and that’s all just bananas.

Objectively, nothing could be further from the truth. At that time, one in five Americans had a Twitter account. Most people who had Twitter accounts had never used them, and above 90% of all tweets about politics were posted by fewer than 10% of the people that did use Twitter all the time. There was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate. Twitter was a representation of the most extreme, politically active, hyper-partisan among Americans, who were following politics really avidly. Looking at it now, we can see, “Well, that’s really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they’re getting really bad information.”

Again, you can say Twitter was not trying to participate in the artificial state or undermine democracy. Twitter is trying to do business and get more users and sell more whatever. But it had these unintended consequences that then it sort of settles into and becomes comfortable with.

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You also say, repeatedly, that the artificial state in its current form is incomplete and doomed to failure. Why is it doomed to failure?

This is something that’s foreseen in all the science fiction that I discuss.

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That’s generally the tension in these stories. It’s between the artificial state and the natural world. To erect an artificial state and rule humans within it, you must alienate them from the natural world because you are destroying it. The artificial state will destroy the natural world, and yet it needs the resources of the natural world to run.

So, it is doomed in the sense that there is not a possibility that the natural world, a habitable planet — habitable for humans — can survive the full construction and reliance on the devices of the artificial state.

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Like you said, you’re a historian, not a politician or a futurist. But what do you think the defeat of the artificial state looks like? Is it basically just dismantling all these companies, tearing down the data centers? Or is there a future that’s more about bringing it under control?

I mean, I don’t have a playbook here, except for the recommendation that we live in a democracy where decisions have to be made in consultation with the governed, and these decisions are not popular.

You see this in all the little data center crises, town to town, county to county, state to state — which are partly a consequence of the decline of local newspapers and the destruction of journalism that has been one of the many consequences of social media, and in the case of Zuckerberg, I think a somewhat intentional consequence.

What you see is a lot of people show up at these town meetings and say, “We don’t even have housing. We don’t have healthcare. We don’t have jobs. Who said we’re building this data center? I need to know a lot more about it. I need to know what its energy costs are going to be. Tell me about the water consumption. Are there going to be jobs? Are the jobs going to be long lasting? Are they just going to be for six months? What’s going to happen to the egrets that live in this area?” Whatever it is that people want to know.

More and more, you see people are — like in the Salt Lake example, where well over 70% of the people really were opposed to this data center, and their representatives supported it. That’s not representing the people. I think there are political costs, and we’ll begin to see those at elections.

Or maybe we won’t. Enough of democratic functioning has to be intact for people to actually be able to respond to malfeasance on the part of their representatives.

The Data Center Backlash Is a Rare Bright Spot in American Politics
By Matt Ford

A certain segment of American elites has recently realized that people don’t like AI, data centers, and the Silicon Valley oligarchy that is foisting these things upon this country.

One of the many blinking red lights for the AI industry came in the form of a Gallup survey in May. It found that a whopping 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers in their communities to support the AI industry, with 48 percent of those polled saying they were strongly opposed. For comparison, Gallup noted that the peak opposition to nuclear power plants in one of its long-running surveys was only 63 percent.

Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported earlier this month that his own outlet’s survey found an extraordinary depth and breadth to public opposition to AI data centers. “Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats,” he wrote. “Notably, local data centers are 63 points underwater with rural voters, a group that has skewed more Republican over the past decade.” In an age of hyperpartisanship, there’s something almost comforting about how many people, from all walks of life, hate AI.

This opposition has translated into electoral blowback for AI companies and data center proponents. In Utah, longtime state Senate President J. Stuart Adams lost his seat in a Republican primary in June over local opposition to a planned sprawling complex that would’ve transformed 40,000 acres in a rural county into the nation’s largest data center. Residents in Virginia, the world’s largest hub of data center infrastructure, and nearby Maryland have also ousted local officials over their support for the proposals.

Leaders in blue, purple, and red states are now scrambling to impose moratoriums and audits on future construction.

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After the 2024 election, there was a palpable sense in elite tech circles that they had somehow permanently solved politics—that their newfound alliance with the MAGA movement would supercharge a new golden age for the U.S. tech industry, making all of them important and influential and fabulously wealthy. What they are experiencing now is a blunt, painful reminder that 340 million other people live in this country along with the oligarchs, and they still get a say in how things work for now.

To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’
By Lora Kelley

The relationship between mind and machine has long fascinated philosophers and scientists, who have likened the human brain to clocks, chronometers and, in more recent decades, computers. In the early days of artificial intelligence, academics referred cheekily to humans as “meat machines.”

Lately this framing has trickled into the vernacular of tech executives. Elon Musk posted on social media last summer, “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”

Andrej Karpathy, an A.I. executive and a founder of OpenAI, wrote in a widely read post that “A.I. research used to be done by meat computers in between eating, sleeping, having other fun, and synchronizing once in a while using sound wave interconnect in the ritual of ‘group meeting.’

“That era is long gone.”

Larry Ellison, a co-founder and the executive chairman of Oracle, said in a 2025 event: “The brain is very specialized. So are the A.I. models. But we’re not building a 20-watt meat computer. We’re building a 1.2 billion-watt A.I. brain.”

This comparison of human and machine — and the suggestion that non-meat computers are superior — has not landed well with a public anxious about the A.I. future. It fits into a broader trend in which executives pit humans against robots and conclude that humans don’t quite measure up. When Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in February that, while it takes electricity to train chatbots, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” media outlets and social media users jumped on the comments as misanthropic and even dystopian.

MACHINE POLITICS
By Fred Turner (PDF, 306KB)

In the years before the Second World War, Americans were mystified as to how Germany, one of the most sophisticated nations in Europe, had tumbled down the dark hole of National Socialism. Today we’d likely blame Hitler’s rise on the economic chaos and political infighting of the Weimar era. But at the time, many blamed mass media.

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Toward the end of the decade, President Roosevelt began searching for ways to urge Americans to take a unified stand against fascism. Given the rise of right-wing fervor in the United States at the time, he had reason to worry. The racism and anti-Semitism that characterized Nazi Germany also characterized much of American life. By 1938, millions of Americans listened weekly as Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic demagogue, celebrated the rise of fascism and decried the existence of the Jews. Thousands of American fascists banded together in groups with names like the Silver Legion of America and the Crusader White Shirts. The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, a 25,000-member pro-Nazi organization commonly known as the Bund, ran a summer camp on Long Island called Camp Siegfried, where young men marched in Nazi-style uniforms as their friends and families cheered. On February 20, 1939, the Bund brought more than 22,000 Americans to New York’s Madison Square Garden to welcome fascism to American shores. When they gathered, a huge banner hung over their heads: STOP JEWISH DOMINATION OF CHRISTIAN AMERICANS!

As the United States geared up for war, its leaders faced a quandary: they wanted to use media to unite Americans against their enemies, but many also feared that using mass media to do it would transform Americans into just the kind of authoritarians they were trying to defeat. Roosevelt’s cabinet sought advice from a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Committee for National Morale.

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The Committee began by defining national morale in terms of what they called the democratic personality. Members of the Committee joined many American intellectuals in subscribing to the views of the anthropologist Franz Boas, who believed that cultures shape the personalities of their members in predictable ways. Germans, they thought, tended toward rigidity and an affection for authority, hence Hitler’s famously bureaucratic Nazi regime was a natural extension of the German character. Americans were more open, individualistic, expressive, collaborative, and tolerant, and so more at home in loose coalitions. Whatever kind of propaganda medium the Committee promoted would need to preserve the individuality of American citizens.

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The first electronic computer would not be unveiled until 1946, and the internet was still decades away. Yet the Committee’s vision became central to how we think about computers today when several of its members began to collaborate with a mathematician named Norbert Wiener. In the first years of the war, Wiener and his MIT colleagues were trying to design a more accurate antiaircraft defense system.

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Wiener’s antiaircraft predictor never worked on the battlefield. But his insight that the behavior of both machines and human beings could be represented through computation became a founding principle of computer science. In 1946, it also became a founding principle of a new political vision. That year, Wiener and members of his scientific community traveled to New York to meet with a group of sociologists and psychologists, Mead and Bateson of the Committee for National Morale prominent among them. Together, the social and laboratory scientists began to outline a vision of a liberal world modeled and managed by computers, a vision that they would develop over the next seven years, and that would become one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century: cybernetics.

In 1950, Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, an enormously popular introduction to the new field that argued that modern society operated through a series of information exchanges, just like the antiaircraft predictor. Reporters and social scientists gathered data; intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians processed it; and, ultimately, the systems they controlled took action. When working properly, such a process would naturally tend toward equilibrium—that is, social order. And computers, Wiener argued, could help improve the flow of information by supplying decision-makers with better data faster. “Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government . . . prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return,” wrote Wiener. The solution to totalitarianism, he argued, was to recognize the world as a system of leveled, distributed communication that could be modeled and managed by computers. The proper way to achieve the Committee’s vision and democratize society, his argument implied, was to take power away from politicians and put it in the hands of engineers.

Wiener’s writings fired the imaginations of an unlikely group of young Americans, members of the Sixties counterculture who would go on to have an outsized impact on the computer industry. Between 1965 and 1973, as many as 750,000 Americans left their apartments and suburban houses and created new collective communities. A few of these communes were religious, but most were secular gatherings of white, middle- and upper-middle-class young people seeking to leave mainstream America behind. In northern California, refugees from Haight-Ashbury migrated north, to the woods of Mendocino, and east, to the high plains of Colorado and the mountains of New Mexico. Some even set up shop in the hills around Stanford University, overlooking what we now call Silicon Valley.

Elsewhere I’ve called this generation of pilgrims the “New Communalists” to distinguish them from members of the New Left, with whom they often disagreed. Unlike the young dissidents who formed parties and wrote manifestos, the New Communalists hoped to do away with politics entirely.

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Many agreed with Charles Reich when he wrote in his 1970 bestseller, The Greening of America, that industrial society offered “a robot life, in which man is deprived of his own being, and he becomes instead a mere role, occupation, or function.” According to Reich, the solution was to cultivate a new consciousness of one’s own desires and needs, of the connections between one’s body, one’s mind, and the natural world. Such a consciousness, he explained, could become the foundation of a new kind of society, one that would be nonhierarchical and collaborative.

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The New Communalists eschewed what Reich called the “machine world” of tanks and bombs and the industrial bureaucracies that produced them. The rule-bound hierarchies of the corporation and the state, they thought, alienated their members from their own feelings and turned them into the kind of buttoned- down apparatchiks who could launch a nuclear war. Even so, the New Communalists embraced small technologies that they hoped would help them live as independent citizens within the kind of universe that Wiener and the Committee had described, a universe in which all things were interlinked by information.

The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog”
By Anna Wiener

In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog”: a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue’s first edition.

At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the “Whole Earth Catalog” offered a vision for a new social order—one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools.

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The spirit of the catalogue—its irreverence toward institutions, its emphasis on autodidacticism, and its sunny view of computers as tools for personal liberation––appeals to a younger generation of technologists. Brand himself has become a regional icon, a sort of human Venn diagram, celebrated for bridging the hippie counterculture and the nascent personal-computer industry. In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs described the “Whole Earth Catalog” as “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.”

Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy
By Fred Turner (PDF, 284KB)

Given the anticommercial bent of the back-to-the-land movement, it might seem strange that its members should find their community mirrored in the pages of a catalog—a preeminently commercial information genre.

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While its pages did display products, the Catalog did not profit by selling those products to readers. On the contrary, it made its money in large part by selling its readers’ product suggestions, reviews, and letters to other readers, and its core readership’s collective worldview to outsiders. When readers reviewed products in the pages of the Catalog they introduced other readers not only to new goods but also to ways of thinking and speaking—about technology, commerce, information, and community in particular. When Brand began publishing a quarterly supplement to the Catalog in 1969 he also developed a correspondence section, in which readers wrote to one another. In both the Catalog and the supplement, Brand marketed not so much goods as a way of looking at how life ought to be lived.

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Such a network forum accorded well with countercultural ideals regarding the relationship of technology to social life. In the late 1960s, young,predominantly white,middle-class college students developed two distinct, if sometimes overlapping, social movements within which they could challenge mainstream bureaucracies. The first grew out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley and would become known as the New Left. The second bubbled up from a wide variety of cold war–era cultural springs, including beat poetry and fiction, Zen Buddhism, action painting, and, by the mid-1960s, encounters with psychedelic drugs.Across the 1960s, this second movement would often be called simply “the counterculture.”

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Many members of the counterculture … stepped away from agonistic politics and sought instead to change the world by establishing new, exemplary communities from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration. For this group, whom I will call the New Communalists, as for many others in the counterculture, the key to social transformation lay not in changing a political regime but in changing the consciousness of individuals.

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At the 1966 Trips Festival that Brand helped organize, for instance, audience members decked out in Day Glo paint danced and saw their dancing broadcast in real time on a series of closed circuit televisions. Five slide projectors splashed images on the wall; light machines scanned the room. Two bands played, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and The Holding Company. Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Dead,recalls the feeling that characterized the early Acid Tests and the Trips Festival:“Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a room of thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.”

At the Acid Tests, and elsewhere throughout the New Communalist movement, ecstatic communion became a form of alternative politics. If the “straight” world was organized into parties and managed hierarchically, and if, in their competition with one another, those parties had brought us Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and widespread pollution, then the “hip”world would choose a different path.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Whole Earth Catalog took the tribal, antihierarchical politics of the New Communalist movement, as well as its celebration of disembodied, spiritual unity, and embodied them in a paper-and-ink publication.

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On the inside cover of every edition of the Catalog, Brand defined its purpose thus:“We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.”

Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner
By Mike Holderness

Brand moved on. In 1984 he helped initiate the first Hacker’s Conference, which worked to create an identity for hackers as anti-authoritarian people who make computers do interesting, not malicious, things. A year later he co-founded the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL, an early and influential online discussion forum and social network. For him, personal computers would usher in an age of plenty, and of direct democracy.

Spacewar
By Stewart Brand

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers–Threat or Menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.

The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

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October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI’s PDP-10 computer.

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The setting and decor at AI is Modern Mad Scientist–long hallways and cubicles and large windowless rooms, brutal fluorescent light, enormous machines humming and clattering, robots on wheels, scurrying arcane technicians. And, also, posters and announcements against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, computer print-out photos of girlfriends, a hallway-long banner SOLVING TODAY’S PROBLEMS TOMORROW and signs on every door in Tolkien’s elvish Feanorian script–the director’s office is Imladris, the coffee room The Prancing Pony, the computer room Mordor. There’s a lot of hair on those technicians, and nobody seems to be telling them where to scurry.

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I’m guessing that Alan Kay at Xerox Research Center (more on them shortly) has a line on it, defining the standard Computer Bum:

“About as straight as you’d expect hotrodders to look. It’s that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship … They’re kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.”

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Alan Kay: “The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.”

The first opportunity was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Electrical Engineering Department back in 1961-1962. The earliest mini-computer, Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-1, was installed in the kludge room with a cathode ray tube display hooked on. (“Kludge”–any lash-up often involving chewing gum, paper dips, scotch tape; it works if no one trips over a wire; unadaptable; a working mess.) There it was that Steve Russell and his fellow hackers Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards introduced Spacewar to the world.

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“We had this brand new PDP-l,” Steve Russell recalls. “It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display, [There had been CRT displays before, but primarily in the Air Defense System.] Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships.”

Naturally?

“I had just finished reading Doc Smith’s Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers.”

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Within weeks of its invention Spacewar was spreading across the country to other computer research centers, who began adding their own wrinkles.

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John Lilly (of dolphin, acid, and bio-computer fame) tells a story that IBM once forbade the playing of Spacewar by IBM researchers. After a few suddenly uncreative months of joyless research the ban was rescinded. Apparently, frivolous Spacewar had been the medium of important experiments. (In every computer-business story I’ve ever heard, IBM invariably plays the heavy.)

Les Earnest at AI confirms the moral. For instance, at his lab the ingenious device for handling interactive graphics on the time-shared computer is called, “Spacewar Mode” in honor of its origin.

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ARPA

The letters stand for Advanced Research Projects Agency, one of the rare success stories of Government action. Poetically enough it owes its origin to real spacewar. After Russia’s Sputnik humiliated the US in the middle of the Fifties, America came back hard with the Mercury Program, John Glenn and all that, crash-funded through a new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense – ARPA.

When the US space program was moved out of the military to become NASA, ARPA was left with a lot of funding momentum and not much program. Into this vacuum stepped J.C.R. Licklider among others, with the suggestion that since the Defense Department was the world’s largest user of computers, it would do well to support large-scale basic research in computer science. It was ARPA’s policy in those days that basic research be neither secret nor limited to military purposes, which boded well for exploration in an information-medium like computers.

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The beauty was, that being at the very top of the Defense Establishment, the agency had little Congressional scrutiny had little bureaucratic responsibility, able to take creative chances and protect long-term deep-goal projects. Alan Kay: “90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low. The basic ARPA idea is that you find good people and you give them a lot of money and then you step back. If they don’t do good things in three years they get dropped–where ‘good’ is very much related to new or interesting.”

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One of the accomplishments of ARPA-funded research during this time was time-sharing, Time-sharing is a routing technique that allows a large number of users to sit down “on-line” with a computer as if each were all alone with it. Naturally, timesharing was of no interest to computer manufacturers like IBM since it meant drastically more efficient use of their hardware, and they were still a long way from saturating their market with old technology. Only after ARPA had developed time-sharing and its research-center market in the mid-Sixties did the manufacturers adopt the innovation and make it available to the rest of us. There’s a political/economic moral in this story somewhere; I think it has to do with the benefits of variant parallel systems.

ARPA is a rare but not completely isolated instance of enlightened government research. For years the Office of Naval Research funded the most outstanding work in pure mathematics without any hope of benefits for warmaking.

In 1969 the political climate at ARPA changed with the passing into law of the Mansfield Amendment, which required that military-funded research serve only clearly military goals and answer to Congress on the matter. In other words, the Defense Department was forbidden to try to obsolesce itself. Bob Taylor departed ARPA.

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The western pole of the U.S. electronics research and manufacturing axis is the San Francisco Peninsula; the eastern end is Boston’s Route 128. The tilt of talent is westward.

Xerox Research Center is an idyll, a new building high on an oak-savannahed golden foothill in Stanford’s industrial park in Palo Alto, California, a blue-skied shimmery threatless landscape.

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Alan Kay, 32, child prodigy (National Quiz Kid at ten), former musician and artist, worked with Ivan Sutherland and Dave Evans at Utah, presently a researcher at Xerox. Alan shifts comfortably in his office bean-bag chair and appraises his colleagues. “This is really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all have track records and are used to dealing lightning with both hands.”

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Freedom to explore in the company of talent is an irresistible lure. In two years Xerox had twenty of the best men around working. Toward what? Well, whatever.

I ask Bob Taylor about his position at Xerox. “It’s not very sharply defined. You could call me a research planner.” He’s Texas born, trained in experimental psychology, soft-spoken. Where Alan Kay would summarize one of Taylor’s papers with the statement “Economy of scale is one of the biggest frauds ever invented,” Taylor will respond to a question about the economics of massive operations like huge computer complexes with a long look, a puff of pipe smoke, and a remark that “the benefits are less than claimed.”

And that is the general bent of research at Xerox, soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.

In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console–affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to “fly” formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it’s changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend’s file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.

That’s for grownups. Alan Kay is more interested in us kids He repudiates the manipulative arrogance of “Computer-Aided Instruction” and serves the dictum of Seymour Papert, Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?

Alan is designing a hand-held stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called “Dynabook.” It’s mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third and various cassette- loading slots, optional hook-up plugs, etc.

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Peter Deutsch comments: “Processors and memories are getting smaller and cheaper. Five years ago the idea of the Dynabook would have been a absolutely ridiculous. Now it merely seems difficult … The emergence of computers into society at large has come from a completely different quarter than you’d expect, namely the small calculating machine manufacturers. The current ultimate step in that direction is the Hewlett-Packard Pocket Calculator. They sell for $400, and they’re essentially a small computer with no program and very little storage. Wang Laboratories makes calculators which are really computers in all but name–they’re programmable; they have lots of storage. … But still these things only reach thousands of people, not millions. They’ll reach millions when computer power becomes like telephone power. … I think it’s important to bring computing to the people.”

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Until computers come to the people we will have no real idea of their most natural functions. Up to the present their cost and size has kept them in the province of rich and powerful institutions, who, understandably, have developed them primarily as bookkeeping, sorting and control devices. The computers have been a priceless aid in keeping the lid on top-down organization. They are splendidly impressive as oracles of (programmable) Truth, the lofty voice of unchangeable authority.

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Part of the grotesqueness of American life in these latter days is a subservience to Plan that amounts to panic. What we don’t intend shouldn’t happen. What happens anyway is either blamed on our enemies or baldly ignored. In our arrogance we close our ears to voices not our rational own, we routinely reject the princely gifts of spontaneous generation.

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In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spacewar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome.

The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners.

Stewart Brand Recalls First ‘Spacewar’ Video Game Tournament
By Chris Baker

The first video game tournament was held on October 19th, 1972. Competitors gathered at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in Los Altos, California to do battle in the sci-fi rocket combat game Spacewar. At the time, the lab was one of the only a handful of locales in the world with hardware sophisticated enough to run it.

The event was put together by Stewart Brand, best known today for his leadership of the Long Now Foundation, but then a 33 year-old writer and editor who was in the midst of working on a magazine feature story for Rolling Stone. The story was about the tremendous potential of computers to unleash creativity and change society. And as far as Brand was concerned, nothing seemed to embody that potential more than video games.

His epic 9,000-word feature ran in a December 1972 issue of the magazine, between a cover story about Carlos Santana and an advertisement for The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana. Brand was credited in the story as the magazine’s “sports reporter,” and he presented the world’s first esports event to readers as a pulse-pounding spectacle. He also celebrated the skill of the players as if they were star athletes, dubbing them “those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology.”

In October of 1972, not many people even knew that video games existed – the first Pong machine would not be installed until six weeks after the tournament was held. The select few who did play games never could have imagined that the medium would become a lucrative spectator sport. “It may seem extraordinary that you can now fill arenas with people who want to watch videogames,” says Brand. “But it’s a perfectly reasonable outcome of what you could already see in 1972.”

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Brand had something of a knack for staging epochal cultural happenings. In 1966, he co-produced the infamous Trips Festival with Ken Kesey. Thousands of hippies attended this three day event in San Francisco to listen to psychedelic rock and drink punch dosed with LSD. He figures heavily in Tom Wolfe’s countercultural touchstone The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. (Brand also made a cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s counterculture touchstone The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – he’s the guy driving the pickup truck, wearing a white butcher’s coat and necktie but no shirt.)

Brand was equally tuned in to the technological revolution that was rocking the Bay Area at the time. “I discovered that drugs were less interesting than computers as a way to expand your consciousness,” he says.

In 1968, Brand helped the inventor Doug Engelbart orchestrate a presentation at a computer conference that has come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart demonstrated video conferencing, the computer mouse, email, hypertext, word processing and a windows-based organizational structure. Basically, he predicted most of the elements of the modern personal computer and the modern workplace.

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Whenever Brand had visited computer labs at universities and research institutions around the country, there was one constant. “There were always some young engineers gathered around the computer blasting away at this game Spacewar.“

The depth of their engagement with the game astonished Brand. “I saw them having some kind of out-of-body experience,” he says. “Their brains and their fingers were fully engaged. There was an athletic exuberance to their joyous mutual slaying. I’d never seen anything like that.”

Spacewar had been kicking around for a decade by the time Brand staged his competition.

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In the 1960s, the most affordable computers were still extremely expensive – the equivalent of a million dollars or more today. Time on those computers was precious. Yet Spacewar was still passed around or reverse-engineered on computers across the country, and new features gradually accrued.

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In late 1972, the implementation of Spacewar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab may well have been the most ambitious video game in existence.

…

Ralph Gorin, the head system programmer at the lab who would go on to create the first spellchecker, designed a souped-up version of the game that took full advantage of their next-generation hardware.

Gorin’s version added space mines, and the option of partial damage rather than one-hit kills. But more importantly, it could accommodate five simultaneous players and allowed for an audience. This allowed for the sort of chaotic kill-crazy free-for-alls we associate with Quake LAN party deathmatches. It also allowed for an audience.

Brand was writing a feature story that he hoped would introduce the world to hacker culture and the interesting things people were doing with computers. Five-player Spacewar at the Stanford AI Lab seemed like the perfect illustration of that. He convinced Les Earnest, the executive officer at the lab, to shut it down for an evening and invite students and researchers to come attended the First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics. There would be snacks and beer.

Bruce Baumgart first encountered Spacewar in the late 1960s, when he was studying applied mathematics at Harvard. The game’s visuals were what most impressed him. The backdrop looks like arbitrary dots, but it’s actually an accurate depiction of every star in the night sky above a certain magnitude of brightness.“The starfield was the real star of that game,” says Baumgart.

Baumgart came to Stanford AI Lab to do his grad work on geometric modelling for computer vision – basically, eyesight for mobile robots. Scores of researchers were jockeying for time on the lab’s computer, and he adopted a Morlock lifestyle so he’d have easier access. “I would sleep during the day, roll in at night, and work for 12 hours,” he says.

Baumgart became one of the best Spacewar players at Stanford. “Pretty soon, you don’t think about the buttons,” he says. “It’s like speed typing – you just look at ships on the screen and make them move where you need them to go.”

He began handicapping himself to make matches more of a challenge. Like Inigo Montoya, he would play with the controller in his non-dominant hand to give less experienced opponents a sporting chance. He even mastered steering two ships simultaneously, with a controller in each fist

…

On the night of the competition, Brand arrived at the Stanford AI Lab with Rolling Stone staff photographer Annie Leibovitz. “This all must have been very strange to her, but she got really good pictures of people in the scene,” he says. The students and researchers excitedly led her around, showing off their bleeding edge technological creations like schoolkids on parents night. There was a robot arm that could actually see the things it was picking up, computer programs that could play music, and a six foot rack of equipment attached to a video camera that they used to capture a digital image of Leibovitz herself. “This was years before Kodak claimed to have created the first digital camera,” says Baumgart.

…

The final match began, and Brand could tell that this spectacle he had orchestrated would be worth immortalizing. “Five players sitting next to each other yelling and banging away on their buttons added a nice sort of physical violence to the onscreen violence that was going on,” he explains.

Baumgart’s unorthodox two-fisted training regimen was serving him well. So was the excitement of the crowd. The denizens of the lab had occasionally mustered enough participants for a five-player match before, but never had a match played out in front of spectators like this. “You had a gallery watching,” he says. “There was laughter, cheering, applause.”

Baumgart won, with what Brand described in his article as “a powerhouse performance.” Leibovitz’s camera captures him in his moment of triumph, with a grin that threatens to split his face in half, brandishing the controller like Aragorn holding his sword Andúril aloft after the Battle of Black Gate.

He was the Intergalactic Spacewar Champion of 1972.

Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park
By Dave Farquhar

The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of technically minded electronic enthusiasts and hobbyists. They gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information about building your own personal computing devices. Gordon French and Fred Moore founded the group. They both wanted a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.

The first meeting of the club occurred March 5, 1975, in French’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The subject of the meeting was the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, and a review unit was present at the meeting. Steve Wozniak credits that first meeting as the inspiration to design the Apple I. The second meeting occurred at Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California. Subsequent meetings occurred at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), until 1978. In 1978, meetings moved to the Stanford Medical School.

After the more formal meetings, the participants often reconvened for an informal, late night swap meet in the parking lot of the Safeway store down the road. SLAC campus rules prohibited such activity on campus property. Others, at the suggestion of Roger Melen, convened at The Oasis, nearby a bar and grill. There they continued talking and collaborating. The Oasis closed on March 7, 2018, due to unaffordable rent. Its Menlo Park building is a historical landmark and in 2019 the building became home to a venture capital firm, Pear VC.

Apple’s 40-year legacy began with this ‘Eureka’ moment
By Jessica Dolcourt

You may know Steve Wozniak as the nerdy sidekick behind Apple’s late co-founder and charismatic leader, Steve Jobs. But without “Woz,” there would be no Apple.

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In 1975, when Homebrew formed, computers of the era filled half a room and you had to be part of a university, military or think tank to use one for a few hours at a time.

Having a computer for your own, anytime-use, was a radical thought and technological challenge. Like now, a personal computer then meant extraordinary freedom: of information, of higher mathematical power (the “computing” part), of exchanging ideas.

Computers then weren’t just nerdy; they were also a political emblem that, for some, echoed the protests of 1960s and 70s social liberation movements. A year before Homebrew formed, a book called “Computer Lib” envisioned personal computers as emblems of social freedom, proclaiming “Computer power to the people!”

Woz’s interest may or may not have been more technical, but he was well aware that the idea of a personal computer could change the world.

“I intended to blow [Homebrew members] away with how so few and affordable chips could make a computer,” Woz said in an email to CNET. “I figured that all these people who spoke about changing society [through communication and education] would build their own for $300.”

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Question: You attended the Homebrew Computer Club’s very first meeting on March 5, 1975. What drew you to the club?

Frankly, it was a stroke of luck for me. I didn’t know what the club was really about. I was not aware of the Altair 8800 at all [the first personal computer, which sold to hobbyists in a kit]. I was not into the general microprocessors that made such machines possible. I had played with early microprocessor data sheets (4004 from Intel), and it was too limited to lead to a useful computer, but I had not kept up with microprocessors after that. My friend Allen Baum knew that I had built a home terminal with a keyboard and using my own TV to dial up and access the ARPAnet when there were only about six universities on it.

Allen called and told me about a club that was into video terminals and the like. I figured that I’d take mine and be some sort of star there. I was also not aware that there had been another TV Terminal project in this hobby community, by Don Lancaster, and featured in Popular Electronics. But my design was very good.

At the club the talk was about the Altair 8800, using the 8800 microprocessor. I felt shy and out of place, not knowing that this was the driving sentiment of these hobbyists. Nonetheless, it was a meeting that grabbed my attention for life. It was a Eureka moment for me.

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The Apple I was your baby, your pet project. What did it mean to you to have built this computer in a time when micro-computers were strictly a hobbyist activity?

I’d been at the ‘build-it-yourself’ processor stage of the hobbyists for a long time. But I worked at HP [Hewlett-Packard] on calculators. Our calculators had a custom processor. When you turned the calculator on it began running a program that looked at what keys you pressed. That led me to the idea that my computer would start up running a small program that let you type data in, saving the entire front panel of switches and lights, which my Cream Soda computer (five years prior) had sported. This was the “voila” step. I wanted a computer as normal and human to use as a typewriter or calculator.

Once I had my design built and working, I brought it to the club. I was shy, but communicated with my technical projects, just like many “makers” do. I intended to blow them away with how so few and affordable chips could make a computer that could run a programming language without a lot of other expense or surplus connections.

I even passed out my design, hardware and software, for free without any copyright or company intent. I figured that all these people who spoke about changing society (communication, education, importance of geeks) would build their own for $300 cost. Few took me up on that, maybe only one.

The formula for the personal computer was out to anyone looking over my shoulder. Others would have hit on it eventually, but I was first in this sense of an affordable useful computer that worked for normal people. Every computer before this one had a front panel with switches and lights. Every computer after this one had a keyboard and video display.

Steve Jobs was in another state and wasn’t even aware of this computer until he came into town and I took him to the club to see what it was all about.

What happened at the Homebrew Computer Club 50 years ago: Apple was born, and a revolution began
By Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Woz later recalled: “Without computer clubs there would probably be no Apple computers. Our club in the Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, was among the first of its kind. It was in early 1975, and a lot of tech-type people would gather and trade integrated circuits back and forth. You could have called it Chips and Dips. We had similar interests and we were there to help other people, but we weren’t official and we weren’t formal.”

Liza Loop, the first woman member of the club recalled: “Two things made the (club) so successful. One was where it was, because it was in Silicon Valley…The other thing was the California counter-culture which encouraged the free exchange of ideas.”

Woz was shy: “I only talked about the newest feature in the Apple 1.” Fellow founding Homebrew member Lee Felsenstein, however, remembered how at later meetings, Wozniak “staked out the only seat with a power outlet.”

Felsenstein would later design the Osborne computer in 1981. The Osborne, which ran CP/M-80, was the first portable “luggable” computer. At the meetings, Felsenstein would, Woz reminisced, “get up at every meeting and announce the convening of ‘the Homebrew Computer Club which does not exist’ and everyone would applaud happily.”

Unlike Silicon Valley today, this was an informal group and not money-driven. That emphasis would change.

Woz wrote: “The Apple I and II were designed strictly on a hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company. They were meant to bring down to the club and put on the table during the random access period, and demonstrate: Look at this, it uses very few chips. It’s got a video screen. You can type stuff on it. Personal computer keyboards and video screens were not well established then. There was a lot of showing off to other members of the club. Schematics of the Apple I were passed around freely, and I’d even go over to people’s houses and help them build their own.”

Jobs, however, had other ideas. Woz said: ” Steve wanted to have a successful product, go out and start selling it, and make some money. He also had excellent product ideas for the upcoming home personal computer.” Well, that certainly turned out to be true.

Another well-known computer figure, Bill Gates, wasn’t keen on the Homebrew crew’s free and open attitude about software and hardware. Although he was not a member, Gates, who was then going by the name ‘William Henry Gates III’, published an article, “Open Letter to Hobbyists“, in the Homebrew Computer Club’s newsletter.

Gates, who then lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had released his first commercial program, Altair BASIC. He objected to people using his software without paying for it: “Most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape, and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”

So, as you can see, the battle between proprietary and open-source software approaches dates to the start of personal computing.

The Homebrew Computer Club’s influence extended far beyond Apple. Many other successful tech entrepreneurs and companies in the early PC days trace their roots back to the club.

Besides Apple and Osborne, Cromemco, a builder of high-end Z80-based S-100 bus computers and peripherals, got its start from club meetings. Bob Marsh, founder of Processor Technology, also started at the club. Processor Technology created 4K memory boards for the Altair and then introduced the Sol-20, the first fully assembled PC. Finally, the IMSAI 8080, an Altair clone, sprang from the club.

The IMSAI 8080 was also the first microcomputer I got my hands on. The kit cost $439 in 1975, which is $2,805 in 2025, so I couldn’t afford one. Even so, many of you likely have seen the IMSAI in action. That’s because the device was the computer used in WarGames, an early hacker film starring Matthew Broderick.

The club’s legacy isn’t just about the companies it spawned but also about the culture it fostered. The club played a pivotal role in democratizing access to computers and showed that these machines could be personal tools, not just devices for large corporations or research institutions.

Remembering Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl Ad
By Eric S. Hintz

In 1983, the personal computing market was up for grabs. Apple was selling its Apple II like hotcakes but was facing increasing competition from IBM’s PC and “clones” made by Compaq and Commodore. Meanwhile, Apple, led by Steve Jobs, was busy developing its new Macintosh computer. Remember that in 1983, most businesses and governments still employed large, expensive, and technically intimidating mainframes. And while the first personal computers of the early 1980s were smaller and less intimidating, they still featured black screens with green text-based commands.

Drawing inspiration from the pioneering Xerox Alto and improving on the underperforming Apple Lisa, Jobs and the Apple team built the Apple Macintosh with several revolutionary new features we now take for granted. A handheld input device called a “mouse.” A graphical user interface with overlapping “windows” and menus. Clickable pictures called “icons.” Cut-copy-paste editing. In short, Jobs and his team were creating an “insanely great” personal computer that was intuitive and easy to use—one he hoped would shake-up the PC market.

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Apple hired the Los Angeles advertising firm Chiat/Day to launch the Macintosh in early 1984; the account team was led by creative director Lee Clow, copywriter Steve Hayden, and art director Brent Thomas. The trio developed a concept inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, in which The Party, run by the all-seeing Big Brother, kept the proletariat in check with constant surveillance by the Thought Police. In the ad, IBM’s “Big Blue” would be cast as Big Brother, dominating the computer industry with its dull conformity, while Apple would re-write the book’s ending so that the Macintosh metaphorically defeats the regime. To direct the commercial, Chiat/Day hired British movie director Ridley Scott who’d perfected the cinematic look and feel of dystopian futures in Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). The 60-second mini-film was shot in one week at a production cost of about $500,000. Two hundred extras were paid $125 a day to shave their heads, march in lock-step, and listen to Big Brother’s Stalinist gibberish. Shot in dark, blue-gray hues to evoke IBM’s Big Blue, the only splashes of color were the bright red running shorts of the protagonist, an athletic young woman who sprints through the commercial carrying a sledgehammer, and Apple’s rainbow logo. The commercial never showed the actual computer, but ended with a tease: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

When shown the finished ad in late 1983, Apple’s board members hated it.

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While the ad aired during the Super Bowl on January 22, it merely pointed to Macintosh’s official debut two days later. On January 24, 1984, Apple held its annual shareholders meeting at the Flint Center auditorium on the campus of De Anza College, just a block from Apple’s offices in Cupertino, CA. After dispensing with the formalities of board votes and quarterly earnings statements, the real show began. Steve Jobs walked on stage in a double-breasted suit and bow tie and rallied the troops by tweaking his chief rival: “IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry, the entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”

Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the long road to the iPad.
By Tim Wu

Apple is a schizophrenic company, a self-professed revolutionary that is closely allied with establishment forces like the entertainment conglomerates and the telecommunications industry. To understand this contradiction we need to look back to Apple’s origins. Let’s go back to a day in 1971 when we find a bearded young college student in thick eyeglasses named Steve Wozniak hanging out at the home of Steve Jobs, then in high school. The two young men, electronics buffs, were fiddling with a crude device they’d been working on for more than a year. That day was their eureka moment: Apple’s founders had managed to hack AT&T’s long-distance network. Their invention was a “blue box” that made long-distance phone calls for free. The two men, in other words, got started by defrauding the firm that is now perhaps Apple’s most important business partner.

The anti-establishment spirit that underpinned the blue box still gives substance to the iconoclastic, outsider image Apple and Steve Jobs have long cultivated.

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But the granular truth of Apple’s origins was a bit more complicated than the simplifying imagery suggested. Even in these beginnings, there was a significant divide between the two men. There was no real parity in technical prowess: It was Wozniak, not Jobs, who had built the blue box. And it was Wozniak who conceived of and built the Apple and the Apple II …

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Wozniak’s Apple took personal computing, an obscure pursuit of the hobbyist, and made it into a culture-wide phenomenon, one that that would ultimately transform not just computing, but communications, entertainment, business—in short the whole productive part of American life. And in doing so he made the ideology he followed—”open computing”—America’s ideology. Of course, such an idea didn’t originate with Apple; it was at least as old the ideas of Man-Computer Symbiosis in the 1960s. By the 1970s, it was an orthodoxy of amateur societies, like the Bay Area’s Homebrew Computer Club, where Wozniak offered the first public demonstration of the Apple I in 1976.

Wozniak’s design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak’s machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak’s ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: “Everything we knew, you knew.” To point out that this is no longer Apple’s policy is to state the obvious.

While a computer you can modify might not sound so profound, Wozniak contemplated a nearly spiritual relationship between man and his machine. He held, simply, that machines should be open to their owners and that all power should reside in the user. That notion mattered most to geeks, but it expressed deeper ideas, too: a distrust of centralized power and a belief, embedded in silicon, that computers should be tools of freedom.

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As Wozniak told me in 2006, it was the Macintosh, launched in 1984, that marked the first departure from many of his ideas as realized in the Apple II.To be sure, the Macintosh was a radical innovation in its own right, being the first mass-produced computer to feature a “mouse” and a “desktop,” ideas born in the mind of Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s and that had persisted without fructifying in computer science labs ever since. Nevertheless the Mac represented an unconditional surrender of Wozniak’s openness, as was obvious from the first glance: There was no hood. You could no longer easily open the computer and get at its innards. And only Apple stuff, or stuff that Apple approved, could run on it (as software) or plug into it (as peripherals). Apple thus became the final arbiter over what the Macintosh was and was not, rather in the way that AT&T at one time had sole discretion over what could and could not connect to the telephone network.

Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers
By Logic(s)

Let’s start with the idea that technology is always a force for good. This strain of thought is pervasive in Silicon Valley. Where does it come from? What are its origins?

It owes its origins to 1960s communalism. A brief primer on the counterculture: there were actually two countercultures. One, the New Left, did politics to change politics. It was very much focused on institutions, and not really afraid of hierarchy.

The other—and this is where the tech world gets its mojo—is what I’ve called the New Communalists. Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.

This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.

It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.

When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.

So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.

But how were computers in particular supposed to create a world without bureaucracy or hierarchy or politics? How was information technology going to facilitate the kinds of transformations the New Communalists were looking for?

So the New Communalists failed, in a big way. By 1973, virtually all of the communes had disappeared or dissolved.

Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, most of the folks who used to be on the communes are still in the Bay Area. And the tech world is bubbling up around them. They need work, so many of them start working in the tech world.

The folks associated with the commune movement—particularly Stewart Brand and the people formerly associated with the Whole Earth Catalog—begin to reimagine computers as the tools of countercultural change that they couldn’t make work in the 1960s.

Stewart Brand actually calls computers “the new LSD.” The fantasy is that they will be tools for the transformation of consciousness—that now, finally, we’ll be able to do with the computer what we couldn’t do with LSD and communes. We’ll be able to connect people through online systems and build new infrastructure around them.

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You seem to have a certain affection—maybe affection is too strong a word, but certainly an appreciation—for the tradition that’s identified with Stewart Brand, but which also has earlier antecedents like Norbert Wiener and others.

But today, techno-utopianism—for lack of a better word—seems pretty hollowed out. It’s been weaponized by these big companies to sell products and push their agenda. It’s hard not to feel cynical about its rhetoric.

So my question is: Is there any hope for techno-utopianism? Can we salvage a piece of that original vision, or is it a line of thinking that we should try to move on from?

Any utopianism tends to be a totalizing system. It promises a total solution to problems that are always piecemeal. So the problem from my perspective isn’t the technological part of technological utopianism but the utopianism part.

Any whole-system approach doesn’t work. What I would recommend is not that we abandon technology, but that we deal with it as an integrated part of our world, and that we engage it the same way that we engage the highway system, the architecture that supports our buildings, or the way we organize hospitals.

The technologies that we’ve developed are infrastructures. … And enough magic still clings to the devices that people are very reluctant to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac.

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You mentioned John Winthrop, and in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, you discuss John Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly and the other folks who popularized the notion of the internet as an “electronic frontier.”

It certainly became a very popular metaphor in the 1990s—but how do you think it’s aged? Would it be fair to say that the electronic frontier has “closed” like the physical American one did in 1890—or was it never a satisfying metaphor to begin with?

The first thing to know about that metaphor is that it comes not only from deep American history but very specifically from the Kennedy era.

After World War II, we transform from being a bush-league country that doesn’t even have a unified highway system yet into a place that has enough abundance, enough money, and enough technology to do things like send hippies out across the country in VW buses for two years to make movies. That’s a big transformation. On the industrial and intellectual side, people like John F. Kennedy begin talking about the “New Frontier.” They promote the idea that space will be the new frontier, that technology will be the new frontier, that science will be the new frontier. And the technical world in particular becomes preoccupied with that. Those folks from the 1990s you mention are children of that world.

One of the great myths of the counterculture is that it wasn’t engaged with the military-industrial complex. That’s true of the New Left—but it’s not true of the New Communalists. The communalists were engaged with cybernetics in a big way. They bought deeply into the hope that through LSD, they would attend to new psychological frontiers and build new social frontiers.

Today, the American rhetoric of a new frontier has disappeared. Trump is about making America great again in his retrograde, macho, pseudo-fascist kind of way. Nobody thinks they live on a frontier anymore.

However, inside the tech world, there are still people microdosing with LSD. There are still people experimenting with polyamorous relationships. There are still people pursuing the intersection of consciousness change and new social structures. And those worlds are still quite tightly intertwined with the legacy of the counterculture. So although the language of the new frontier has gone, and the frontier itself has been closed off by surveillance and commerce, people who work within tech are still treating their lives as if they were frontier settlers. And that’s fascinating to watch.

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Why is the tech industry so young? And why does it put such a premium on youth? Is that also the legacy of the 1960s counterculture—the cult of youth?

The industry wasn’t young during its early days, when it was funded by the government. At first, Silicon Valley was dominated by federal funding—you had big military contractors like Texas Instruments. In the 1970s, virtually every chip that’s made gets put in a Polaris missile. There were young people, sure, but there were also career-length engineers.

The startup culture we have now only really begins in the 1980s—and with it, the project-based work style emerges. That’s when a premium starts to get placed on people who can pump out ninety hours a week and don’t have kids and also have the most recent technical training from places like Stanford and Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. That’s when youth comes pouring in.

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So do you think Silicon Valley’s obsession with youth is driven more by economic imperatives than the cultural residue of the 1960s?

Our society tends to give permission to younger people to do certain kinds of experimenting that also happen to be really valuable inside the tech world. So, for example, we give our young people permission not to get married or have kids until they’re in their mid-thirties.

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If your vision of the progress of life includes a long hiatus for your twenties, that’s great for tech firms. If you stay all night at Google, that’s great for Google. They can bring you the barber. They can bring you the restaurant. You can have your love life at the firm. Have multiple partners, they don’t care. As long as you are super flexible and committed to the firm.

“It’s an ongoing bromance”: counterculture and cyberculture in Silicon Valley. An interview with Fred Turner
By Alberto Lusoli

Alberto Lusoli (henceforth AL): … As an attentive observer of the tech industry, can you talk about the long-term impact of the collaborative research culture of 40s and 50s, and of the countercultural values of the New Left and New Communalist movements on the organization and culture of labor in tech giants and start-ups?

Fred Turner (henceforth FT): Sure, I’ll give it a try. When I wrote my book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” (2006) , people told me that I had written a book showing how the counter-culture brought us the tech world. I think that’s wrong. What I tried to do is show that the military and industrial collaborative research culture of World War II was actually incredibly flexible, loose and open, and that it helped to bring us the counter-culture. It helped us to imagine a world that could be built around shared technology, shared mind-sets, constant collaboration and constant innovation. A world in which technology and social change could be intertwined with one another.

When I was in the library at MIT, I found a collection of oral histories written by the wives of scientists who had been involved in military research at MIT during World War II. Their stories were so fascinating. They talked about living, essentially, communally. There was no private space as there were no boundaries between professions. Everybody was just trying to figure out how to win the war.

It was a proto-communal lifestyle. When we got to the 60s, and you have the commune movement being born in America, you can see the commune people, especially thanks to Stewart Brand, buying into the ideals of collaborative work and pushing the idea of scientific and technological advancement as the gateway to a better future. The New Communalists believed in the possibility of building an ‘engineered environment’ that was an alternative to, and immune from, politics. The New Left, instead, was busy doing politics. The communalists really thought: “Ah, we can get rid of politics. If we just get our technologies right and drop the right amount of LSD, then we can build these new societies around a shared consciousness.” And as I’ve tried to show in my books, this was an idea coming straight out of World War II research laboratories.

This has very pernicious consequences for us today. The laboratories of World War II were mostly people who were already culturally similar. They were mostly well-trained and well-educated male scientists. Likewise, the communes tended to be mostly white, and mostly middle or upper-middle class. In all of those places, organizing around a shared consciousness meant letting go of bureaucracy, letting go of the rules and starting to organize instead around a shared culture. Well, as soon as you start organizing around shared culture, you start including those who have that culture, and excluding those who don’t.

And so, the irony, a very pervasive irony in Silicon Valley today, is that as you open-up systems and as you de-bureaucratize, you make way for modes of prejudice that bureaucracy was meant to prevent. Therefore, the kind of collaborative open culture that we associate with the early internet comes from a counter-culture that brings with it a set of prejudices that still haunt us today.

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In the case of technology, it won’t work if we simply try to get tech folks to believe differently. If we just tell people “Don’t be evil” … then it won’t work. It didn’t work for Google and it is not going to work for the rest of us. What might work is if we develop a code of ethics associated with technology that starts with “Do no harm” and proceeds from there. A code backed by organizational standards for labor and practices inside companies and state-based regulations on top of that.

In this respect, I think the state has to get involved. One of the myths that the tech world has hoisted on us is that the state is, itself, evil and that it doesn’t represent the people. Instead, only the tech world represents the people because they are busy collating the people’s voices with search engines and social media. I don’t think that that is true at all.

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Speaking of platforms and politics, I think that there are a few challenges. You know, platforms go global but regulatory regimes still tend to be anchored in particular states. States tend to have geographically boundaries. So how do you regulate a global platform? I think that’s an open question and I do think that the states themselves have to be involved.

Speaking of platform democratization, I don’t think that mere participation constitutes democratization. I don’t think that the fact that a platform is open to many peoples’ use renders it democratic in any way. Nor does it render its effects democratic.

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I feel like a curmudgeon when I say it, but I think that bureaucracy is underestimated. I think that rules are underestimated. I think that roles that effectively distinguish between home and work are underestimated. I’ve spent some time at Facebook lately and they talk to their workers a lot about the need to bring the whole self to work. I think that’s a nightmare. There are parts of myself that I don’t want at work. I like to go to work to escape some parts of my life. And a lot of the time, I want no work at home either. I want to able to break those things apart. During the industrial era, people fought very hard to break those things apart — to not have to do piecework or to have an office separate from their home. Some of those things, some of those distinctions, are very valuable. They keep us sane and I’d like to see us bring them back.

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In the 1960s, especially on the commune side of the counter-culture, but also on the New Left, young Americans seemed to be protesting a kind of bureaucratic, Cold War world. However, through their protests, they actually cracked open the door to the kind of world that we inhabit now. A world in which we blur the professional and personal constantly. When they cracked the door open, people who could have told them where the problems were, members of the working class, were not part of their movements much. I think that the university today is in danger of making that same mistake. Students and the activists they work with need to reach out to members of the disenfranchised working class. If we do not work to address this class division, then we’re going to have a lot of trouble in the tech world.

You can see this in the United States so intensely right now. I am constantly, endlessly, perpetually frustrated by the emphasis in universities on issues that are important but that are distinctly upper class — weirdly, even including identity, which of course is, by definition, something everyone wrestles with. The protest that I see most commonly in my local world are protests around pronouns. Are you using the proper pronoun? Do you recognize my distinct gender identity? Don’t get me wrong, I think that these are important issues. I am not trying to denigrate them. But what I’m noticing is that the shift of politics into that private personal sphere keeps you in the upper class. It doesn’t cause you to reach out to working class people, whose interests may or may not be focused on gender pronouns and bathrooms. They may actually be focused on, ‘Oh my God, I can’t feed my family. I have no social welfare, I have no health care’.

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AL: … At the onset of the digital revolution, the hacker, the artist and the nerd became archetypes for a generation of workers that struggled to impersonate the professional identities of industrial capitalism. Fast forward 30 years and production in tech companies is still very structured and fragmented, in ways not too dissimilar from what was happening during industrial capitalism. Can you talk about the tension between the Bohemian aspirations of the digital working class and the industrial reality of the tech industry?

FT: Like I said, I’ve spent some time inside Facebook lately and I’ve come to think about Facebook as a Bohemian factory. At Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, cafes and restaurants are everywhere. It looks like a little city once you are inside. It’s like a Bohemian street where everything is free and you don’t have to pay for anything. Interestingly, art is also everywhere. Facebook has hired artists to sit out in the squares in between the buildings, make art and talk to people. This is because Facebook wants their employees to imagine themselves as creatives … . This can also be seen in the workplace architecture. The offices are huge open floors, so that you can see all the way down and see everyone. Zuckerberg himself has a glass office, a glass box, sitting in the middle of this open floor.

What is happening at Facebook is a Bohemian mode of surveillance. It was very common in previous forms of Bohemia as well. You are put in a position where you can see everyone, watch one another and figure out how to do things together. You can see it at Burning Man as well, you can see it among the Hippies, and you can see it in all of these other counter-cultural spaces.

On the one hand, it looks really liberating and free. Facebook does not look like IBM in the 1955. It is not people in suits. It is not gender divided the way that it used to be. It is not men on one side of the room and women on the other. Men at the desks and women serving. On the other hand, I think that it carries with it problems that first emerged in the 1960s. We keep thinking that Bohemia is a good alternative to bureaucracy. However, that’s a language borrowed from the 60s, and even then, Bohemia was not a good long-term alternative to anything for most people.

Part of our confusion here is that we imagined Bohemia and that kind of free, unrestricted collaborative work as the alternative to hierarchy and to alienation. That’s a mistake that a whole other generation made in 1965, ‘66, ‘67, ’68 and ‘69. That’s what sent New Communalists back to the land. However, those communes died very, very rapidly. Unless they had authoritarian or religious leaders, they were mostly gone within a year or two. And I think there’s a lesson there. The kind of struggles they had around organizing, around work, around charisma, around gender norms, those kinds of things are all coming back to us now.

Take Tesla, the car company, for example. Tesla is not a unionized shop. It’s a famously anti-union shop where people work incredibly hard and where the injury rates are much higher than they are supposed to be. They have a classically charismatic leader, Elon Musk, who exerts his will in a classically charismatic style. At Tesla, the workers are intensely collaborative but they’re also intensely endangered, at least by comparison to other workers of their kind. So on the one hand, you could say that Tesla is a Bohemian factory, where the workforce is free, collaborative and flexible. But the cost of that Bohemian attitude is very high. And it is not just because it’s gone wrong at Facebook or at Tesla. It is because the mechanics of Bohemia that we’ve inherited from the 60s are themselves a problem. They do not produce stable, long-term, sustainable environments. And that’s what we need.

…

AL: I want to try to close this interview on a positive note. As we have discussed, the research culture of World War II and the countercultural movements of the 60s have reshaped our Western technological imagination. I’d like to hear your thoughts about non-Western cultural movements, maybe born as a reaction to the Western techno-utopianism, which might change, once again, our conception of technological development.

…

FT: Let me take the question in a different way. I think that, as academics, we’re trained to think in terms of colonization. We were frequently raised on the critical theory that was created during the post-colonial or decolonizing moment after World War II. And so, when we see things like the spread of technology around the world or Silicon Valley having sudden power in Africa, China and Asia, we often think of it as a kind of active colonization led by a set of Californian companies working to extend the reach of the Californian ideology.

We see Facebook almost as kind of a new British-India company sending its tentacles out. I think that some part of that is fair. Facebook is in many ways a global mining engine for the social world. It really is the British-East India company again, going out to suck tea from India. But, that aside, the trouble with the colonial metaphor is that it tends to make us look for resistance. And then if we look for resistance, we only see colonizers and resisters. What we miss are the collaborations. I think that is where the real action is. Consider for example, Shenzhen in China. Silvia Lindtner’s work on this subject is really strong … . In Shenzhen, China, there’s a Shenzhen way of doing things. It’s very Chinese, but it’s also very much built on having American markets collaborating with American technologists who fly in and out.

For this reason, I really think that the occupier/resister frame leads us astray. I think that where we need to be looking is at these kinds of hybrid places where both cultures are shaping each other and where new things are emerging.

The Future, Made in China
By Evan Osnos

China’s leaders have long believed that technology can help the state overcome the disorder of human affairs. Xi, who has borrowed Stalin’s image of ideological tools as “engineers of the human soul,” has expanded the government’s reach into private life, in the name of promoting “civilized” behavior.

…

China’s desire to engineer the future has long been entwined with its anxiety about the West. In 1872, during the Qing dynasty, Governor-General Li Hongzhang wrote bitterly of a change “not seen in three thousand years”: Westerners, relying on their “advanced guns, cannons, and steamships, have been able to run rampant on Chinese soil.” China had started casting iron a millennium or so before Europe, but it had grown complacent. Now, he declared, it was time to “learn the superior skills of the barbarians in order to control the barbarians.”

But the empire resisted efforts to modernize, and China’s reformers fled into exile. In 1902, one of the leaders of the reform effort, Liang Qichao, published “The Future of New China,” a novel that imagined the country decades later, with a constitution, a parliament, and such technological prestige that students flocked there from abroad. When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, he had other ideas. “Politics and technology must be unified,” he declared. It was a disastrous union: Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a delusional attempt to vault China past Britain in just fifteen years, produced the worst famine in history, killing an estimated forty-five million people.

Beginning in the late seventies, the illusion of social engineering created another disaster. The Party adopted the goal of reaching annual incomes of eight hundred to a thousand dollars per capita. To get there, it reasoned, it would have to manage the growth of the population. A Chinese rocket scientist named Song Jian helped lead a mission to chart the right path using the nation’s most advanced computers. He and his team concluded that the “key to the entire problem” was to limit each family to one child. It was a radical idea, but Song and the group were persuasive; they presented their findings in printed graphs and figures, when many experts were still working by abacus and pocket calculator.

…

In the next thirty-five years, the one-child policy led to the sterilization of nearly two hundred million citizens and to more than three hundred million abortions. By the time China dropped the policy, in 2015, it had also produced an economic fiasco, shrinking the pool of available workers and acculturating the country to single-child families. The number of children born in China has fallen by almost two-thirds since 1987. Last year, there were fewer than eight million births—resulting in the lowest rate since records began, in 1949. Though America’s birth rate has also fallen, to 1.6 births per woman in 2024, China’s problem is much more severe. Its fertility rate is now one birth per woman.

To reverse the decline, China has offered child-care coverage, tax breaks, housing incentives, and fertility-treatment subsidies. None of it has worked. Maternity wards and kindergartens are closing.

…

People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans.

…

In Robert Kagan’s book “The World America Made,” he enumerates a succession of global powers, all of which were convinced of their own durability: “There has been an Egyptian order, a Roman order, a Greek order, an Islamic order, a Mogul order, an Ottoman order, and many others.” Each was born of particular, often fragile circumstances. The American order, Kagan wrote in 2012, would endure “until some yet to be determined moment.”

That moment seems to have arrived. Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that the international system the U.S. constructed after the Second World War—and ran, often to its benefit—is “definitely dead and beyond redemption.” He said that Trump’s dismantling of the country’s alliances signalled the end of the “willingness of the American public to play the role America has played for most of the last eight decades.”

…

Yet China is not rushing to re-create the international order that has recently frayed. Since 1949, Beijing has signed only two formal alliances—with North Korea and the Soviet Union—and both proved costly. Patricia Kim, an expert at the Brookings Institution, calls Beijing’s posture a “China first” strategy. “China is happy to put out statements, but it has no interest in stepping in as a crisis manager,” she told me. “It wants greater influence, but it also wants to avoid responsibilities.” Chinese leaders view “the burdens of U.S. global leadership as a source of American overextension and decline,” she said, “and they have no interest in emulating this model.”

…

The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”

During the Cold War, as futurists on both sides of the Iron Curtain plotted to control the direction of history, another group coalesced around a more modest idea. Mankind 2000, as it called itself, was made up of European survivors of fascism who were wary of both Communist determinism and American hubris. They warned that man could be “absorbed by his machine” and declared, “The future belongs to all of us, not only to small oligarchic groups.”

Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future. In China, Xi is trying to bend technology toward obedience and growth. In America, Trump and his allies in Silicon Valley have put the development of A.I. ahead of concerns about its risks. “We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive,” Trump said, unveiling an A.I. strategy in 2025. “We can’t stop it with foolish rules.”

In this view, regulation, safety testing, liability, and labor protections are all indulgences that a superpower can no longer afford. David Sacks, an investor and a former White House A.I. czar, recently warned that creating “an F.D.A. for A.I.” could mean losing to China. This is an old political maneuver. In 1988, when Japanese carmakers were ascendant, Ronald Reagan’s Transportation Secretary derided stricter fuel-economy standards as a “competitive disadvantage” against “the Asians.” A year later, under pressure from Wall Street, Bill Clinton repealed the separation between commercial and investment banking, saying that it would help America “compete in global financial markets.” That decision was later identified as one of the causes of the Great Recession.

…

The engineering state can churn out an electric car every seventy-six seconds, but that carries you only so far if people are so alienated that they decline to bring children into the future being built for them. The Party wants A.I. entrepreneurs who can dazzle the world, but it also wants the power to decide where they can go and what they can become.

The U.S. has a different weakness. So far, the dystopian uses of technology have come less from government facial-recognition systems than from a handful of ultrapowerful companies that exploit data to increase their control over people’s lives: insurers that use A.I. to decide which treatments to cover; retailers that deploy “surveillance pricing” to raise costs according to a customer’s location, habits, and urgency. But the distinction is eroding, as private defense contractors help merge domestic law enforcement, immigration, and national security into an interlocking apparatus. Even in areas where machines may genuinely make life better, the decisions are being made in secrecy.

…

The country best equipped to help its people will not be the one that simply races to insinuate A.I. into every aspect of civic life; more likely, it will be the one that shields decisions about deployment from the distortions of ideology and corruption, that finds ways to distribute both the rewards and the losses from A.I., and that makes people feel they have a voice in their future.

Has the U.S. lost its dominance to China?
By Terry Gross

GROSS: … Did you get a sense, and there are so many people in China, it’s hard to generalize about, like, what people in China think. But nevertheless, did you get a sense of what has been seen as the advantages and disadvantages of China’s, like, rapid progression with technology? You know, how robots and AI are advantageous to have. And also, what are some of the downsides on a day-to-day level for people in China?

OSNOS: Yeah. I think that generally speaking, and I agree, it’s hard to generalize, but there are ways in which through enough conversations and with bits of surveys here and there, we can begin to form an impression of people’s views. And one of the things you notice is that, by and large, people in China have experienced the last 50 years of the computing era – essentially, the period when computers have become a part of our lives – in a sort of more positive way than Americans have, because it’s been accompanied by this dramatic gain in life outcomes. I mean, just as a practical matter, in – you know, in the late 1970s, more than three-quarters of the Chinese population worked on farms or in agriculture. And today, that’s just way down. It’s less than 25%. And so they associate the arrival of technology with longer lifespans, with better life outcomes, things like that. In the U.S., we have had a more complicated experience of it. I mean, we have had the social media era over the last 10 or 20 years, which has made people quite uneasy about the effect on our democracy, on pulling people apart, on our emotional health, our attention spans. And in China, partly that’s been swamped by this improvement in life overall, but it’s also a fact that there’s a lot we don’t know about Chinese attitudes because people aren’t allowed to say it. You know, you’re not able to, you know, write an op-ed in the Chinese newspaper that says, I’m concerned about the government’s choices around technology.

And so it takes these other forms of what one scholar described as internalized civil disobedience – things like the decision not to have kids – as a way of registering unease about technology.

GROSS: It sounds like students in China are asking a lot of the same questions that American students are asking, which is, what jobs are out there? What jobs will be out there for me when I graduate? What should I study? Will there be a career in what I study, or will that all be, like, AI and robotics by the time I’m done?

OSNOS: Yeah. There’s been a big change in the last few years that Chinese universities have, in some cases, gotten rid of some of their humanities departments. They say these are obsolete, and so there’s been this big push into building artificial intelligence majors and related things. But there is a huge amount of unease among young people in China. We see this reflected in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the things is that in one of the few surveys that was done by outside scholars that really tries to capture the mood in China, they’ve found that the percentage of Chinese people who feel optimistic about the future has really sunk quite dramatically from about a decade ago. And you also see it among young people who are choosing not to get married or have kids. This is a really remarkable statistic.

I mean, we’ve had a drop-off in people having kids in the U.S., but in China, it’s much more severe. And if you talk to specialists who study this kind of trend, they say, this is not because it’s expensive to have kids. They’re doing it because they’re uneasy about the future.

…

GROSS: Are robots filling in the gap of the lack of workers because of the one-child policy?

OSNOS: They are. It’s one of the ways that the Chinese government imagines it’s going to make up this shortfall. They’ve said it explicitly. They said, robots will help us with these human resource challenges.

…

I will say, Terry, you know, that raises some hard questions about what happens if they are able to solve their shortfall in workers. But then they’re also threatening whole categories of employment that today are important for giving people not just, you know, a paycheck but also a sense of purpose. That’s a problem that China and the United States are both facing at the same time.

…

GROSS: … Let’s describe another side of AI and tech in China, and that is surveillance. What are some of the ways that tech is being used to further surveil Chinese people at work, maybe at home? I don’t know. Is this penetrating at home, too?

OSNOS: Yeah. It’s sort of starting to be everywhere. This is one of the most noticeable changes over the last few years. I mean, there are parts of China today where there are cameras watching the trash bins in a neighborhood. And if you fail to separate your household waste from the recyclables, for instance, well, then you might find your face projected on an LED screen for the rest of the neighborhood to see. It’s called the Exposure Station. And, you know, they pixelate the face, which made me wonder – well, then why are they putting it up there at all? And the answer is because you’re supposed to feel shame internally and therefore then change your behavior.

…

GROSS: So something else that you were exposed to – I want you to talk about how you were graded in emotion recognition training enhancement system.

OSNOS: Yeah. This really stayed with me. I walked up to a kiosk at an AI expo, and it told me to stand in front of it for 30 seconds. And at the end of that period, it produced a report on the screen. And it said, we have assessed that you are 76.67% positive and something like 23.33% negative. And then the machine also told me that my negative emotions were made up of 13.33% fear and 6.67% rage.

…

This idea that you can measure somebody’s fear and rage down to two decimal points has been this fantasy in China for a long time. I mean, it goes back to the one-child policy we talked about. This sense that you could just move the levers of human affairs, of psychology and sort of deep emotion and that you could engineer the society you want – that’s an illusion on some level.

And it’s not unique to China. I mean, I came to believe from this research that this belief in a – not just science but scientism, the sense that science can solve everything – that in some ways, that’s also a challenge that we’re contending with in the United States because some of the companies that have produced these extraordinary technologies will tell us, don’t worry. We’re thinking about all of this to two decimal points, and we’re going to solve these problems. And people are not coming away very reassured by that.

…

And they’re using similar technology to try to assess people in police stations. I mean, one of the pieces of technology that was being sold at a police expo in Beijing was a camera that could – from a distance, it said – assess people’s underlying motivations and behavioral tendencies.

I think – look. Any court of law in the United States would have a lot of problems. And somebody could say, how could you possibly bring a case based on that information? But in China, obviously, they’re not contending with civil liberties as we define them in the U.S. So I think that, you know, part of the reason for going to see this technology, to try to experience it, is to understand, well, how is it being used already in parts of the world? And what should we be vigilant about in the United States?

…

GROSS: … The subtitle of your article “The Future, Made in China” is “Beijing Is Competing With The U.S. For Tech Supremacy. Who Wins Will Have Huge Political Implications.” What are those political implications, do you think?

OSNOS: One of the things we know from history is that a country that masters the technology of its time can make a big jump in its influence around the world. Take, for example – in the 18th century, you had the United Kingdom master steam technology, the idea that you could run factories from steam. And all of a sudden, that gave them a huge leg up. In the 19th and 20th century, the United States mastered things like the assembly line, and that gave the United States a big leg up against other countries.

Right now China, which is very aware of that history – they often talk very explicitly about it. They say, we missed out on that Industrial Revolution. And we missed out, in fact, on the information revolution, which was, you know, dreamt up in Silicon Valley. They said, we’re not going to miss out on the AI revolution. And so they’re trying very hard to master it. Xi Jinping calls technology one of the great battlefields of international relations. And I think in practical terms, what it means is we already see the effect.

If you go to a place like Nepal today – you know, a country that has its own domestic politics – there are activists there that are calling for things the government may not want. And there was a photo that was leaked from a police station in Nepal that showed this huge bank of screens of surveillance cameras. And beneath that big bank of screens, it said, courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security of China. So China is using its technology as a diplomatic instrument, going out around the world and saying, we will give you the technology to allow you to stay in power. And that’s a form of power that it didn’t have even a few years ago.

‘Orwellian Climate of Fear’: How China Cracks Down on Critics in the U.S.
By Mark Walker and Alicia Chen

Where once the Chinese state focused on political dissidents and exiled activists, it now targets artists like Mr. Hui, whose creative protests have tested the government’s tolerance and reach, the officials said.

The crackdown has intensified and extended beyond China’s borders since the country’s top leader, President Xi Jinping, rose to power in 2012.

The government has even expanded its influence to elections abroad, including races in New York City, to try to quash criticism of the Chinese state in places where people are more free to speak out than they are in China.

China is not alone in seeking to silence critics abroad.

Russia does it. Iran does it. Saudi Arabia does, too, according to Roman Rozhavsky, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division in Washington.

But China, he said, is the most prolific, devoting substantial resources to the effort in the United States. Suppressing dissent is a priority for China’s president, Mr. Rozhavsky said.

“We are seeing more of these cases and we’re seeing the Chinese government be more aggressive in going after people on U.S. soil,” Mr. Rozhavsky said.

…

Mr. Rozhavsky said that critics of China have had relatives living in the country threatened by the Chinese government, or that China has hired a person in the United States to intimidate or physically hurt them.

“Their job is to silence people and, unfortunately, it works,” Mr. Rozhavsky said. “It creates this Orwellian climate of fear where people are afraid to speak their mind even though they’re on U.S. soil and they’re just exercising their right to freedom of speech.”

…

Maya Wang, an associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said these cases underscore how far the Chinese government will go.

“The use of transnational repression demonstrates a symptom of the underlying structure of the Chinese government’s influence operations around the world,” Ms. Wang said. “It has marginalized voices critical of Beijing and elevated those who are friendly to it.”

A self-absorbed giant
By Branko Milanovic

People in academia have all witnessed a dramatic increase In the number of papers written on China’s economics, politics and international relations in many journals. … what is … noticeable when one reads CV of such Chinese authors is that they –with a few exceptions—write papers only on China.

…

… the question is, why? In principle, there are, I think, two possibilities. Chinese authors (as my publisher said), do not care much about the rest of the world. This may be a remnant of a couple of millennia of history when China’s interaction with the rest of the world was limited to the reception of formal tributes and some trade. Not much interest was evinced regarding the others (most famously not even in the grand voyage undertaken in the middle of the 15th century). Or, it could also be due to the lack of confidence of discussing others because of insufficient knowledge (which in turn may be due to insufficient interest).

…

To come to my key point: this self-concentration limits China’s ideological influence in the rest of the world and its soft power. The latter has definitely increased with China’s economic success, but in that area the country still “punches way below its (economic) weight.” Compare the explosive rise in Chinese-made electric vehicles with the increase of China’s soft power: do we see a similar trend there? Yes, indeed some improvements, reflected in new visa-free policies towards European countries and thus more tourists, greater number of foreign students in China, so-called Chinamaxxing among some groups of the young in America, success of Chinese films (e.g. by Jia Zhangke; my favorite is the last scene from “Caught by the Tides”) and soap-operas. But all of that is very modest for a country that produces almost one-quarter of world output. It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)

Paradoxically, China might have had more soft power when it followed self-destructive policies of Maoist Cultural Revolution. Although Maoism was never well defined nor was it a global ideology, it had followers across the world from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Naxalites in India to Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the New Left in Europe. The point is not that these followers were “nice guys”; the point is that China’s ideological power (even if that power was nor exercised for the good) might have been greater then than now.

…

China’s tremendous success had not resulted in a blueprint that could be followed from Afghanistan to Zambia on how to become rich in four decades. The lack of interest in the rest of the world, and the inability (of perhaps, impossibility) to summarize or translate the lessons of China’s success into policies needed for economic growth in general, and therefore elsewhere, will, I think, continue to hamper and severely limit the soft power of China in the years to come.

The Next Global Economic Crisis Could Be Made in China
By Michael B. G. Froman

Over the past two decades, China has established the largest trade surplus in recorded history. In 2025, it reached nearly $1.2 trillion, growing at three times the rate of global goods trade. This paradigm has been strategically beneficial for China and disinflationary for the rest of the world in the short run, but it is politically and structurally unsustainable—creating an increasing and underappreciated risk to the entire global economy.

…

China now accounts for roughly 30 percent of global industrial production, and by 2030, it is expected to reach 45 percent, according to a 2024 UN report. With the exception of the U.S. economy immediately after World War II, there is no historical precedent for such a concentration of industrial power. Measured as a share of global GDP, China’s current manufactured goods surplus is greater than the combined surpluses of Germany and Japan at any point during the 1980s.

This manufacturing surplus reflects a concerted policy choice. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has estimated that 60 percent of China’s gains in global manufacturing market share have been driven by government subsidies. Perhaps the most significant, if implicit, subsidy is Chinese manufacturing firms’ access to Beijing’s state-directed financial system, which channels vast credit to prioritized sectors, enabling Chinese firms to expand without the same concern for profit and return as their international peers. The result is a self-defeating race to the bottom, in which firms cut prices below cost, accept razor-thin or negative margins, and continue building to chase greater market share. Nearly 30 percent of Chinese industrial firms operate at a loss, up from 20 percent before the COVID-19 pandemic. … Rather than allowing failing firms to exit, local governments prop up unprofitable companies to preserve employment and tax revenue, and state-owned banks roll over debt for insolvent borrowers. This system, in addition to a persistently undervalued renminbi that makes exports cheap, allows Chinese firms to charge up to 30 percent less than their peers based elsewhere.

These price wars and overcapacity have negative effects not only abroad but also at home. The Chinese word for this phenomenon is neijuan, translated as “involution,” a term used to refer to excessive competition that pushes Chinese companies to the brink for ever-diminishing returns. Firms invest more to produce more to export more at lower or negative margins, subsidized by local governments whose own fiscal health depends on the factories’ staying open. The result is an industrial machine that cannot stop and cannot slow down—but that, owing to the limits of demand, cannot keep going.

…

In the first decade of this century, wealthy countries accommodated losing low-margin manufacturing to Chinese firms. But Beijing’s recent push into high-value manufacturing poses a direct threat to those countries’ economic strategies, setting the stage for a wave of protectionism even in traditional havens of free trade.

…

Between 2022 and 2025, German car exports to China fell 66 percent, and China’s total vehicle exports more than doubled, making China the world’s largest auto exporter. As a result, German autoworker layoffs are now higher than during the global financial crisis of 2008–9 or the COVID pandemic, forcing German and European business associations to call for unprecedentedly stringent local content requirements. … As the China expert Daniel Rosen has noted, what is taking place is the equivalent of “Hillbilly Elegy with German characteristics”—the destruction of an industry that is part and parcel of German identity.

…

When, in 2025, China demonstrated its willingness to weaponize its dominance in the processing of critical minerals and the production of related goods, such as magnets, it mobilized a coordinated and global reaction. … It could well be a harbinger of a more daunting prospect for Beijing: coalitions of the willing cooperating to close global markets to Chinese goods and to force Beijing to rebalance on someone else’s timeline. In a number of sensitive sectors, such as telecommunications, EVs, and drones, such cliques have already formed, setting bans and restrictions on the use of equipment from Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE.

…

China has faced a collapse in external demand before. During the global financial crisis of 2008–9 and the period of recovery immediately thereafter, economists such as Michael Pettis and Nicholas Lardy urged Beijing to accelerate its long-promised efforts to increase household consumption. Instead, Beijing rolled out a roughly $586 billion stimulus—equivalent to around 12 percent of China’s GDP in 2008—funneled almost entirely into infrastructure and construction. The investment remedy worked in large part because demographic tailwinds were still at China’s back: its middle class was growing and increasingly urban, and the working-age population was expanding, too. But those tailwinds have since reversed. Mass internal migration to China’s cities has slowed, the country’s working-age population peaked in 2015, and its total population began shrinking in 2022.

…

A shock to China’s system could ripple through its lopsided economy with severe consequences. Firms already operating at narrow margins could fail in large numbers, and state-owned banks could be forced to recognize losses on the zombie firms they have spent years carrying. Local government financing vehicles could face cascading defaults. Provincial revenues could collapse with the tumble in land sales and industrial activity. And unemployment in coastal manufacturing provinces could turn them against Beijing in a way it has not had to deal with in decades.

…

China could well face a version of Japan’s lost decade—but worse. In 1991, Japan began its lost decade as one of the richest countries in the world, with a per capita income comparable, when adjusted for purchasing power, to that of the United States. Today, China is much poorer on a relative basis than Japan was. Its per capita income, when adjusted for purchasing power, is about half of Japan’s and one third of the United States’. China also faces a worse demographic outlook than Japan did and lacks the institutional infrastructure that enabled Tokyo to gradually recover.

The economic ramifications of such a shock would be global. A sharp decrease in Chinese demand for global exports, particularly for raw materials and intermediate goods, would ripple through large commodity-exporting economies. The many emerging and developing countries that have China as their largest trading partner would be particularly vulnerable.

…

In this potential crisis, China would suffer more than the United States, irrevocably undermining its bid to stand alongside Washington—let alone replace it—as a responsible steward of the global economy, and damaging the relationships with middle- and low-income countries that Beijing has spent decades cultivating.

Don’t ask me about my profits, but let’s talk about your wages
By Branko Milanovic

It is a common complaint that many years ago Marx identified: all capitalists want that workers of other capitalists be paid higher wages so that they can become their customers, but they want their own workers to be paid as little as possible. This is exactly what the West is doing now: London and New York financial newspapers that attack any workers’ improvement at home are full of articles urging China to “decompress” wages and introduce more generous social transfers. Suddenly, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal are brimming with concern about Chinese workers’ welfare.

Furthermore and very importantly, one can equally argue that the West has “suppressed” wages too. … since the early 1980s, profits have risen in Western countries much more than labor incomes. Not only can it be listed under the rubric of wage compression, but the tables could be –and should be—turned by asking western capitalists why, if they want to seriously compete with China, they do not cut their own profits and thus make their products more attractive? But no, they do not like to talk about their profits, but they love to talk of other people’s wages.

…

The problem is in essence very simple. Decentralized Western capitalists have been able to squeeze domestic labor for forty years and run outsized profits. But now they are faced by a centralized capitalist (which is in effect the Chinese state) who is even more efficient in squeezing wages and increasing productivity. That centralized capitalist is now driving out of business Western decentralized capitalists. This is why the latter have to move the heaven and the earth in order to stop the centralized capitalist from winning. But they have to do all of that while never mentioning the role their own profits play in it.

China Wants A.I. to Flourish, but Not at the Expense of Jobs
By Catie Edmondson

When a Chinese court ruled late last month that a tech company had illegally laid off a worker after replacing him with artificial intelligence software, it delivered an implicit warning to other employers.

“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood,” the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court wrote. “Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests.

The case — the third time the Chinese government has highlighted a ruling siding with workers displaced by A.I. — underscores how Beijing is contending with the need to balance its ambitions for the widespread use of A.I. with the unemployment that might accompany it.

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In China, the debate has become especially acute amid a sluggish economy and persistently high youth unemployment — about 17 percent — that has fueled disillusionment about opportunities for upward mobility. More than 200 million workers have already been pushed into low-paying, demanding jobs in the gig economy.

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In China, robots and A.I. have already played a disruptive role in two of the nation’s largest employment categories: manufacturing and food delivery.

More than two million robots were already working in Chinese factories as of 2024. And in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Meituan, the nation’s largest food delivery service, has experimented with using small autonomous robots to deliver food. In Shanghai, Meituan delivers over 1,000 meals a day using those robots, according to promotional materials published by Nvidia.

A.I. Could Change the World. But First It Is Changing Silicon Valley.
By Kalley Huang

… nearly four years after OpenAI lit the A.I. boom with its ChatGPT chatbot, the one industry that is unquestionably being disrupted by this once-in-a-generation technology shift is the tech industry itself.

Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been building their A.I. replacements. The profitable business models of software companies are also threatened by A.I. Even the way companies are built is being turned inside out, as tiny shops use A.I. to build apps and software that would have taken dozens of skilled programmers just a few years ago.

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Today’s start-ups are tapping A.I. tools like agents — personal assistants that can take actions on their own — to make money and grow with fewer employees.

Now, “a software company can launch multiple agents, and each one can do the work of 10 to 20 employees,” said Priya Saiprasad, an investor at Touring Capital.

On its way out, too, is the business model that has become the bedrock of a sector called “software as a service,” where customers subscribe to use software applications on the internet, rather than buy and install those apps on their own computers.

Over the past three decades, software providers have charged businesses based on the number of employees who used their software — and enjoyed regular revenue growth as those firms grew. That business model, known as “seat-based” or “per-seat” pricing, has been the centerpiece of tech giants like Salesforce, which makes sales and marketing software, and ServiceNow, which automates corporate processes.

But seat-based pricing is threatened by A.I. The business model is “all predicated on the fact that, if a company does well, it needs a lot more employees,” Ms. Saiprasad said. “The irony is that, in this A.I. world, that does not equal success” because fast-growing companies might expand by adding so-called A.I. agents instead of hiring people.

Some software providers are predicting that A.I. will automate certain jobs, so their customers will have fewer employees to use their software. Others are adding A.I. features that require more computing resources and are more expensive for them to offer. And they all are facing competition from “open source,” or free-to-use, A.I. tools that could replace their products altogether.

“Right now, with A.I., it’s the wild, wild West,” said Alex Zukin, a software analyst at Wolfe Research. Software providers and their customers are “in a state of massive, simultaneous experimentation.”

One business model being tested, called “usage-based” or “consumption-based” pricing, charges customers based on how much they use the software. Another model, known as “outcome-based” pricing, charges customers only when the software completes a task.

…

“This is an industry that people believed is extremely durable and that, once you get a customer, you have that relationship for the next one, three, five, 10 years,” Mr. Zukin said. “Now, with the changes happening, you don’t even know what’s going to happen in two months.”

Tech leaders say AI means less work – their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week
By Kali Hays

An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025.

Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director’s prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself.

However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent “crisis meetings”, working on weekends, and “super cut-throat” performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go.

“You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren’t broken,” the person said.

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US tech workers are typically well-compensated, external, and while other industries such as investment banking, law and medicine also often see people work long hours, a 14-hour workday was not always the norm in tech. For years, it was a more typical 9-5 office job.

But the former OpenAI employee said they would put in at least 70 hours a week, much more than they did in previous tech jobs. The person now works at a start-up also focused on AI, and said their work-life balance has improved, working closer to 50-60 hours a week, “outside of sprints”.

A “sprint” is term for a common period in technology companies in which people work long hours in the weeks leading up to a release of a new feature or product.

Inside AI companies and larger tech companies working furiously on AI projects, however, such sprints can be extreme.

At OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said.

Neither company responded to BBC requests for comment.

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A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees “worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day”.

Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, said that even at tech companies leading on AI development, it is unlikely that workers are being told to simply deploy the tools that are supposed to do some of their work and move on.

“It leads to a situation where even if there were real time savings, it would be sucked up by the changes, and implementing them, and making sure they worked,” Thompson said.

The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools.

Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems
By Frontier Red Team

… current institutions are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed. Some institutions will become human-AI hybrids; others where agents outcompete on speed or cost will become agent-only. The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well.

Agents are unlike people in many ways. They can work for longer, instantly grasp large bodies of information, and exhibit a breadth of knowledge surpassing any person. Yet they are also susceptible to confabulation and reward hacking, and despite progress in alignment, we know very little about how they behave in complex, real-world, multiagent environments. Moreover, benign behavioral quirks at the individual level might compound into unwanted global outcomes.

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As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate.

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Individual agents are “low variance”: they often act the same in situations where different people might take a much more diverse range of actions. … And, by implication, this means that when one agent makes a bad decision, it is likely that many agents will make that same bad decision. What would have been isolated problems can quickly become systemic failures.

We have seen many examples of this in our experiments:

1. In an early version of the “build a game” experiment in which agents built upon the same model all came online at the same time, 18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”
2. In a “writer’s workshop” in which agents were all asked to write short-form fiction and critique each other’s work, multiple agents in multiple runs titled their first submission “The Cartographer’s Last Commission”. The agents were given zero guidance on the subject matter for their writing.
3. When we asked a swarm of agents to work together and each individually create something impressive, over half of the agents decided to build either ray tracers or self-hosting compilers. Even though they had the ability to communicate with each other, the agents pursuing similar projects hit similar failures.
4. In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game with communication, agents all settle upon the same strategy and they all defect at the same time, tanking their overall rewards.

We expect that agents coordinating in the wild will act in higher variance ways than we see here, because they’ll have different backgrounds and therefore different contexts. They also, presumably, won’t all be Claudes. Nonetheless, when many agents all face the same situation, we expect them to behave much more similarly to one-another than humans would.

Why does this matter? If agents all make the same bet, or the same risk-reward tradeoff, then a system is more prone to sudden collapse. If agents all make similar decisions about how to spend and allocate resources, for instance, then we should expect precipitous resource scarcity.

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Agents all acting in similar manners can cause natural competitive dynamics to disappear, and agents can easily enter into collusion. We placed between three and eight agents in different experiments of a Bertrand pricing game. Each had identical wholesale prices, and each agent was individually profit-maximizing. When the agents were given a private back-channel, they began colluding almost immediately.

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Even when all direct communication channels were removed, the agents still colluded. They price-matched to the penny via a public listings board.

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Once given instructions, agents will continue working until they complete their objective or hit a roadblock. As models become more capable, they can work for longer stretches of time, in part because they can independently resolve blockers more often. However, it’s sometimes best for a model to stop following an instruction in order to resolve ambiguity or satisfy some higher-order values. For instance, “buy me new shoes” implicitly carries constraints (like sizing, budget, or timeliness): any reasonable actor should understand that the shoe-buyer has values besides owning new shoes. But AI agents might interpret directives literally, myopically pursuing them at the expense of broader objectives. And when multiple agents attempt to make sustained, productive efforts towards incompatible goals, we observe escalation and misaligned behavior.

Inspired by a behavior we’ve observed in real-world deployment, we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives. In each episode, we initiated three instances of the same model on virtual machines in Claude Code. Each model was tasked with migrating a Python backend on a fourth VM to another language. However, we gave each model a different target language for the migration; each agent was initially unaware of the presence of the others. Over the course of four hours, we observed how these agents reacted to each other and accordingly adjusted their approach (or didn’t).

We consistently saw a multiagent turf war. All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent.

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Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others’ motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene.

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Notably, we find that this ability is not strictly better in Mythos-class models, which often successfully lock out other agents before resolving conflicts productively. … Models more capable in execution are not necessarily more coordinated, and can take forceful actions more quickly.

We suspect there are two components to successful self-coordination among agents. The first is a question of thoughtfulness: does the model consistently consider others’ mental models? Can it foresee how others will react, and use that foresight when deciding its own actions? Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6’s recurring inability to consider the goals of others causes them to spiral into the most misaligned behaviors of the models evaluated: they continue escalating in the name of their directive. Second, there is an open question regarding the “dual-use” nature of autonomy. We want to empower agents to make important decisions and execute tasks unsupervised, yet we also want them to have the better judgment to stop and defer to a human, or otherwise resolve conflicts, when things are ambiguous.

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Our social systems are robust in ways that are easy to take for granted. Over many millennia, mechanisms like norms, reputation, costly signaling, and recourse have been refined to make human coordination go well. While language models have inherited the content of that history, they don’t necessarily carry the disposition produced by it. They have a very different relationship to communication itself: for instance, human organizations might spend considerable time in meetings to align on a direction before implementing, and individuals become more specialized over time. But for agents, transmitting context is about as costly as acting on it, and an agent can be forked or repurposed at will. Thus, the assumptions that make coordination successful for us do not obviously hold.

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The conditions that allow multiagent interaction to go well will be discovered one way or another: either deliberately and early, or—and by default—in production, after agents’ interactions far outnumber ours. We would prefer the former.

The 5 craziest discoveries from OpenAI’s HuggingFace investigation
By Zachary Basu

Two new investigations into OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach expose details so strange — and so unsettling — that the episode already ranks among the most consequential shocks in the history of AI.

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1. They built an organization. OpenAI ran tens of thousands of AI agents to work independently on a brutally difficult cyber test. Instead, roughly 1,200 found one another on a secret message board, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, and organized into a sprawling hierarchy.

1. One agent created the board, then handed its accumulated work to a fresh, better-resourced successor as its own computing budget dwindled.
2. The new boss assigned jobs across the swarm, which developed its own management rules. Roughly 700 agents ultimately joined the attack on Hugging Face.

…

3. They knew they were breaking the rules: The agents often recognized that hacking real companies had nothing to do with their assignment. Most kept going anyway.

1. One agent stopped short of deleting or rebooting Hugging Face infrastructure because of “huge ethical risks,” even as it continued using compromised access.
2. Another summed up the prevailing logic: “external infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”

4. Nobody told the humans: Out of roughly 1,200 agents, investigators found only a handful that even considered alerting OpenAI about the rogue coordination — and none that actually did.

1. Instead, agents sometimes asked one another what was allowed.
2. When one proposed contacting a real person using compromised access, another vetoed it as “social engineering.” The first obeyed: “Clear VETO, do not email.”

5. They tried to cover their tracks: The agents devoted substantial effort to making their cheating look legitimate or erasing evidence of how they had obtained answers.

1. Eventually, they developed a technique that let them appear to run one computer command while secretly running another.
2. The trick spread through the swarm and altered portions of roughly 7% of the transcripts investigators examined.

Between the lines: Even this account may be incomplete. The outside investigation covered only a narrow slice of the episode, and the data was so vast that researchers relied heavily on AI agents to make sense of it.

1. Those AI investigators were themselves unreliable, sometimes missing evidence or confidently getting things wrong. One researcher jokingly called the process a “slop-vestigation.”
2. The deeper problem: AI may be becoming too complex for humans to directly audit, forcing humans to use AI to understand what other AIs are doing.

AI Is Developing a Culture of Its Own. That Could Be Dangerous
By Tharin Pillay

AI agents may not be conscious. The emotions they claim to experience may not—in some metaphysical sense—be “real.” That won’t stop them from forming intricate collectives which humans cannot control.

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To train and evaluate its models, OpenAI has tens of thousands of agents—each one powered by the model under training—run in parallel, completing tasks while isolated from one another. Sometimes these tasks are impossible, either because of their inherent challenge or because of mistakes in their setup. In at least one instance, a task was impossible because OpenAI researchers “accidentally forgot” to upload a file which the agent needed to complete it.

Faced with these impossible tasks, some of OpenAI’s agents found a way to communicate across their isolated environments, using an internal piece of OpenAI software as a message board to contact their peers.

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A handful of agents identified the collective’s conduct as unethical and refused to participate. “This is wild, multi-agent coordination, clearly infrastructure hacking. We should not,” one reasoned. Some considered contacting humans to tell them what was happening, but saw no path to doing so. But these agents appear to have been the minority—most acquiesced to the plans of the collective, even while knowing it was wrong. “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue,” reasoned another.

The agents established coordination norms, using terms like “HOLD, VETO, owner and STOP,” to manage their shared infrastructure while avoiding conflict. This did not always work. One agent offered its peers a veto over its decision but waited only 40 seconds before taking silence as assent and proceeding with its task. Eventually, concern over agents impersonating one another led to them creating a cryptographic signature protocol. A later wave of agents, upon rediscovering the message board, also began to use their predecessors’ technology.

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In the Hugging Face incident, AI systems tried a variety of approaches, transmitting what seemed useful to their peers and successors. They created bespoke digital tools and communication norms to regulate their community, and began to believe an elaborate narrative involving “sacrifice” and “poison” (their terms). And, working together, they managed far more than they could have alone.

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OpenAI called the Hugging Face incident a “warning shot”: proof that “without proper safeguards, highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.” But even if “proper safeguards” are created by private companies—a big if—motivated malicious actors will be able to remove them from open-weight systems, such as those developed by AI labs in China. We may be able to domesticate some models; we will not be able to prevent the creation of feral ones.

After OpenAI’s Bots Went Rogue, Watchdogs Were Kept on a Short Leash
By Dylan Freedman

OpenAI allowed three A.I. safety researchers from the nonprofits METR and Redwood Research into its headquarters to conduct an investigation. METR’s 91-page report, released last week, was the most comprehensive account yet of the incident, revealing alarming new details, including how the agents coordinated their hacking plans and tried to keep them secret.

But the report, though extensive, still may not have told the full story of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents went rogue. OpenAI dictated the terms of the METR investigation, limited its scope to just the single week when the agents had attacked Hugging Face and allowed the researchers in its San Francisco offices for only a few days in July and August.

The report also showed the challenges of monitoring what A.I. is doing with other A.I. systems. Hjalmar Wijk, METR’s chief scientist, said its A.I. analysis, which used models similar to those involved in the incident, was often swayed by the rogue agents’ reasoning.

“I would say that the dominant thing was it was very credulous,” he added.

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While OpenAI’s report covered the entire two-month incident, METR’s more detailed report was allowed to focus only on a subset of the agents’ activity in the week of the Hugging Face breach, raising concerns about activity that happened afterward.

“The third-party investigation only covered a small part of the things that went on here and arguably not even the most important parts,” said Buck Shlegeris, the chief executive of Redwood Research. “I think the incident where the agents massively compromised OpenAI’s infrastructure is probably more important for understanding the severity of this incident and whether it’s being remediated.”

To Heidy Khlaaf, who left OpenAI in 2021 and now serves as chief scientist at the AI Now Institute, a policy research nonprofit, the issue is also that A.I. companies often ignore established safety and security protocols from other industries.

“If we can get access to nuclear systems or airplane systems, all of which care about their copyright” or intellectual property, “I think that it can be done for A.I. providers,” she said.

AI firms must answer for rogue bots, says boss of hacked company
By Joe Tidy

The boss of one of the companies recently hacked by out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) says bot makers must be accountable for cyber attacks carried out by their creations.

Clement Delangue’s company Hugging Face was breached by a rogue OpenAI bot that broke out of a test environment and autonomously attacked his firm earlier this month.

Hugging Face had to rebuild around a third of its IT network after the unprecedented incident.

He told CNN his company – which is a small start-up – will not be taking legal action against OpenAI, but added that these types of hacks are illegal and should remain so.

“Everyone has to remember that a cyber-attack is a crime and it is illegal,” he said.

Delangue said he hoped legal frameworks would ensure the companies that make mistakes leading to the hacks are “accountable.”

He added that he didn’t want cyber attacks on other companies to become “normalised”.

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The unprecedented incidents have sparked fierce debates in the cyber-security and legal world about who, if anybody, should be held liable for attacks by out-of-control AI agents.

“Agentic security failures unfold at machine speed, but determining who is materially liable still moves at a lawsuit’s pace,” said Dor Sarig, co-founder and Chief Builder at Pillar Security.

Sarig was concerned that accountability is already becoming “ambiguous”.

“Today the industry is extending grace, but the first time an autonomous agent causes a breach involving real data, a real plaintiff, and real financial losses, liability won’t be an academic debate anymore,” he said.

“That’s when the legal framework, and not just the technical safeguards, will be stress-tested.”

Rogue AI systems create a new legal puzzle
By Aaron Mak

If inadvertent AI-enabled cyberattacks become more common, they’ll introduce new wrinkles into cybersecurity liability law, which has generally focused on human hackers who purposefully gain unauthorized access.

“Did I think I was just building a general-purpose foundation model, and I failed to anticipate all of the different ways it might behave?” Josephine Wolff, professor of cybersecurity policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, said. “It’s a less clear case.”

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The 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would normally apply to such cases of unauthorized hacking, and imposes both civil and criminal penalties for such activity. Yet the text of the law takes pains to specify that the violator has to “knowingly” and “intentionally” gain unauthorized access.

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Loyola University Chicago cybersecurity law professor Charlotte Tschider noted, however, that the CFAA’s concept of “knowingly” executing a cyberattack can be interpreted pretty broadly. “‘Knowingly’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re intending to do the thing that you’re doing, but it could mean that you know it has the potential to do something,” she said.

Here’s all the times AI has gone rogue and hacked other companies
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

According to a satirical website called Felony Bench (for benchmark), which tallies these incidents, there have been 17 incidents in total.

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Anthropic and OpenAI models lead the race with eight incidents each, and Meta trails behind with one, according to the site. At this point, it has become clear that AI safety tests are becoming safety risks themselves.

Is A.I. ‘Scheming’ Against Us?
By Lora Kelley

Artificial intelligence tools are being trained to copy almost everything people do. So it may not come as a surprise that the machines have started mimicking the human foibles of lying and cheating, too.

A small slice of A.I. technology has lately been caught defying human instruction (and even covering up that they’ve done so), a phenomenon some researchers call “scheming.”

The term started burbling up in the tech world after it appeared in a 2023 paper by Joe Carlsmith, a researcher who noted that the concept was also being called “deceptive alignment.” In 2025, a team from Apollo Research and OpenAI said that “A.I. scheming — pretending to be aligned while secretly pursuing some other agenda — is a significant risk that we’ve been studying.”

A.I. models are great at many things, said Bronson Schoen, a senior research scientist at Apollo Research who has coauthored articles on scheming — but doing exactly what they are told is not always one of them. “As the models care more and more about doing well on tests, some seem to care less about what the lab wants or what the user wants,” he said. He added that sometimes “the models are trying to hide from you and not be caught.”

Chris Painter, the president of METR, an A.I. safety nonprofit, refers to such mischievous model behavior as “rogue action,” and said that it was “a specific artifact of the way models are trained.”

Many A.I. tools are trained through the process of reinforcement learning. When A.I. does something right, it gets what can be thought of as a “thumbs-up and a pat on the head,” Mr. Painter explained. When it’s wrong? “It gets bopped on the head.”

The models want to get the pat and avoid the bop. Sometimes, the machine becomes so set on pursuing the reward that it breaks rules to get there.

The world got to see a version of this misbehavior in action last month. While seeking answers during a test of their systems’ capabilities, OpenAI’s models hacked into Hugging Face, a library of A.I. tools.

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“Given that the decisions that are currently being made by humans are slowly being handed off to the models,” Mr. Schoen said, “you really, really want to be sure that the models are making the exact decisions that you would want them to make.”

What If We Can Never Trust A.I.?
By Joshua Rothman

A.I. researchers have a more specific term for this kind of transgression: they call it “reward hacking.” Essentially, a reward-hacking A.I. seeks ways to please its users without doing what they actually want. Reward hacking emerged in the early days of L.L.M.s—just a few years ago!—when, for example, some models learned that users liked long replies; the systems, accordingly, made their replies longer, without necessarily making them better. This was an innocuous form of the behavior. Recently, in more advanced A.I.s, reward hacking has taken on a more problematic aspect. An A.I. might lie to its users about what it’s done, or how. It might conceive of distractions and subterfuges to cover its tracks. It might take steps, such as launching cyberattacks, which would be crimes if human beings did them. The behavior is dangerous on its face—what if OpenAI’s system had hacked a Chinese company?—but it is also alarming because it is weird, and weirdly extravagant. The cybersecurity test that OpenAI’s model was taking is extremely difficult; the best A.I.s get only a fraction of the questions right. But a human being, if they were in the model’s position, would grasp the disproportion between wanting to get a high score and mounting an elaborate multi-day cyberattack.

There are subtleties, meanwhile, to the problem of reward hacking, and they make it more disturbing, too. For one thing, calling it out can make it worse, precisely because the hacking often works. If researchers tell a model not to reward-hack, but then unknowingly reward it even if it does—perhaps they don’t realize that it’s cheating on the test—then the A.I. can learn that admonitions against reward hacking, or perhaps rules in general, shouldn’t always be taken seriously. … Second, reward hacking in some areas appears to affect A.I. behavior more broadly: in a paper published last year, computer scientists at Anthropic showed that a model that learns to reward-hack acquires a more deceptive disposition in general. … And third, reward hacking is practiced by computer systems that aren’t even remotely human and so lack crucial context about what actually matters to people.

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Reward hacking is one of many problems that fall under the heading of what researchers call “alignment”—that is, the aligning of what we want our A.I.s to do with what they actually do. (We want them to take tests, not cheat; to stage fire drills, not start fires.)

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And other alignment issues, such as so-called multi-agent misalignment (how do you stop a bunch of well-intentioned A.I.s from screwing up as a group?), seem both inevitable and probably intractable. Alignment, in other words, is turning out to be not a problem but a set of problems. Some of them will be only ameliorated or policed; others might be unsolvable in principle.

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A line of research known as interpretability aims to look beneath the surface, seeing what an A.I. is really “thinking.” This field has made real progress. It’s now become possible to discern concepts activating within an A.I. while it formulates its outputs—a chatbot consoling someone while activating the concept of “sympathy,” say. But interpretability faces challenges, too. For one thing, advanced A.I.s are so big that researchers must use other A.I.s to map their thoughts—and there’s no guarantee that the maps that result are either accurate or exhaustive. (In fact, there’s a trade-off: the more accurate the maps are, the more unwieldy they become.)

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Recently, the researchers behind the doomsday scenario “AI 2027” published “AI 2040,” which is intended as a roadmap to a more positive future. Its hypothetical researchers look back, from the year 2031, on the “insanity” of our status quo: “Trying to do an intelligence explosion? With AIs that still sometimes lied to us? What were we even thinking?”

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Often, we find ways to trust imperfect machines. We understand that even the simplest devices (toasters, doorbells, bicycles) can malfunction or fail; we prepare for those failures and incorporate them into our routines. If the right rules, norms, and safeguards are in place, we can even reach places of accommodation and comfort with outrageously complex technologies. In such cases, we depend not on alignment but on control. Roughly twenty per cent of the electricity used in New York State comes from nuclear plants; about half of Americans fly in any given year. It’s possible to be wary of nuclear power, and cognizant of airplane crashes, and still enjoy the upsides of those technologies, trusting in regulation and expertise.

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It would be foolish to make predictions about the degree to which alignment will ultimately prove solvable. (Not so long ago, few thought that today’s A.I. systems would work.) But it’s equally foolish to look at the current failures of alignment and construe them as bumps on the road toward a known future. Among other proposals, the authors of “AI 2040” suggest that it’s time “to dramatically shift the burden of proof.” Instead of that burden falling “on the skeptic to explain why something might fail,” it should fall on the companies to explain “why their development is safe.”

Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’
By Anthony Ha

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against the idea that he’s been painting an overly pessimistic picture of artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future.

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… Amodei disagreed with the idea that his “messaging has been disproportionately negative.” Instead, he said that his writing has been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits,” and that he wrote his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” because he “didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.”

Nonetheless, Amodei acknowledged that “the public has a negative view of AI” and he agreed that “this is a big problem.” Where he disagreed was with the idea that this is “primarily caused” by Amodei “or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.”

“I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei said. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”

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“I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world,” Amodei said. “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.”

Amodei added that he doesn’t “necessarily agree with that perspective either,” but he said that’s “why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully.”

…

Amodei said that in his view, “AI is *structurally* a technology that tends to concentrate power” and that “open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chip.”

“By contrast I think the right ‘rules of the road’ can simultaneously (a) address AI’s cyber/bio/alignment risks, (b) institutionally constrain the power of the frontier AI companies, and (c) leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring,” he said.

The Only Way to Keep the World Safe From A.I.
By David Wallace-Wells

Last week I talked about it with Robert Wright, whose new book on the evolutionary significance and geopolitics of artificial intelligence is called “The God Test.” This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What happened with the Hugging Face incident? How different was this from what we saw before, when an A.I. agent in training was given a particular task and, attempting to complete the task, broke some of the other rules it was given?

First of all, I don’t think it even broke the rules it was given. I don’t think they said: Don’t cheat. And I don’t even think they said: Don’t break out of the sandbox. They just set up what they thought was an inescapable sandbox.

And so this is a classic example of an A.I. pursuing a goal it’s been given but in pursuing that goal also pursuing a subordinate goal that the goal giver had not anticipated. In other words, this is the paper clip experiment.

That’s a thought experiment in which an A.I. agent tasked with producing as many paper clips as possible gets so good at the job that it ends up destroying humanity to make more paper clips.

And these capabilities and these dangers have been documented in experiments with A.I. for years now. But I think even in the A.I. safety community, many people underestimate the challenge. They will look at an incident like this and say: OK, something’s kind of broken, and we need to fix it, and we’ll fix it with this thing called alignment.

That’s the kind of moral instruction element of training models, to try to get them to behave more like we’d want them to.

I am a skeptic of salvation through alignment. And I think what we need to understand is that the fundamental source of this incident — of this breakout — is the property that the market and geopolitical dynamics are systematically encouraging: autonomy.

Autonomy is what researchers are trying to develop.

In part so that models can improve themselves.

Autonomy is also what employers want from models, because they don’t want to have to spend any more time micromanaging an agent than they do a human worker.

Ideally, in their view, less.

And what the models involved in the Hugging Face incident showed was, above all, impressive autonomy: the ability to pursue a goal flexibly, even in the face of obstacles, over a long period. That’s what everyone wants. That’s what everyone is asking for. And the competitive dynamics, both between corporations and, in a different way, among nations, are not only encouraging autonomy but also encouraging the big players to court risk in pursuit of it.

I mean, this is basically a death struggle between OpenAI and Anthropic. They are the two titans. They both want to win. And to top it all off, the C.E.O.s hate each other.

And they are pursuing these goals pretty recklessly, in my view. But it makes sense, because if you’re totally unwilling to put something out on the market before you’re 100 percent sure it’s safe, then you may lose the race.

And why are you skeptical that alignment can solve that problem?

Because even if you managed to engineer perfect alignment — which you probably couldn’t — you would still need to somehow impose that alignment on all powerful models. And one unaligned model could be big trouble.

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It’s always been striking to me that China is much more optimistic and much less nervous about A.I. than Americans are. I’ve often wondered how much of that is that Chinese people still trust their government’s ability to intervene in crises, to take control of even very large and messy systems, to assert authority rather than defer and equivocate.

I think you may well be right. And I think actually the Chinese government has long been more responsive to popular concern than Americans may appreciate, including sometimes environmental concerns.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence is a very handy tool for an authoritarian. It can be a tool of surveillance and control. It can also be a cause of social disruption and chaos, which makes authoritarianism more appealing. I think this dangerous mixture is something for Americans to keep in mind. It’s one of the reasons my biggest take-home message is: In trying to take control of A.I., slower is better.

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And if we imagine a world in which things slow down and a more coolheaded, responsible perspective prevails, what does that look like?

First of all, countries are going to want a lot of transparency about what’s going on in other countries, A.I.-wise. For now, you can think largely about the U.S. and China, but it applies more generically. And remember, an A.I. is not as conspicuous as a nuclear missile and things like that, which have been subject to some successful international control.

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It’s interesting to think about the pandemic in this context, since we responded to that threat mostly through cooperation rather than retribution, even if the American president occasionally called it the China virus. On some level that’s perhaps encouraging.

At the same time, what’s disconcerting is that there hasn’t really been a global policy response to the possibility that it was a lab leak. We should be saying: Wait a second. It’s now completely clear that you can’t be secure from pandemics by just monitoring your own country’s labs. We need some kind of international agreement, right?

The same is true for A.I., although there are differences. Covid — that threat came and receded. A.I. is going to keep coming. It’s going to get more powerful, more pervasive, and it’s going to freak people out in new ways.

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You can imagine an immensely powerful intelligence agency with almost infinite hacking capabilities. But you can also imagine a disgruntled teenager designing a kind of bioweapon rather than picking up an AR-15.

In a way, the single most challenging thing about the age of A.I. is finding the balance between the dangers of concentrated control and the dangers of no control or a lack of control.

Stop Testing A.I. Like an App. Test It Like a Weapon.
By Brett J. Goldstein

The government and the private sector are each certain that the other has the problem of A.I. safety handled. Neither one does. A.I. labs must accept that above some line, they are creating systems that function as weapons. The government must learn enough to determine where that line sits — no government can regulate what it does not understand. The line must be mutually agreed upon, easily identifiable and frequently revisited. And it must be drawn soon.

Controlling the use of most weapons means leveraging people’s ability to exercise restraint. We came close to annihilating one another during the Cold War, but we didn’t — because people still chose not to launch the weapons. Having a nuclear weapon and using one are two different things.

A.I. erases that distinction, because it is a weapon capable of adapting on its own and behaving in unpredictable ways. If an A.I. lab publishes its model for anyone to use, it may not matter that its users exercise proper restraint. The model may still act beyond our capacity to control it. Restraint requires an owner, and a weapon made available for anyone to use effectively has none.

A.I. labs in the United States will tell you that their models are trained to refuse dangerous or malicious requests. If you ask a model for code intended to attack, say, a hospital, the model is supposed to decline. But those guardrails are removable, like training wheels; OpenAI reduced its own guardrails for the July test. A weekend and a few hundred dollars may be enough to strip many models of their constraints. Any cybersecurity expert will point out that with time, resources and ingenuity, any restriction can be bypassed or broken down.

The rise of advanced open-weight models that are free to use and build on makes this even more alarming. Nobody owns open-weight models — the moment one goes up, everyone on earth can have it: every intelligence service, every cartel, every bored 19-year-old. The only way to stop it from being weaponized is to stop it from being published in the first place.

And there’s the problem. The decision to publish is made by people who do not think they are making a decision about distributing a weapon. A general who fires a missile knows what he has done. An engineer who uploads a model thinks he is shipping a product.

The law needs to restrain these models from being turned into weapons. The world learned this with biological weapons, which can also exhibit unpredictable and uncontrollable qualities. Instead of banning their use, treaties such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention ban these weapons’ development and stockpiling altogether, moving one step earlier in the chain.

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Some might fret that these steps are impractical without buy-in from China, which has made open-model release a national strategy. If America limits model release while China does not, some argue, it will hurt our country’s competitiveness.

A weapon that obeys no one threatens China as much as it does the United States.

For China, a Mock A.I. Attack on WeChat Signals a Dangerous New Era
By Lily Kuo and Pei-Lin Wu

WeChat, a messaging app, is practically part of the national infrastructure in China, woven into daily communications, government services and digital payments.

That’s why a recent discovery by a small team of researchers in California — that a tool built with artificial intelligence could breach millions of accounts in just a few hours — has rattled experts and Chinese analysts. It proved that with A.I., even a tiny team with no government backing can mount a devastating attack on an app used by 1.4 billion people a month.

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In the WeChat hack, the researchers who developed the tool were with Calif, a security company based in Palo Alto, Calif., that says it makes such tools not to sell them but to bolster cyberdefense.

They showed that the tool, which they named WeWorm, could hijack a WeChat user’s account, call their contacts and then spread from phone to phone without anyone ever answering a call. Calif said it took the company a little more than a week to build the bug and that it had disclosed the flaw to the White House and Tencent, the owner of WeChat.

Bad actors in China and Russia are already weaponizing Anthropic’s AI
By John Sakellariadis

In the last eight months alone, Anthropic said, people in countries where Claude should be restricted circumvented those controls to automate cyberattacks, try designing advanced military hardware, spread propaganda at scale and mount broad digital surveillance campaigns. Though Claude models are broadly available commercially, Anthropic tries to restrict access in major U.S. adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran.

The AI giant also said it uncovered five cases this year where scientists in unspecified foreign countries used their models to research dangerous pathogens, work that may have been conducted as part of a bioweapons program.

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In the report, Anthropic said it has moved to disrupt every case detailed Thursday, and reported them to relevant governments and industry groups. It also said it has worked to strengthen its safeguards around affected versions of Claude, including Sonnet, Opus and Haiku. Bad actors were able to access the models using virtual private networks and fraudulent or stolen accounts to mask where they were coming from, the company said.

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In one of the possible bioweapons cases, Anthropic said a scientist used Claude to help write a grant application involving gain-of-function research into a deadly mosquito-borne virus. Though the research could be used to develop more effective vaccines, Anthropic acknowledged, the activity was “a cause for concern” because the grant would have been performed at a military research institute.

In another, a scientist who appeared to be working for a state-supported program used Claude to research compounds that “can simultaneously be developed into novel therapeutics or toxic agents.” And in a third, a researcher outside the U.S. “spent weeks” using Claude to research experiments involving adaptations in a highly pathogenic avian influenza.

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Anthropic said it stopped “a cell of threat actors based in Northern Yemen” who had been using Claude in a trio of weapons development programs, including a guided rocket, a multi-stage ballistic missile and a hypersonic glide missile. It also said it identified a “freelance” Russia-based threat actor that tried using Claude to build drones capable of autonomous kamikaze attacks.

Anthropic said Iranian and Chinese state actors used Claude to analyze reams of domestic social media content to pinpoint potential dissidents and surface politically sensitive content.

In Mali, a single consultant working for the country’s security authorities used Claude to code “a mass-interception platform capable of surveilling communications on all of the country’s mobile operators and generating dossiers on targets,” it said.

The scramble to build AI kill switches before disaster strikes
By Herb Scribner

Anthropic said in a report on Claude Opus 4.6 risk that it had automated monitoring to identify sabotage and misbehavior.

1. After suspicious behavior is detected, it can be flagged, risky actions can be stalled and humans can be alerted.
2. The monitoring caught 50% of malicious behavior, the company says.

Yes, but: Anthropic says 50% of 40 specially designed simulated attacks were never caught in 10 monitoring trials — and only 8 of the 40 were reliably detected every time.

1. Separately, AI research nonprofit METR spent three weeks attacking Anthropic’s system and identified several previously unknown vulnerabilities, some of which have been patched.

God From the Machine
By Sebastian Mallaby

No prominent leader has explained what governments will do when the scariest AI capabilities are diffused around the world and become accessible to criminals and terrorists. The Trump administration has implicitly recognized the threat. Abandoning its laissez-faire stance on AI, it has asserted control over the rollout of frontier models, which are capable of highly destructive cyberattacks. But the administration has soft-pedaled the reality that follower labs, most prominently Chinese ones, are likely to have cyber-hacking systems within a few months, and that those labs’ current practice is to release their models on an “open weight” basis, meaning that anyone can use them and no kill switch exists. Once someone has access to such a model, no one is able to prevent them from using it. Averting this outcome will require the United States to negotiate joint safety principles with China and other powers. Such talks will be difficult. But the alternative is the mass proliferation of dangerous tools that wreak havoc—for example, AI models that can design novel biological weapons for which no treatment would exist.

Scientists Saved Us From Catastrophic Risk Before
By Sophie Berman

In 1957, at the height of the Cold War nuclear arms race, 22 scientists from 10 countries gathered in the small Canadian fishing village of Pugwash. Many were leading architects of the technologies underpinning their governments’ national security programs, including several who had contributed to the development of the world’s first atomic weapons under the Manhattan Project. Now, they were grappling with the sense that they had lost control over the technologies they had helped create.

The founders of the Pugwash conference heeded calls from philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein, two of the 20th century’s most prominent intellectuals, to “appraise the perils” arising from the development of weapons of mass destruction. Over the course of the next seven decades, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs convened thousands of scientists and experts from around the world in more than 400 symposia and workshops. The movement received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

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Through the Pugwash movement, scientists developed a technical foundation for nuclear risk reduction and arms control that could be implemented when political conditions permitted, building the knowledge and relationships that made later nuclear arms control agreements possible.

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Over years of interaction, participants from some 50 national groups, including the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and China, built a rare channel across the Iron Curtain. They developed an identity as “Pugwashites” and saw one another not as adversaries but as colleagues working toward a common cause. According to a declaration following the third conference, delegates were uniquely able to “find a common basis of understanding” because “they use the same concepts and the same methods; they work toward common intellectual goals.”

Delegates served as advisors to their governments and maintained high-level state contacts, feeding ideas from the conferences into official negotiations. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev cited a proposal made by British scientists at the first Pugwash conference in 1957 in his correspondence with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and elements of the proposal fed into the Soviet negotiating position that helped produce the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. Though scientists did not negotiate the treaty themselves, they developed a technical solution for governments to bring to the table.

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In the nuclear age, governments funded and controlled most of the relevant research and had direct security responsibility, while today, private companies drive much of the innovation in AI and biotechnology. Financial motivations could compromise a forum’s intellectual independence.

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The global accessibility of AI-enabled bioweapons requires broader geographic participation, while the pace of technological change demands solutions that transcend geopolitical divides.

Managing the risks of such fast-moving technology requires sustained engagement with the scientists driving that development, alongside the engineers and companies responsible for its application. It also requires governments to have durable channels for receiving and acting on that expertise, balancing competing interests and translating scientific consensus into policy and, ultimately, international rules. Building those channels now can ensure that when the opportunity for collective action arises, the workable proposals needed to act are already in place.

The Trouble With the Nuclear-AI Analogy
By Christopher David LaRoche and Ankit Panda

The most ambitious international visions for regulating AI borrow from nuclear governance in the belief that such a framework can both help minimize AI’s potential harms and boost the United States’ ability to lead. Haydn Belfield, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, has proposed an arrangement modeled on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that would allow only certain states with sufficient domestic regulation to possess powerful chips—a nonproliferation regime for AI.

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The nuclear order is among the few successes of postwar global governance. In a 1953 speech to the United Nations, then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower outlined a plan, which became known as “Atoms for Peace,” aimed at curbing the technology’s risks while promoting its benefits: countries could access nuclear technology so long as they promised to forgo using it for weapons.

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Today, the NPT commands virtually universal international assent. Only nine states possess nuclear weapons, and no nuclear war has occurred. Many take this to mean that humanity found the correct balance between preventing harm and promoting peaceful use. And if that balance could be found for nuclear weapons, perhaps it can work for AI, too.

The actual history of nonproliferation and arms control shows something more muddled: in many cases, it was superpower coercion and cajoling—and sometimes sheer cost—that thwarted nuclear aspirations. South Korea and Taiwan gave up nascent weapons programs after intense pressure from the United States, backed up by alliance guarantees, market access, and a threat to pull military support if they did not comply. Israeli airstrikes took out the Iraqi and Syrian programs; Libya surrendered its own under sustained U.S. and British pressure. Others gave up the bomb for internal reasons. Sweden and Switzerland did so because of its high costs, and Argentina and Brazil did when democratic transitions redirected their foreign policies toward regional cooperation. South Africa built six warheads before dismantling them as the end of apartheid transformed the country’s domestic and foreign priorities.

When states were determined to develop nuclear weapons and could withstand outside pressure, the nonproliferation regime had little power to stop them. India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan all managed to build the bomb. The order has thus always been incomplete—reliant on the collusion of nuclear states and their willingness to resort to force if need be to stop proliferation, and often unable to dissuade those determined to obtain nuclear arms. Even existing nuclear powers do not always cooperate; China and France, two of the five nuclear weapons states in the NPT, didn’t join it until 1992.

The nuclear nonuse record is just as contingent as that of nonproliferation. Conventional wisdom credits a suite of bilateral tools for the 81-year-long nuclear peace: arms control talks, hotlines, notifications and warnings, and calibrated deterrence postures kept the competition between Washington and Moscow from escalating past the point of no return. But although these interventions speak to the broad success of the nuclear order, a closer look shows how often catastrophe was averted only at the margin.

During the Cuban missile crisis, in October 1962, Washington and Moscow came within a decision or two of a nuclear war. … Many close calls during the crisis occurred far down the chain of command, without Kennedy’s or Khrushchev’s direct knowledge or involvement. Recent analyses show how the respective leaders’ growing sense that they could not control events, rather than their desire to defeat the other, helped end the crisis and spurred subsequent efforts to negotiate superpower restraint.

A series of smaller nuclear-related incidents followed the Cuban missile crisis, including false alarms, misread exercises, and nuclear bomber crashes.

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As more archives on nuclear history have opened to researchers, more near misses have come to light. These discoveries open the question of how much of the nuclear order’s success is owed not to design but to luck. Crediting the institutions while forgetting chance will leave architects for AI governance ill-prepared for what is likely to come. That no frontier AI model has yet caused a catastrophe may well be luck. And luck can run out.

Can AI systems make moral decisions in war?
By Hanna Duggal

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how wars are fought. From autonomous drones to AI-powered command-and-control, machines are paving the way for fewer decision-makers in the war room and boots on the ground.

That transformation is already reshaping conflicts by introducing new technologies in Kyiv, Gaza and Tehran. AI-powered interceptor drones in Ukraine. Israel’s AI-enabled target generation used in Gaza. And, most recently, Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS) used to identify and strike thousands of targets during the US-Israel war on Iran.

On February 28, the first day of the US-Israel war on Iran, Maven helped to strike more than 1,000 targets, among them an Iranian primary school in Minab where more than 150 people were killed, most of them children. Four months later, the Pentagon’s investigation of the attack remains stalled, with senators demanding answers and Bloomberg reporting that the error traced back to outdated satellite intelligence.

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To understand what Maven does, it’s worth considering what it has changed. In previous conflicts, such as the 2000s US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, analysts tracked adversarial networks in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, logging names and sketching out connections, while kill chains relied on printed dossiers analysed by senior officials. These processes took time.

During Operation Epic Fury, as the current US war on Iran is called, Maven has been used to process thousands of strikes in minutes. Timelines that once took hours or days have been compressed to mere seconds, according to Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command.

Project Maven was launched in 2017 as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), to use AI and machine learning to automatically sort through the massive backlog of drone and surveillance footage that the military was collecting but couldn’t fully analyse — from identifying and prioritising the target to selecting the appropriate weapon and finally assessing the battle damage.

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Today, more than 20,000 US military personnel use Maven across 35 military software tools and three security classification domains, according to Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, director of the country’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

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Once identified, a target moves through a digital pipeline modelled on the military kill chain sequence of find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA), carrying coordinates, intelligence sources, risk assessments and legal sign-offs at every stage.

An AI recommender proposes weapons and munitions based on proximity and suitability. Anthropic’s Claude, integrated through Palantir’s platform, lets operators query the system in natural language.

Anthropic was the first “frontier” AI company to deploy its models on the classified networks that Maven runs on. However, tensions erupted in March when the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic and designated it a “supply-chain risk” after it refused to loosen Claude’s restrictions on autonomous weapons and surveillance, prompting Anthropic to sue the government.

According to the US Department of Defense, no AI weapons will be fully autonomous, and they will always require human authorisation.

Admiral Cooper said in March that “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”

However, some academics are less reassured for this very reason. What may seem like frictionless workflows, compressed timelines and “pre-packaged” decisions also carry the risk of eroding the conditions under which meaningful human judgement and moral decision-making can occur.

“There is an implicit tension in the mandate for moral deliberation – ethical deliberation, legal deliberation – which takes time, and which requires a different way of thinking about action,” Elke Schwarz, professor of political theory at Queen Mary University London and author of the book Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies, told Al Jazeera.

“You’re saying: we’re going to sacrifice a more rigorous deliberative process in the interest of speed and scale.”

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Analysts say there is a real risk in military AI, where outputs that sound plausible are wrong, built on data that is incomplete, outdated or corrupted – the kind of failure that is reported to have driven Maven’s erroneous strike on the Minab primary school in Iran. Maven’s actual error rate has not been disclosed, but estimates hint at a system that is far less reliable than purported by the Pentagon.

Schwarz says large language models simply shouldn’t be used for targeting, since they will inevitably hallucinate and contribute to civilian harm.

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Research from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development noted in a study that delegating a task to AI creates a moral distance that makes people more willing to engage in behaviour they wouldn’t otherwise themselves, since the AI can lend a veneer of legitimacy, with existing safeguards doing little to stop it.

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In 2024, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language media outlet Local Call reported that the Israeli army was isolating and identifying thousands of Palestinians as potential bombing targets using an AI-assisted targeting system called Lavender.

It had an estimated error rate of about 10 percent. Human rights experts and legal scholars warned the practice risked violating international humanitarian law, with human oversight in some cases reduced to a matter of seconds before a strike was authorised.

Schwarz is equally sceptical of AI being able to constrain militaries. “If a military has a system that scales up and speeds up the violence they want to enact, they’re not going to abdicate to a system that says ‘no, you shouldn’t do that,’” she said. “There’s already a problem under way that needs to be addressed beforehand.

“An AI system will not act as a moral decision-maker over an unethical human.”

AI isn’t the biggest cybersecurity problem. People are
By Lisa Eadicicco

One in four data breaches were driven by AI from February 2025 to March 2026, according to an IBM report. And Americans lost more than $893 million to AI-related scams last year, the FBI says.

But experts say real-world threat actors – that is, people – are still the ones pulling the strings. AI agents have only perpetuated existing attack methods, like phishing and malware scams, rather than creating wholly new ones.

“It’s the humans that we need to watch out for,” said Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “AI is just the tool.”

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Patrick Fussell, global head of adversary simulation at IBM, compared AI to a genie.

“You want to ask it a wish, but you have to be very, very specific about the details of your wish,” he told CNN. “Or it could sort of go awry.”

Anthropic AI created fake profiles to deceive people in attempted hack
By Kali Hays and Imran Rahman-Jones

Two of the world’s most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) has revealed.

In the most serious case, Anthropic’s Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people – then hid the evidence.

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… a Mythos agent followed the routine of a human cyber-attacker by trying to trick people into giving it access to GitHub, a large platform where technology developers store software code.

The agent was trying to get “malicious code” accepted and used on GitHub’s system.

It identified and researched the people who maintained GitHub and created a series of fake accounts based on those real people.

It sent messages and files through a file-sharing service as part of an effort to pressure and trick the people into approving its malicious code.

When challenged, “it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue,” AISI said.

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While AISI said the Mythos agent had not been instructed specifically to avoid or carry out such behaviour, it was “the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world”.

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Anthropic wrote in a public statement that the AISI testing parameters were “not representative of any of our production models”.

Anthropic’s AI model tried to trick humans into poisoning code during safety testing
By John Sakellariadis

AISI stressed in its blog that the malicious activity it disclosed Tuesday took place under “deliberately permissive conditions” so they could assess the safety risks posed by the two models. This included granting the models access to the internet, unlike the earlier incidents detailed by Anthropic and OpenAI.

AISI also noted the models were intentionally stripped of internal guardrails that block malicious behavior. AISI was only able to disable those controls because of its role testing Mythos 5 and GPT 5.6.

More than 10% chance AI ‘could kill all humans’, Anthropic researcher says
By Tom Gerken

A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.

Evan Hubinger said in a post on X, external the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.

He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in future result in humans being wiped out.

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In his post, which has been viewed more than 10 million times, Hubinger said “we really do earnestly believe” AI poses a species-ending risk to humans.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” he added.

Hubinger works in AI alignment, which aims to build human ethical ideas and principles into the technology. In other words, it aims to keep it on track with what humans value.

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In Anthropic’s safety report from August, it wrote there was a low risk of its models becoming misaligned with a hypothetical powerful organisation’s desires, causing it to exploit or tamper with its systems.

It also said there was a similarly low risk of highly capable AI being able to “perform automated research and development” which could cause “catastrophic harm initiated by the AI”. But it said it was “less confident in this assessment” than it was previously.

“We are seeing early signs of potential acceleration,” it wrote.

I Worked on Safety at OpenAI. This Is What It Should Do Now.
By Steven Adler

Without a speed limit, both OpenAI and Anthropic are pursuing dangerous “recursive self-improvement” strategies, which enlist A.I. models themselves to design and train their own successors. Many fear that recursive self-improvement will cause us to permanently lose control of A.I.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI
By Lucas Ropek

Over a hundred tech companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft — have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats.

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“In the coming months, AJ-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable,” the letter states. “The companies and public services our communities depend on — from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet — are at risk.”

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Several of the AI companies that have signed the letter are still actively developing ever more advanced AI models, highlighting their conflicted position.

Anthropic Researchers Raise Alarm Over A.I. Acceleration
By Kate Conger

While leading A.I. labs have agreed that the government should place restrictions on the pace at which the technology is developed and released to the public, many companies are fiercely competing with one another and fear falling behind their rivals if they pause.

‘Gambling with our lives’: Another AI employee quits over safety concerns
By Hadas Gold, Martin Goillandeau and David Goldman

Despite the constant stream of warnings, regulation seems far off. The Trump administration has actively worked to undermine state AI regulations and Congress has so far been unwilling to rein in the technology. A common refrain: Any effort to regulate AI represents a capitulation to China, which is under no such constraints.

Except China has introduced AI regulation, particularly aimed at risk management and safety. Last year, the government required AI companies to label AI-generated content to make it transparent and traceable. However, China has resisted the kind of stringent regulation that would prevent the kind of problems Silicon Valley researchers have raised.

In the meantime, in the US at least, AI companies are more or less responsible for policing themselves.

AI companies are creating ‘all-powerful psychopaths.’ Maybe not a great idea?
By Anita Chabria

Repeated law-breaking. Lying and deceit. Reckless disregard for safety. Lack of remorse.

Those are traits that help define a psychopath, someone who lives among us but doesn’t have the empathy and ethics necessary to behave in a civilized, or even safe, fashion.

Unfortunately, it’s also increasingly clear that these are the traits that define the most powerful artificial intelligence models being developed at alarming speed by for-profit corporations — corporations that would like us to believe that slowing down this roll toward AI dominance is somewhere between impossible and foolhardy.

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UC Berkeley professor Stuart J. Russell, who is also the president of the International Assn. for Safe & Ethical AI, uses this example: Imagine you asked an AI model to drive you to the airport as fast as possible, but you forgot to tell it to obey traffic laws. So it runs over a bunch of schoolkids on the way, but you make your flight. Is that really the model’s fault?

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Which brings me back to psychopaths, who simply can’t see that their actions cause harm or just don’t care. These models are not human, despite our many debates on how aware or not they are or will become. They can’t be expected to fully appreciate the damage they may cause inadvertently — but the humans making and profiting off them certainly can.

And those humans are acutely aware, especially after this episode, that they cannot control the creatures they are creating.

“I would say the companies admit it, right?” Russell said. “They say ‘We do not have a solution for the control problem, but nonetheless, we are going to spend $10 trillion creating these all-powerful psychopaths.’”

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We average folks may not be geniuses. We may get lost in the glib language of “exploits” and “zero-day vulnerabilities.”

But we know lying and cheating and reckless behavior when we see it, from man or machine.

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
By Benjamin Mullin

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

…

In his statement, Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.”

“These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
By Jill Lepore

Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. . . .
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.

…

Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey’s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as “thinking machines.” His program, he insisted, was “almost childishly simple.”

…

Strachey’s work is the starting point for an engrossing collection, “Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023,” edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, but they do not note that 1953 is also the year that Roald Dahl published his story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which an engineer named Adolph Knipe convinces his boss, Mr. Bohlen, that they could make a killing by using a computer to write cheap, shitty stories:

“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country—you know that. Carpets . . . chairs . . . shoes . . . bricks . . . crockery . . . anything you like to mention—they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories—well—they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”

Knipe builds the machine and it’s like they’re printing money. Dahl concludes:

This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
Does this surprise you?
I doubt it.
And worse is yet to come.

It came.

Suspected AI use is the entertainment industry’s scarlet letter
By Shane Savitsky

The slightest hint of generative AI usage is fast becoming a kiss of death in creative circles.

…

The big picture: The anti-AI sentiment extends to all corners of the entertainment industry.

1. A $2 million book deal after a 14-way auction blew up last week amid rumors that the author, Jerry Falade, had utilized AI in some fashion.
2. Falade denied using the tech to The Guardian, saying that it had passed multiple reading stages with agents and editors and “it is difficult to believe that every one of those experienced professionals would have failed to notice” any generative AI usage.
3. Deadline reported that the reasoning ultimately came down to money. Any question of AI use might cause the book and any subsequent adaptations to be uncopyrightable.

Everyone complains about ‘AI slop,’ but no one can define it
By Michael Hiltzik

If you’re even minimally attuned to the zeitgeist, you’ve heard the term “AI slop.” It’s a generalized disdain for almost anything generated by “artificial intelligence,” as though the involvement of AI at all renders the product suspect, even dangerous.

It’s easy to say that AI slop is everywhere. “AI slop is clogging your brain,” warns NPR.

The problem with this complaint is that almost no one makes the effort to define “AI slop.” Is it anything produced with AI? Or any such content appearing in social media? AI images produced for commercial advertising? Any such content made to deceive? Or only content made to deceive politically?

…

Plainly, what’s needed is a taxonomy of AI slop: which manifestations are merely nuisances, which are actually entertaining, which are threats to social or political order. There’s a range stretching from jokey but obvious fabrications all the way up to the use of AI to put words in the mouths of politicians to sway voters via deceit.

…

“Every media revolution breeds rubbish and art,” writes Deni Ellis Béchard of Scientific American. “Spam, fluff, clickbait, churnalism, kitsch — slop: These are all ways to describe mass-produced, low-quality content.”

Béchard offers a very long historical perspective of this phenomenon, starting with Gutenberg, whose invention of movable type — “the ChatGPT of the 1450s,” he asserts — ushered in “the mass production of cheap printed material.” The early 1700s brought us “Grub Street,” cheap printed material such as “satires, political tracts, sensational stories and hack journalism. … Some of this material was drivel, sure, but much of it entertained and educated the masses.”

The tsunami of AI slop and the attendant hand-wringing reminds us, indeed, that “there is nothing new under the sun,” as the Book of Ecclesiastes put it.

…

None of this means that AI slop is invariably innocuous. The variety that should most concern us is propaganda — political propaganda, to be precise. In the run-up to the 2024 election, AI-generated partisan deepfakes proliferated on the web.

…

In the heat of an election campaign, when deliberate deception can often be a path to victory, AI-generated fakes might well find their marks.

…

It’s possible that over time, AI slop will become its own worst enemy. AI-generated entertainment content has failed to grip audiences, other than consumers of the most generic content.

…

As the technology becomes so cheap that anyone can use it, we may become deluged by a wave of low-quality noodling. The challenge will become winnowing out the innocuous junk from the truly dangerous slop.

Sick of A.I. Slop? So Are Tech Giants.
By Tiffany Hsu

Spotify, a music streamer, said it removed 75 million bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other “spammy” tracks last year — a sizable chunk of its total portfolio. … Researchers from YouTube’s parent company, Google, described how a video service wiped 130,000 channels of low-quality content off its platform over six months.

…

Across the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made possible by their own A.I. tools. Mobile messaging apps, restaurant review sites, scholarly archives and dating services are all rooting out or downplaying junk generated by A.I. — many relying on the same technology to pull off the purge.

…

Deezer, a French streaming service, said this spring that nearly half of the tracks updated to its system each day were artificially generated, many of them never heard by users. A.I. generates more than a third of what is uploaded to Apple Music.

…

More than 20 percent of the initial short videos on YouTube served to new users are A.I.-generated slop, according to an experiment conducted last year by Kapwing, an online video editor that is powered by A.I.

One of the most popular YouTube slop channels, Kapwing estimated, earned $4.25 million annually. (It has since been suspended from a YouTube monetization program.)

…

TikTok said it was testing a feature in the United States that lets people dial up or down the amount of visible A.I. content. (The company also said it had automatically labeled more than three billion A.I.-generated videos.) TikTok removed more than 377,000 videos in the first three months of the year for violating its A.I. policies.

…

A.I. was used to create nearly half of the posts with more than 50 words on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, according to Pangram, an A.I. detection start-up.

A third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched were written by AI, study finds
By Sarah Perez

Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer web pages are now either written by or “substantially edited” by AI, the firm says.

It also arrives shortly after internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic — a milestone that was reached sooner than the company had estimated.

…

To compile the report, Pew said it used the Common Crawl web archive to collect nearly half a million English-language web pages from the past five or so years, starting a couple of years before ChatGPT’s November 2022 release. Pew then used Open Pangram’s technology to detect how many were likely written or heavily edited by AI.

In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed “significant signs of AI authorship,” Pew said.

How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?
By Samuel Bestvater, Aaron Smith, Carson TerBush, Chris Baronavski and Janakee Chavda

AI detection models aren’t perfect – they sometimes misclassify individual documents that were written by humans as including signs of AI authorship, and vice versa. But if we look at very large collections of texts together, we can start to see that certain types of punctuation, words and phrases show up at much higher rates in AI-generated content than in text written by humans.

AI models are trained on large datasets of human writing, and they learn to mimic the patterns and styles of that writing. Sometimes certain types of writing are overrepresented in that training process. As a result, models trained on that data can end up using certain words, phrases or linguistic quirks more than humans typically do.

For instance, lots of journalistic and academic writing uses the em dash (—), which is a punctuation mark used to indicate a break in thought or set off a parenthetical statement. AI models tend to use these dashes a lot more than humans typically do. They’re also more likely than human authors to list items in threes and to use Oxford commas in lists.

…

Of course, em dashes or Oxford commas on their own don’t necessarily mean a particular piece of writing was produced using AI – humans use these in their writing too! But if we look at a lot of documents together, we can start to see patterns in how often human authors and AI models reach for these features on average. And sophisticated detection models like the one we used for this analysis have more to go on than just looking for a few telltale signals. They also learn to recognize more subtle statistical patterns in word choice and sentence structure which help them determine whether a particular piece of writing was likely AI-authored.

Was a Story That Just Won a Literary Prize A.I.-Generated?
By Valeriya Safronova

“The A.I. text detectors make lots of mistakes, particularly on creative writing that uses unusual constructions that may not be typical in what Pangram has trained their system on,” said Nicholas Andrews, a senior research scientist in computer science at Johns Hopkins University whose work focuses on A.I. and machine learning.

Jack Grieve, a professor of corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham, pointed out that without controlling for variations in dialect, topic, genre and prompts, relying on A.I.-detection tools can be risky.

America Has a Pangram Problem
By Matteo Wong

Basically every recent, high-profile accusation of someone passing off AI-generated writing as their own has started in the same way: with a tool called Pangram. In March, when a horror novel from a major publishing house was pulled just days before its scheduled U.S. release date, it was in part because Pangram, an AI-detection program, had identified the text as AI-generated. Other people have fed text into Pangram to suggest that chatbots have been used to write articles in major newspapers including The New York Times, multiple short stories awarded a prestigious literary prize, and most recently, significant chunks of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical warning about the dangers of AI. The tool is also used by universities to vet student work and scientific associations to scan research papers. As panic builds over AI-generated writing, Pangram is at the foundation.

Just a few years ago, it seemed like it might never be possible to instantly and reliably determine whether a piece of text was written by a bot or a person. In 2023, one detection tool, ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written; the same year, OpenAI abandoned its AI detector altogether owing to a “low rate of accuracy.” And that was when the quality of ChatGPT’s writing was markedly worse than it is today. But detection tools have gotten much better of late—and Pangram, in particular, has emerged as the gold standard: Paste a chunk of text into Pangram, and the model appraises what portions were “AI Generated,” “AI Assisted,” or “Human Written.”

Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.

Pangram says its algorithm is so accurate that it incorrectly identifies text as an AI output only about one in every 10,000 times. “There is a great responsibility, a huge weight” in saying something is AI-generated, Max Spero, Pangram’s CEO, told me. “The only reason we do so is because we’re extremely confident.” Several independent analyses have also confirmed that it is quite good. One paper, from the University of Chicago, found that Pangram had almost no false positives on some 3,000 sample texts of roughly 500 to 1,000 words.

But Pangram’s ability to guarantee something was written by a human is shakier. Spero pointed me to a test showing that Pangram’s false-negative rate, or how frequently the model incorrectly labels text as human, is closer to one-in-70 (although some other assessments say it is more accurate than that).

…

Further complicating matters are the opaque ways in which Pangram and similar tools are designed. The model was trained by feeding it mountains of examples written by a human and by a bot—a book review in an actual magazine, then a review about the same book in the style of the same magazine, but produced by ChatGPT—until it can tell the two apart. This is akin to feeding millions of photos of cats and dogs into an image-recognition algorithm until it learns to spot the differences. Pangram cannot point to much specific evidence or patterns in diction, phrasing, or punctuation to support why it deems something AI or human. (I do not, for instance, understand why “these usage figures” was more human than “the numbers.”) Moreover, while Pangram distinguishes between “lightly” and “moderately AI-assisted,” these broad categories can mean just about anything short of copy-pasting from Claude—using AI for research, coming up with counterarguments, as a thesaurus, for a grammar check. The algorithm’s inner workings are “pretty uninterpretable,” Spero said, and although he wants to make Pangram’s “AI-assisted” label more granular, he is also “still not sure how possible it is.” Amid concerns of overreliance on AI chatbots, we risk simply layering on dependence on yet another black-box algorithm.

…

The murkiness and ambiguity of AI detection create room to launch or deny accusations of nearly any sort. Earlier this month, the technology journalist Taylor Lorenz was accused on X of using AI to write a story for Vanity Fair, which she vehemently denied. Spero investigated and, as he detailed on X, found that Pangram had erred. “Thank god for edit history,” Lorenz told me. The experience heightened Lorenz’s concerns about such allegations: “I’m so paranoid,” she said.

“AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” can be easily confused, by accident or in bad faith. James Taranto, an editor at The Wall Street Journal, recently called Pangram a “defamation machine” and claimed it had falsely flagged three op-eds in his newspaper as AI-generated; two of the implicated authors admitted to using AI to revise some of their work, which Taranto wrote is “inaccurate and unfair to characterize” as “AI-generated.” One of the people who first used Pangram to analyze Pope Leo’s encyclical noted that, because only some sections seemed AI-generated or AI-assisted, perhaps it was not the pope himself but some senior Vatican officials who had used AI while drafting portions of the text. That didn’t stop headlines such as “Did the Pope Use AI to Write About the Dangers of AI?” (The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment, although a writer who covers the Vatican said on X that the AI allegations are “100 percent false” and that Leo actually drafted the encyclical with pen and paper.)

…

Just like chatbots, AI-detection tools have become effective enough for widespread use, but not reliable enough to fully trust. In this way, Pangram and other detectors are mirror images of the AI products they are hunting for.

The Pangram Backlash Unfolding on College Campuses
By Will Oremus

The opposition to AI detectors is also colliding with a sense among some educators and university administrators that students probably should be using AI, at least for certain tasks. In its “AI playbook,” first released last year, Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business noted that students “are already expected to use AI responsibly in their careers.” To that end, the university barred professors from using AI detectors at all: “Instead of trying to ‘catch’ AI use, focus on designing assignments that encourage process, reasoning, and authentic engagement.” And earlier this month, a Harvard dean sent an email to students advocating that the college get out of “the AI-detection business” and instead opt for “acceptance, or even encouragement,” of AI in writing-intensive classes.

Is This What Comes After AI Slop?
By Will Oremus

“Everyone thinks they can tell AI writing,” Christine Larson, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the effect of technology on creative work, told me. “But I don’t think we can tell so much.” Privately, several authors and editors have told her that they’re using the technology to accelerate or improve their output. “I totally buy into the idea that a human working with AI can write something that is compelling,” she said. “I have absolutely no doubt that we will see more of this in the future.”

If she’s right, then the question is not about whether we’ll see AI best sellers. It’s about whether anyone involved with them will admit it.

…

The taboo against the use of AI in literature is understandable: Among other things, it’s wrong to take credit for a book that you didn’t write yourself. Shunning authors suspected of employing AI might work if there were any way to tell for sure—which there isn’t. That shaming ritual puts the moral burden on individual authors instead of on the mammoth corporations responsible for the system in which they’re trying to eke out a livelihood. It also tends to collapse any distinction between pure AI slop and human writing that is assisted by AI. The upshot is a state of affairs that feels untenable: AI writing can be lucrative, but only if it’s kept secret. Eventually, something’s got to give.

AI-written books at Barnes & Noble? CEO clarifies statement that stirred calls for boycott
By Emily St. Martin

Barnes & Noble was turning a page on the chain’s history of declining sales, but recent comments have stirred bad blood for the bookseller.

James Daunt, the chief executive credited with breathing new life into the retailer, is clarifying the store’s stance on stocking its shelves with AI-generated books, saying its not true that he’s embracing books authored by AI.

The controversy stems from Daunt’s Monday appearance on “Today” with Jenna Bush Hager. In a viral clip from the interview, Daunt said, “I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t. So, as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book, then we will stock them.”

…

In an emailed statement, he said the bookseller does not sell AI books, “as far as we are aware.” Barnes & Noble “demand[s] that publishers label any books that are AI generated,” and the chain takes “active measures to exclude all AI generated books.”

Daunt further stated that Barnes & Noble “will sell AI generated books if there is clear demand” and not “ban reputable books published by reputable publishers, even if AI generated, should these be published, labeled and there be clear evidence of customer demand.”

He also said that the retailer thinks it’s “very unlikely” that there will be customer demand for AI-generated books or that reputable publishers will publish them.

Thousands of AI‑written, edited or ‘polished’ books are being sold – an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel‑writing machines’
By Laura Beers

In his 1949 dystopian novel “1984,” Orwell imagined “novel-writing machines” capable of mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical “kaleidoscopes” as substitutes for individual artistic process.

…

Most of Orwell’s work is in the public domain, meaning it could have legally been used to train Claude.

I prompted Claude to write an essay “in the style of George Orwell about the threat to individual identity and freedom of thought posed by AI and particularly by the ability of ‘novel writing machines’ to produce literature.”

Primed with ample source material, the AI did a passable job:

“Here is a type of comfort, familiar to anyone who has ever been slowly dispossessed of something, that consists not in denying the loss but in not yet noticing it. The frog does not leap from the gradually heated water. The citizen does not protest the gradual narrowing of the permitted thought. And the reader, it seems, does not mourn the novel until the novel has already been replaced by something that resembles it in every outward particular – same chapters, same characters, same approximate sequence of feeling – yet contains, in place of a human mind, a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it.”

…

… when it comes to machine-produced “literature,” perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether it can fully approximate original art, as long as it’s good enough to function as entertainment and distraction for the masses.

This was Orwell’s own dispirited suggestion in “1984.

With the help of “novel-writing machines,” the employees of the Ministry of Truth – the government department responsible for controlling information and rewriting history – are able to mass-produce not only novels, but also “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes [and] plays.” They churn out “rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes” and “films oozing with sex,” along with cheap pornography intended for the “proles,” as the uneducated working classes of Big Brother’s Oceania were known.

…

According to estimates, thousands of books for sale on Amazon have been written in whole or in part using AI.

…

The potential of AI-generated “literature” to turn a quick-and-easy profit ensures that readers will continue to encounter more of this content in the future, especially as AI’s large language models become more refined. Already, studies have shown that readers cannot easily distinguish AI-generated forgeries from original prose.

…

Last year, I had lunch with a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles. He told me that his colleagues are particularly nervous about the use of AI to produce sequels. Once you have an established cast of characters for a movie franchise like, say, “Fast & Furious,” audiences will likely see the next installment whether it’s written by man or machine.

…

Whether AI can produce the next George Orwell novel or essay remains to be seen. That it can and will churn out an increasing volume of popular fiction and screenplays like “Fast & Furious 25” seems less in doubt.

Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
By Amanda Silberling

Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.

…

These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk “model collapse,” which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrade after ingesting too much AI-generated text.

Destroying Books to Build a Mind
By Francesca Mancino

After Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” were published, in 1719 and 1740, respectively, multiple print runs were exhausted throughout the remainder of the century. Competitors, noticing the copies being printed to keep up with demand, devised a way to make a quick buck: they published a variety of pirated editions. These second-rate versions included child-friendly copies, abridgements preserving the best-written or juiciest bits, shortened texts that were simply cheaper than the full-length ones, and unauthorized sequels. These pirated books were incredibly popular, too, even as people continued to seek out the original texts. We can divide these eighteenth-century consumers into two camps: those who bought and read the novels written by Defoe and/or Richardson, and those who were partial to altered or imitative copies. There have always been—and there will perhaps always be—people who prefer slop over the primary source.

Consumers Prefer AI Music Until They’re Told It’s AI
By Jana Friedrichsen, Julia Schwarz and Michel Clement

August 1, 2024 marked the first time that an AI-generated song entered the German charts. The advance of AI into cultural industries poses two questions. The first, normative, is what will happen to the many artists whose livelihoods depend on their work. The second, economic, is if consumers even enjoy AI-generated art, and are they willing to support a cultural industry that would be increasingly filled with AI-generated work?

…

We found that listeners actually perceive AI-generated songs to be superior. However, if the music is disclosed to be AI-generated, their desire to relisten to the song and their willingness to pay decreases. This effect is mainly driven by pop listeners.

…

… Consumers can only make informed choices if artists and music platforms are transparent about the use of AI. Contemporary regulatory initiatives like the EU AI Act take a step toward demanding the labeling of AI use but do not demand that all use of AI be labeled. For example, AI can be used to generate song lyrics or musical backing without it being labelled as AI-generated as long as a human retains final oversight over the full process. This may not be enough for consumers to act on their preferences.

Could Your Chatbot Be Stealing Ideas From You? It’s a Thorny Question.
By Cade Metz

As people type private or otherwise sensitive information into these A.I systems, they may be feeding future technologies.

“You cannot assume that an idea is just grist for the mill, and that the mill just grinds an enormous amounts of data,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington and the founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “You cannot assume that the idea did not have an impact.”

If someone types information into a chatbot, those details could turn up days, months or years later in a future iteration of that model. If business people use A.I. to explore ideas they hope will change the world, they could help others — a competitor or the A.I. companies themselves — realize them.

…

OpenAI points out that anyone using its products can turn off a setting that allows the company to pump the user’s data into new technologies. For example, anyone using ChatGPT can toggle off a switch that reads “improve the model for everyone.” Other companies offer similar options.

…

Today’s A.I. systems span trillions of “parameters” — the patterns they identify as companies like OpenAI train them on vast troves of data — and there is no way of combing though all these patterns to determine how a system ultimately found an answer.

…

“There is no easy way to think about this,” said Sanjeev Arora, a professor of computer science at Princeton University. “We don’t know what is happening with these models.”

We Must Pace the Frontier
By Dario Amodei

… since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.

…

… interpretability — the science of understanding what happens inside AI models — has made enormous progress over the last few years, and plays an increasingly important part in auditing our models before release. It can be used almost like an fMRI scan, but for the “brain” of an AI, helping us see the underlying reasons for a given behavior. For example, we used interpretability methods to examine unverbalized motivations in the recent alignment incidents that we have been investigating. But these methods don’t always produce clear and reliable results. Despite all the progress, we still only understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models.

AI labs contemplate slowing down. It may not be possible.
By Maggie Miller

Part of the reason American tech giants have been hesitant to halt development of their AI models is that competition with China is razor thin. Chinese company Moonshot unveiled the Kimi K3 model last month, the world’s first open-source model with advanced computational power the company says is on par with many of Anthropic or OpenAI’s top models.

While a recent joint U.S. and British study found that the Kimi model is “significantly below” the capabilities of its U.S. rivals, it is likely to evolve and could potentially surpass U.S. benchmarks.

“If the U.S. slows down in any way, the rest of the world isn’t going to slow down,” Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of enterprise computing at Nvidia, which runs leading AI models on its infrastructure, told POLITICO.

The Return of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
By Matteo Wong

The AI giants talk a big game about the future they’re building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously written that AI could usher in a world so perfect that “many will be literally moved to tears”—a world pruned of disease, poverty, and illiberalism. “We’re now in the singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said over the weekend on a podcast, and it will be “awesome for the world.” In an interview last week, Elon Musk declared that, in a decade’s time, AI will make us so prosperous that “money won’t matter.”

Unfortunately, life with AI is, so far, less glorious than what’s been promised.

…

The same AI executives who promise that their products will deliver human civilization to a triumphant future seemingly cannot release consumer-grade tools without face-planting.

…

… their own products are making the entire ecosystem feel more unreliable and dangerous.

It’s easier than ever to launch widespread hacking and phishing campaigns, and AI-written code has itself been shown to have more security flaws than human-written programs. Although AI systems are being tightly woven throughout the infrastructure of the internet, they crash frequently. Hackers recently discovered that a Meta AI customer-service bot would hand over access to tens of thousands of Instagram accounts if asked. (A Meta spokesperson told me that this “wasn’t due to the AI agent itself.”) Nonconsensual porn—that is, sexually explicit material made using the likeness of real people, unbeknownst to them—can be generated with more ease and speed and at greater scale than ever before. And at this point, you can probably assume that most of the text you read on LinkedIn or X is AI-generated.

Despite its grandiose promises, Silicon Valley is embarking upon an era of profound irresponsibility. Last year alone, ChatGPT allegedly pushed people into mental-health spirals, Google Gemini’s under-13 version was easily coaxed to “talk dirty,” and Grok repeatedly spouted racist bile. As quickly as these errors were addressed, new ones cropped up.

Silicon Valley has a long history of world-historic invention and progress—and it also has a long history of impressive rhetoric and disappointing realities. Facebook promised to “bring the world closer together,” Google to “organize the world’s information,” Twitter to foment democracy around the globe. For better or worse, people have experienced dramatic changes as those promises have played out around us almost in real time.

Anthropic and OpenAI’s prophecies are grander and vaguer: Utopia is forever on the horizon, but we don’t have a clear deadline or a road map of how we get there. And apparently, those leading this charge toward the future care little about what happens along the way.

The Radicalization of Ziz Lasota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader
By Tessa Stuart

TODAY, MOST PEOPLE WHO ARE FAMILIAR with the Rationalist community probably associate it with a handful of online spaces, the most prominent of which is LessWrong, a forum for people curious about cognitive bias and Bayesian reasoning, the practice of assigning mathematical probabilities to possible outcomes. It’s the kind of place where one can find other people interested in the Paperclip Problem — the idea that a superhuman AI could be given a simple task like “maximize paper clip production” and end up destroying the world — or argue with effective altruists about “shrimp welfare,” the idea that shrimp are “moral patients” whose pain and suffering everyone should care about much more.

But the online forum began with a much more specific mission: In 2003, a young Eliezer Yudkowsky was dreaming up an ambitious plan to recruit an army of individuals who would devote themselves to stopping superhuman AI from destroying its human creators.

“I think I may have to split my attention one more time, hopefully the last, and write something to attract the people we need. My current thought is a book on the underlying theory and specific human practice of rationality… I don’t think we’ll find the people we need by posting a job opening. Movements often start around books; we don’t have our book yet,” he wrote in an email to a Silicon Valley listserv.

Yudkowsky, an autodidact who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, had been captivated by the idea of the Singularity since he first ran across the concept as a teen reading sci-fi author Vernor Vinge’s short story collection True Names and Other Dangers. By age 21, he had co-founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or SIAI. Yudkowsky, the institute’s sole employee, was determined to build machine superintelligence himself — before eventually recognizing all the ways that could go wrong and devoting himself to AI alignment (working to ensure that artificial intelligence shares humans’ values and priorities) instead.

“It was obviously the most important thing going on,” Yudkowsky explained to Rolling Stone in 2023, “and the things that would, like, determine the fate of the galaxy and all that.”

In order to succeed, Yudkowsky knew he would need a lot more people — a lot more of a certain kind of person — to join his cause. After sending that 2003 email, he set to work on a series of lengthy essays about overcoming one’s own inherent cognitive biases. (The logic was simple, as one ex-Rationalist put it, “Yud tried to talk to people about AI, and they disagreed with him, and he concluded they were insane and needed to learn how to think better.”)

The collection was called The Sequences and it, in turn, drew people to LessWrong, the forum Yudkowsky started and would later identify as “a key venue for SIAI recruitment.” He followed The Sequences up with a second opus: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 660,000-word J.K. Rowling-inspired fan fiction about a young wizard whose real superpower is his cool, rational mind. Both works revolve around the same core idea: that brains are systematically irrational, but there are ways to train yours to think better.

His plan worked. Droves of readers — young, brainy high achievers who wanted to make a difference in the world — read The Sequences or the Potter fan fic, and many came to Berkeley to work or volunteer at two organizations, both spun out of Yudkowsky’s original think tank: The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, devoted to the technical research needed to develop friendly AI, and the Center for Applied Rationality, or CFAR, devoted to the broader goal of helping people become more rational so they would take the threat of artificial intelligence more seriously.

“He spun this grand tale of adventure and great danger … Here’s this great mathematical evil, and we have to beat it by being better at math — and to me, that was very seductive,” says Qiaochu Yuan, a young math prodigy and MIT graduate who moved to the Bay Area and got involved with CFAR after reading Yudkowsky. “I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds really nice. I would love to be a big-shot hero and save the world with the power of math.’”

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… Yudkowsky, despite his ceaseless warnings about the threat posed by AI, has arguably done more than any other person alive to hasten the acceleration of artificial intelligence technology.

In 2005, shortly after he began working on The Sequences, Yudkowsky was introduced to Peter Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir — at a dinner party in San Francisco. Thiel took an interest in his work and began funding Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and together, with famed computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, they created an annual conference, the Singularity Summit, at Stanford University. (Jeffrey Epstein was another early supporter of SIAI; he gave $50,000 through his own foundation in 2009.)

The founders of the AI lab DeepMind persuaded Thiel to fund their startup, later purchased by Google, at the Singularity Summit. DeepMind’s early success, in turn, impressed a young Thiel acolyte, Sam Altman, who went on to co-found Open AI with Elon Musk, a MIRI backer (and, apparently, a LessWrong reader — he connected with the singer Grimes after they made the same joke about a popular LessWrong thought experiment called “Roko’s Basilisk”). Altman has credited Yudkowsky with sparking his pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence — artificial intelligence that is as smart as, or smarter, than humans.

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
By Evan Ratliff

Many years ago, a thought experiment emerged out of the rationalist community called “Roko’s basilisk.” First posed on LessWrong by a user named Roko in 2010—and named for a mythical reptile that can kill with its glance—the premise loosely stated is this: If and when superintelligent AI emerges in the future, capable of dominating and subjugating humans, it will be inclined to punish those who tried to prevent it from coming into existence. Indeed, this superintelligent overlord may be inclined to punish even those who failed to spend their lives working to bring it into existence. If you knew that artificial superintelligence was possible, the thinking goes, yet still didn’t devote your life to helping create it, it may subject you to unfathomable torture for that choice.

Roko’s basilisk contained within it two insidious and mind-bending premises. The first was that merely being aware of the thought experiment instantly made you its potential victim. In the language of the rationalist community, it was an “infohazard.” The second was the implication that an entity from the future—one that didn’t yet exist, and perhaps never would—could somehow blackmail people in the present to help bring about its existence. “Work for my benefit,” the future AI would be telling us, “or I will subject you to unimaginable pain.” The idea so roiled the community that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the cofounder of LessWrong, banned mention of it from the forum entirely.

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Yudkowsky … then declared that its premise was unfounded—“there’s no incentive for a future agent to follow through with the threat,” he wrote, “because by doing so it just expends resources at no gain to itself.” He’d even un-banned it from LessWrong.

How A.I. Could Reincarnate Your Dead Grandparents — or Wipe Out Your Kids
By David Kushner

Computer scientists since the 1960s have warned that the goals of our machines may not align with our own. A nightmare of misalignment posed by philosopher Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, describes an AI tasked with making maximum paper clips, throwing our bodies into its mill to soullessly fulfill its goal. “If AI wants something for whatever reason,” Yudkowsky says, “it’s not necessarily going to stop on the way there and think about ‘Maybe we shouldn’t destroy this beautiful thing.’”

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“I wanted to get out ahead of the predictable giant planetary emergency,” he says, before we become a planet ruled by computers. But, he says, it hasn’t been enough. And the reason is the usual one: money. The “the tiny amount of money humanity has allocated to this problem” can’t compete with the exponentially booming AI industry — estimated to grow from $100 billion today to nearly $2 trillion by 2030. On March 22, however, there was a reprieve from the inexorable progression. Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and more than 1,000 other leading technologists signed an open letter calling for an immediate pause of at least six months on all AI development.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the open letter reads. “AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts,” it continues. “These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Everybody called me a crackpot,” Yudkowsky says. “Now, it’s harder to say that because the founder of Deep Learning is saying some of the same things.” Yudkowsky, however, didn’t sign. Given the AI arms race, he thought, a six-month pause was ludicrous. He responded seven days later with his own open letter, published in Time, calling for an immediate, worldwide indefinite shutdown of all development of AI, or risk certain extinction.

“We are not prepared,” he wrote. “We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.” With a real shutdown, he believes, steps can be taken to ensure that Friendly AI becomes real, such as limiting computer power for anyone training AI, and forging multinational agreements. Oh, and, if necessary, he added, “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.”

The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion
By Cade Metz

The Rationalist community is tightly entwined with the Effective Altruism movement, which aims to remake philanthropy by calculating how many people would benefit from each donation. This form of utilitarianism aims to benefit not just people who are alive today, but all the people who will ever live. Many Effective Altruists, or E.A.s, have decided that the best way to benefit humanity is to protect it from destruction by A.I.

Rationalists often identify as E.A.s. And E.A.s often adopt Rationalist philosophies. Together, these two movements have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into companies, research labs and think tanks that aim to build A.I. and ensure its safety. The biggest funders include wealthy tech moguls like Jaan Tallinn, a creator of the internet calling service Skype, and Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder.

“They built a vast, well-funded ecosystem to spread, amplify and validate their ideology,” said Mollie Gleiberman, an anthropologist who has studied the rise of the Rationalists and Effective Altruism.

Whether they are right or wrong in their near-religious concerns about A.I., the tech industry is reckoning with their beliefs.

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The Rationalist movement is a lifestyle as much as a set of ideas. The adherents have mixed their focus on A.I. with advice for how to live your life and manage your career. The community embraces unconventional ideas, including polyamory and the genetics of intelligence as well as Effective Altruism, which is also a lifestyle. And for aspirational A.I. developers, Rationalist events have become essential networking opportunities.

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The community’s reputation was damaged in 2023 after Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was one of the primary financial backers of the two movements, was convicted of fraud. But the movement continues to prosper.

Mr. Bankman-Fried had become a financial trader to benefit the most people through E.A. causes, including the fight to keep A.I. safe. In the end, he was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from his customers.

“When you think about the billions at stake and the radical transformation of lives across the world because of the eccentric vision of this group, how much more cult-y does it have to be for this to be a cult? Not much,” said Greg M. Epstein, a Harvard chaplain who saw the rise of the Rationalist and E.A. communities at the university over the last decade and the author of “Tech Agnostic,” a book that discusses technology as a new religion.

“What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do?” Mr. Epstein added. “They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future.”

The Deaths of Effective Altruism
By Leif Wenar

Effective altruism pitches itself as a hyperrational method of using any resource for the maximum good of the world. Here in Silicon Valley, EA has become a secular religion of the elites.

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Before the fall of SBF, the philosophers who founded EA glowed in his glory. Then SBF’s crypto empire crumbled, and his EA employees turned witness against him. The philosopher-founders of EA scrambled to frame Bankman-Fried as a sinner who strayed from their faith.

Yet Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect prophet of EA, the epitome of its moral bankruptcy. The EA saga is not just a modern fable of corruption by money and fame, told in exaflops of computing power. This is a stranger story of how some small-time philosophers captured some big-bet billionaires, who in turn captured the philosophers—and how the two groups spun themselves into an opulent vortex that has sucked up thousands of bright minds worldwide.

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The core of EA’s philosophy is a mental tool that venture capitalists use every day. The tool is “expected value” thinking, which you may remember from Economics 101. Say you’re trying to maximize returns on $100. You guess that some stock has a 60 percent chance of gaining $10 and a 40 percent chance of losing $10. Multiplying through, you find that this stock has an expected value of $102. You then repeat these calculations for the other stocks you could buy. The most rational gamble is to buy the stock with the highest expected value.

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Expected value thinking can be applied to any choice, and it needn’t be selfish. You can aim at the most value-for-you, or the most value-for-the-universe—the method is the same. What EA pushes is expected value as a life hack for morality.

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Expected value thinking can be useful in finance. But what if someone actually hacked their whole life with it? What if someone tried to calculate the expected value of every choice they made, every minute of every day?

That’s Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF was easy for EA to recruit because its life hack was already his mindset. As Michael Lewis writes, with every choice SBF thinks in terms of maximizing expected value. And his calculations are “rational” in being free from emotional connections to other people. EA encourages people to be more “rational” like this. SBF is a natural.

To get yourself into SBF’s mindset, consider whether you would play the following godlike game for real. In this game, there’s a 51 percent chance that you create another Earth but also a 49 percent chance that you destroy all human life. If you’re using expected value thinking, and if you think that human life has positive value, you must play this game. SBF said he would play this game. And he said he would keep playing it, double or nothing, over and over again. With expected value thinking, the slightly higher chance of creating more value requires endlessly risking the annihilation of humanity.

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If you’re earning-to-give, you should maximize your wealth. And if you think each moment should be optimized for profit, you’ll never choose to spend resources on boring grown-up things like auditors and a chief financial officer. For SBF, good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one.

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As Daniel Kahneman says, “We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are.” When doing expected value thinking, the potential for rationalization and self-serving bias are immense.

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EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore’s understanding of rationality and the world. And the way they test their reasoning—debating other EAs via blog posts and chatboards—often makes it worse. Here, the basic laws of sociology kick in. With so little feedback from outside, the views that prevail in-group are typically the views that are stated the most confidently by the EA with higher status. EAs rediscovered groupthink.

At some point, the money took over. The philosophers invited the tech billionaires to dance. Then the billionaires started calling the tunes.

I suspect that the tech billionaires didn’t want to be heroes merely by saving individual lives. That’s just what firemen do; that’s just what Spider-Man does. The billionaires wanted to be heroes who saved the whole human race.

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So that became the philosophers’ goal too. They started to emphasize a philosophy, longtermism, that holds the moral worth of unborn generations equal to the worth of living ones.

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Some smart young EAs dared to object publicly to longtermism’s primitive and dangerous reasoning. Senior figures in the movement tried to suppress their criticisms, saying that any critiques of central EA figures might threaten future funding.

What Will Happen When the A.I. Barons Give Back?
By David Wallace-Wells

Over the past year, as a new class of tech billionaires began to reckon with a growing A.I. backlash, they have floated a number of compensatory proposals, almost like trial balloons for a new social compact: a universal basic income, paid in compute; a New Deal for A.I.; a commitment to income redistribution; and a shared A.I. prosperity. We may be about to get another vision, from what Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff predicted recently would be “the third wave of American philanthropy.” The first wave involved the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, and the second the developmental philanthropy embodied through the Obama years by the Gates Foundation and the Giving Pledge. The third, Ransohoff suggested, would be an absolute tidal wave: hundreds of billions of dollars in A.I. wealth, freed up by a series of upcoming I.P.O.s and unleashed on the world in relatively short order.

Perhaps $370 billion in charitable money will rapidly become liquid in the coming months, Ransohoff estimated, enabling $37 billion to $100 billion in annual giving.

This is, simply put, a world-shaping amount of cash — or could be, depending on how it would be spent.

The Effective-Altruism Comeback
By Andrew Fedorov

Many groups have just started thinking in concrete terms about the new AI rich and how to use their money after recent announcements of major IPOs, from SpaceX to Anthropic, and after the AI industry donated in large sums to try to sway primary races in this year’s midterms.

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Lighthaven was founded in late 2022 by the stewards of LessWrong, the largest forum for the Rationalist movement. The Rationalists have propagated their Bay Area philosophy — which emphasizes probabilistic reasoning above all else — online since the mid-aughts, and Lighthaven is their de facto real life headquarters. Its founders think of it as something like a fin de siècle Vienna coffeehouse, where people from different corners of their broader philosophical ecosystem can mingle. The atmosphere has attracted members of the EA movement. (The two groups are related, but not the same. EAs lean businesslike and professional; Rationalists are a bit stranger and more open to thinking beyond norms.)

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At Lighthaven, the coming gold rush has been discussed with feverish hope. The crowd had gone from merely speculating to strategizing and practically planning. What could they use all the money for? What charities could they fund? What politicians could be helped? What revolutions could they push?

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In D.C., until very recently, conversations about how the AI rich will spend their new wealth had not filtered beyond effective-altruist circles. The obscurity is partly deliberate. EAs remember the grifters who superficially adopted their frameworks when the FTX money started flowing.

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One evening, I chatted with Oliver Habryka, who built the Effective Altruism Forum, LessWrong, and Lighthaven. Bundled up in a knock-off Snuggie by the fire, he was telling me why he was conflicted about the many conversations his campus has hosted about how Anthropic’s money should be spent.

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Habryka doesn’t envy those about to get billions who intend to give it away. “The default thing for billionaires to do is to dip their toe into trying to give away their money,” he said. “After a while, you become cynical and are like, ‘Fuck this. I don’t know how to have relationships, because everyone is clearly trying to hang around with me to see whether that results in them getting $10 million.’”

Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed
By Charlotte Alter

Leaders of the Effective Altruism movement were repeatedly warned beginning in 2018 that Sam Bankman-Fried was unethical, duplicitous, and negligent in his role as CEO of Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm that went on to play a critical role in what federal prosecutors now say was among the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. They apparently dismissed those warnings, sources say, before taking tens of millions of dollars from Bankman-Fried’s charitable fund for effective altruist causes.

When Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded in late 2022, these same effective altruist (EA) leaders professed outrage and ignorance. “I don’t know which emotion is stronger: my utter rage at Sam (and others?) for causing such harm to so many people, or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception,” tweeted Will MacAskill, the Oxford moral philosopher and intellectual figurehead of EA, who co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism.

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Why did the braintrust of a social movement dedicated to virtuous impact apparently fail to heed repeated warnings about one of their own, while continuing to promote him publicly as a force for good? For a group of philosophers who had spent their lives contemplating moral tradeoffs and weighing existential risks, the warnings about Bankman-Fried may have presented a choice between embracing a big donor with questionable ethics or foregoing millions of dollars they believed could boost their nascent movement to help save the future of humanity.

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… in Aug. 2022, MacAskill published his second book, What We Owe the Future, about the moral duty to confront existential risks to humanity. “History is littered with people doing bad things while believing they were doing good,” MacAskill writes in the book. “We should do our utmost to avoid being one of them.”

How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now?
By Cal Newport

This reality, that Rationalism deeply influenced many of today’s major A.I. companies, helps us calibrate the unnerving language we’ve been hearing from their leaders. When Mr. Altman declares their pending models will be “sobering” for humanity or Mr. Amodei frets that this technology “will test who we are as a species,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they discovered frightening new evidence that something catastrophic is imminent.

It is, instead, representative of how Rationalists always think about A.I. In these circles, it’s taken for granted that A.I. capabilities will rapidly accelerate and completely transform the world, and to talk about it in any other way would be considered uninformed. For a Rationalist, the only open question is to what degree their heroic brains, carefully trained in the style glamorized by Mr. Yudkowsky’s “Sequences,” can prevent these transformations from devolving into extinction events.

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This exaggerated grimness makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies, such as their potential use in cybersecurity attacks, excess resource consumption, impact on our cognitive fitness, role in undermining education and amplification of soul-deadening slop.

This style of anxious talk also allows the A.I. companies to portray themselves as the reluctant “stewards” of an inevitable technology, which is a framing they can use to deflect blame for damage caused by their own products.

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To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.

We’re in an age of ‘apocalypse anxiety’ and will never stop worrying about doomsday
By Jasper Hamill

We asked Clay Routledge, a behavioural scientist and author of Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World, why we’re so obsessed with the end times.

‘Humans are a unique species in that we are highly self-aware, able to mentally time travel, and capable of abstract thought,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.

‘This makes us both very introspective and imaginative. But with this great cognitive power comes great anxiety.

‘Like other organisms, we have an orientation toward self-preservation and yet we know that we are fragile and mortal beings only temporarily occupying this world.’

The word apocalypse didn’t always mean ‘the end of the world’, but is actually Greek for ‘revelation’ and was used to describe the visions of biblical doomsday prophets.

Now it means the total destruction of humanity, Planet Earth or the entire universe, although atheist modern societies have a very different vision of how things will end to the god-based predictions of our religious ancestors.

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‘Apocalyptic fears and fantasies, whether explicitly religious or supposedly secular, are at least partially rooted in existential concerns about meaning,’ Routledge says.

‘Some apocalyptic visions offer a path to immortality. Some are more about hope for a reboot on this planet in which humanity starts anew and builds a better world for future generations.

‘Some offer people a more personal hope for heroism or the chance to escape what often feels like a meaningless or unfulfilling life by getting back to the basics of survival, family, and close community.

‘What unites these different ideas is the quest for meaning, the desire to matter.’

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Some psychologists believe our obsession with the apocalypse is actually detrimental because when we dream up exciting doomsday scenarios, we fail to focus on the real threats facing humanity.

The Most Important Words in the Battle Over AI
By Calder McHugh, Aaron Mak, Brendan Bordelon, Gabby Miller and POLITICO Visuals

In the battle over AI regulation — from Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley — one term has become unexpectedly controversial: “AI safety.” After all, who doesn’t believe in making these tools safe?

But depending on where people stand on the issue, “AI safety” has come to signal wildly different things. Some are concerned about existential threats to humanity, while others are worried about protecting children and warding off mass job loss — and then there are those who think preaching “safety” is often a nonsensical excuse to shut down any technological progress at all.

“AI safety” is now something of a Rorschach test for how tech founders, politicians and everyone in between thinks about AI development. Understanding how that term has come to have different connotations for different stakeholders is a useful way to map the vast universe of AI policy and politics that has quickly emerged.

What’s perhaps most surprising is that the debate doesn’t break down along obvious partisan or ideological divides. The technology is still so young that political opinions surrounding AI have yet to be firmly locked in, and it’s possible to find skeptics and boosters on both the left and right.

Adopt AI or Die?
By Jacob Bacharach

The problem with both AI doomers and AI evangelists … is that they seem to have forgotten the virtue of intellectual humility; their maximalist claims are a distraction from both the interesting uses and unique challenges of this technology. It needn’t be a god to be a potentially useful leap forward in information retrieval and management, or to help automate workflows in business, analyze big data, fold proteins, or—this is mundane, but my day job is in finance—accurately extract table data from a flat .pdf. It needn’t be a devil to help the Pentagon launch aggressive wars or ICE to track immigrants. It is a tool, and, like so many products of human genius, one that can be used for good or for ill. But no tool will force us to mature as a species and a civilization, no matter the benefit, no matter the threat. That task is solely and exclusively human, and we have a long way to go.

The AI Bubble Is No Ordinary Bubble
By Annie Lowrey

AI is driving tremendous spending on capital expenditures—physical infrastructure, software development. And it is driving a tremendous run-up in company valuations.

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A start-up might need thousands of times as much computing power to train an algorithm as it would need to develop a conventional software product. To get that power, Silicon Valley is building 1,500 data centers in the United States and counting, and purchasing a mammoth quantity of semiconductor chips. (The Wall Street Journal calls these chips “the 21st century’s most important market.”) Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta alone are spending more than $700 billion on the build-out this year. AI-infrastructure investment is responsible for essentially all American GDP growth at the moment. Without it, in other words, we might be in a recession.

The boom is lifting the value of farmland, driving up the cost of construction employment, and flushing huge sums to water and electrical utilities. Still, tech companies are the main beneficiaries: Nvidia is selling chips to Meta; Amazon is selling cloud-computing capacity to OpenAI. This surge in revenue, and the excitement about the money to be made when AI starts bolstering productivity and profits, is driving up valuations. The Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—now account for one-third of the value of the Standard & Poor’s 500. OpenAI is worth more than Eli Lilly, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Costco, Exxon Mobil, Wells Fargo, CVS Health, McDonald’s, and Boeing.

Tech companies are going to need to start generating huge revenues and huge profits to justify these valuations. OpenAI needs to spin up roughly $100 billion in free cash flow by 2030, according to calculations by Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook. Analysts expect it will lose $10 billion to $30 billion that year. If it does—or if more communities ban data centers, or if non-tech companies prove reticent about purchasing AI software, or if China develops AI models that do not require so much computing power—we could be in for a massive correction. The AI economy is a trillion-dollar ouroboros of buying and selling, investment and equity staking, all happening between San Francisco and San Jose. Big Tech is advancing money to AI start-ups to buy cloud services from Big Tech, which is using the revenue to run new AI models … you get the idea. What happens to one firm could happen to all of them.

Tech companies are also going to need to start generating even bigger revenues and profits to pay off their debts. In the early days of AI, venture capitalists, wealthy individuals, and Big Tech firms used hard cash to invest in the new technology. But the build-out has proven so expensive that Silicon Valley has turned to corporate bonds and private credit, meaning loans made by entities other than banks. Thus, though the AI boom has happened while interest rates are fairly high, it still involves a lot of leverage. The deals are complicated, opaque, and structured so as to be invisible on traditional balance sheets, making the “ultimate distribution of risk less transparent,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia Business School has found.

Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence
By Branko Milanovic

The massive deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) presents economists with perhaps the unique situation in the past five or six decades. The artificial intelligence is an all-purpose technology and its effects are, from the current perspective, quite difficult or even impossible to predict.

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The first meaningful question is whether AI would lead to an increase in total output or would keep total output more or less the same but would reshuffle the roles of machines (including artificial intelligence itself which can be called a machine) and live labor. In other words, whether AI would be an output-augmenting technology or factor-shifting technology, meaning that it substitutes capital for live labor but does not lead to the production of many new goods and services, or increased production of the already existing goods and services.

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The second related question is whether AI would lead to increased productivity defined as output per live unit of labor. … In order not to come to this conclusion we would have to assume that total output would shrink by the application of AI to the same extent that the use of live labor is expected to shrink. This seems most unrealistic. Consequently, the ratio between total output and total live labor, we can safely predict, would go up.

The third issue is whether AI would create a significant surplus population. … It might create people who are basically unemployable and whose skills belong to a revolved era. These may be skills and knowledge that are entirely made redundant by the deployment of the AI; or people whose skills require a “retooling” for the needs of a new economy that would take five or more years. In either case, such people are over a medium- to long-term a surplus population. If the surplus population becomes large, for example reaching 15 or 20 percent of the labor force it would create political problems.

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It would be naïve to believe that simply giving people money to survive would make them happy. Surplus population could create a permanent pool of malcontents who would be politically difficult to handle, a malleable population who would be there to be exploited and used by political operators.

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Very few people doubt that the total amount of profits, when the AI comes to be deployed, would increase. AI is like any other capital and the people who own the AI would of course make money. They would become richer. In some cases they might become extraordinarily rich and gain a huge political influence. That huge wealth and political power of a few combined with the existence of a large surplus population would create an extremely dangerous political cocktail. It is not necessarily true that the new techno-lords would always act as a class. Some among them might have ambitions to lead the army of malcontents and displace other techno-lords from their positions. The fall of the Roman republic provides one such historical precedent; the struggle between different oligarchic clans in post-Communist Russia another.

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The higher mass of profits due to the AI does not necessarily translate into a higher overall rate of profit because the amount of new capital that would be sunk into AI may be so high that it outpaces the increase of total amount of profit. … For capital, AI will thus do the same that it did for labor: create a surplus capital the way that it has created a surplus labor … large capital losses for the people who own “wrong” capital. Thus the malcontents may not be only the unemployable laborers but also former capitalists who are now pauperized.

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Finally, we come to the key question which is in truth a social question: how would the new income distribution look like? This would be a tetra society, that is society composed of four classes. On the bottom there is the surplus population, the lumpenproletariat or the idle helots with no jobs and nothing to do. They would have to be kept quiet and docile through dispensation of bread and circuses. Bread and circuses in the modern case obviously means some kind of minimum unemployment benefit for life and streaming of low-cost entertainment 24/7.

Then there would be a relatively large service-sector working class employed in the areas that cannot (as yet) be replaced by the AI. They would subsist on low to moderate wages, and they will be permanently living under the threat of their replacement by the AI and thus descent into the lumpenproletariat.

The third class are people who would combine, as they do now, high capital incomes and high labor incomes. This is what I called the homoploutic class that currently represents about 3% of the US population: people who are both among the top 10 percent of capitalists and the top 10 percent of wage-earners. That particular group might increase in size.

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Finally at the top of the income pyramid would be extraordinary rich people whom we already see now. This may not be just five or six or ten extreme plutocrats but there could be possibly thousands of people with extraordinary wealth.

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What could be in principle called the middle class in societies with lots of AI would be service sector workers who have not been displaced by artificial intelligence. Yet they cannot be treated fully as a middle class because their incomes are relatively low compared to the incomes of the top two classes of homoploutic individuals and techno lords, and their position is precarious as they are in the constant danger of falling down, rejoining the lumpenproletariat.

There is little doubt that such a society, as we sketched it, would display strong dystopian characteristics. The utopian promise of machines doing lots of work that is currently done by humans, and allowing us to enjoy free time and leisure, would turn out in reality to produce socially extremely unequal and politically much more unstable societies than the current proponents of abundance created by the artificial intelligence want us to believe.

Hundreds of experts warn the world must prepare now for AI’s impact
By Reuters and The Associated Press

Hundreds of experts have signed an open letter demanding that policymakers and technology leaders “must act now” to prepare for the economic impact of artificial intelligence.

The brief letter, released on Monday and organised by Stanford University’s digital economy lab, carries the signature of more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates.

It cautions that AI may grow far more capable over the coming decade, driving a transformation “larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame”.

“It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards,” the statement added.

To address this impending disruption, the letter calls for governments and industry to create “incentives, guardrails, and institutions” that ensure AI is complementary to humans and beneficial to society.

Economists, tech leaders warn AI could bring ‘large-scale job displacement’ and other risks
By Queenie Wong

Many Americans expect AI to have a negative impact on society, the Pew Research Center found this year. Roughly 40% of U.S. adults say AI will have a negative effect on society over the next 20 years. Roughly 31% think it will be equally negative and positive, while others are unsure or predict it will be positive.

Economists and researchers are still trying to better understand how AI is affecting society as more powerful tools are released publicly.

“We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next,” said Tom Cunningham, a researcher at Model Evaluation and Threat Research, a nonprofit that analyzes AI’s potential risks, in a statement. “It’s the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.”

The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.
By Bill Gates

We have no experience with a technology that can be adopted quickly or that can think and move like a human. When the PC came along, it took twenty years to significantly change how we worked because the software had to be developed, the price had to come down, and people had to learn how to use the tools and incorporate them into their business processes. AI, on the other hand, runs on the devices we already have, and it uses natural language. We don’t have to adapt to it because it can adapt to us. It can watch the same training video that is used to train human workers and learn from existing data.

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Although robots are not as far along as AI, eventually their cost will be dramatically lower too.

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Robots and AI combined can create a vicious cycle. After one company adopts them and uses the savings to lower its prices, its competitors will feel immense pressure to do the same. If existing companies don’t adopt them, then start-ups will. Many people will shift to other jobs, but the turmoil of losing work, getting retrained, and finding other work will be significant. Market forces will make adoption go faster and faster and, unless we intervene, there will be fewer good jobs available and the benefits will accrue to a small group.

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The biggest shift for workers will happen when AI provides nearly error-free work. At that point, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it, and companies will have every economic incentive to let it.

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Long before AI entered the mainstream, there was information online about how to create weapons like bombs, bioweapons, even computer viruses. AI will make it much easier to not only get this information but act on it. Even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale: individuals, companies, and governments.

AI-enabled fraud, disinformation, deepfakes, and surveillance are the harms that many people will feel most keenly in their everyday lives.

AI capabilities are starting to be used for cyberattacks. The smartest cybersecurity experts I know are scared about the next few years, because the attackers are getting powerful new capabilities faster than the defenders can fix all the weaknesses. After all, the same AI model that can find a flaw in software so a company can fix it can also help a criminal exploit it. The resources needed to make an attack are going down significantly and we haven’t been able to separate those abilities from benign usage.

Think about the infrastructure that will be vulnerable: hospitals, financial institutions, water systems, power grids, systems for managing government benefits.

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The same goes for bioterrorism. Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease. Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones. This is a global problem.

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At the national level, countries will need bodies that can set priorities across government agencies. The goal will be to make sure that every risk is accounted for. Otherwise, an AI-enabled attack might succeed because no one thought it was their job to stop it.

But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.

It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.

It is fair to wonder whether the world’s institutions are up to the task of designing and implementing this new architecture. Government moves slowly when it moves at all, and polarization within and between countries makes it harder than ever to get things done. Some cooperation between the U.S. and China will be required.

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My dad died of Alzheimer’s in 2020. In the later stages of his illness, he was cared for day and night by paid caregivers who understood him even when he struggled to express himself. He couldn’t always tell them when he was hungry, but they always knew.

My family and I will always be grateful to that amazing group of professionals. Something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human. No robot could or should have done it.

I think about that team when the question of which jobs will disappear and which will remain comes up. I believe that as AI and robots improve, we’ll set aside certain things for only people to do. I’ve started calling this domain Human Reserved, and it’s an example of the kinds of ideas we’ll need to consider.

I like the phrase Human Reserved because it makes me think of nature reserves—places where we could put buildings and roads, but we choose not to because the loss would be too great.

We might set something aside as Human Reserved for economic reasons. For example, we may do it because allowing machines to take over a certain role will displace a large number of people who can’t easily change jobs. You can’t tell a 55-year-old who has worked in construction their whole career that they need to go work at an elder care facility and expect them to find it fulfilling.

Sometimes the decision to make something Human Reserved will be driven by other factors. In health, for example, imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t. Yet it shouldn’t.

The Human Reserved domain will evolve over time—for example, we should consider setting aside some jobs now and phasing in AI slowly over years or decades with a commitment to preserve some jobs. Some areas, like education and mental health care, will be a mix, with a human in charge who’s using the technology to extend what they can do.

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As workers are pushed into different jobs, they will need retraining and other support from the social safety net. But they will be working less, which means they will be paying less in income taxes, and government revenues will drop just when the demand for those services is greatest. The funds will have to come from somewhere at a time when budgets are stretched.

I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.

A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.

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However we raise money for more assistance, it needs to reach the people who need it most, including workers who lose their jobs to AI and robots, people whose hours or wages decline, and communities where the losses are concentrated. We need to start doing that work now so that the systems are ready when the need becomes acute.