Some number of years ago I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. I paid my yearly fee and received a membership card. Then I failed to attend even a single meeting.

That record roughly reflects my feelings about the DSA. I support a lot of what they stand for, but am leery of them as an organization — too leery, apparently, to bring myself to directly participate in their activities.

I say all this just to disclose where I’m coming from politically with respect to the subject matter at hand. Almost everything you read about the DSA is either written by boosters or by haters. The DSA is polarizing — if you’ve heard of the group, you probably have an opinion about them. I won’t pretend that my political views don’t thumb the scale of the following assessment of them, but if you know at least what those views are, you can weigh them accordingly.

The DSA purports to be a tribune of the working class. Few who don’t possess a DSA membership card truly believe that. The group’s many detractors portray it as a bunch of young urbanites with liberal arts college degrees cosplaying as plumbers and construction workers. There’s truth in that description. But it also enormously underestimates their historical significance.

I’ve written more than once about how politics is a contest between two factions of the elite: those whose class status is largely a function of their accumulated economic capital, and those whose class status derives from their wealth in cultural capital. Those with economic capital tend, not surprisingly, to subscribe to political ideologies that champion the form of power with which they’re best endowed, by making everything subservient to the market. Privatization is good, they believe, entrepreneurs are heroes, government should get out of the way, and so on. The Republican Party has tended to embody these beliefs and thus secured their votes.

Those with cultural capital, for the same self-serving reason, tend to subscribe to ideologies that favor their form of power over that of economic capital. The educational credential is the formal certification of one’s accumulation of cultural capital, so it is the post-graduate degree, and all of the virtue and knowledge it is meant to impute to its holder, that this faction of the elite holds up as testament to its legitimate right to rule. Accordingly, those who are much richer in education than in money tend to believe that the marketplace is a corrupting influence, and that responsibility for government should be in the hands of disinterested experts with advanced degrees. The Democratic Party has tended to embody these beliefs, and it is toward the Democrats that this faction of the elite tends to gravitate.

In an earlier era, these elite factions might have been more honest about their parochial class interests. But we happen to live in an age in which there is only one legitimating ideology for state power: democracy. So both sides are forced to speak in universalist terms rather than in narrow, self-interested ones. They purport to speak not merely on their own behalves, but in the name of “the people,” which is to say, for the working class. The economic elites thus ridicule the cultural elites as out-of-touch snobs, cozy in their ivory towers but utterly helpless in the face of a flat tire, let alone in the real world grind of operating a business that generates wealth and jobs. Workers are best served, they insist, when capital, their own form of power, is allowed to work its magic. Those rich in cultural capital, in turn, regard the economic elites as a heartless, parasitic aristocracy, in thrall to Mammon and bent on enslaving humanity to their greed.

Politics is a contest in which these two elite factions smuggle their particular class interests into an exalted debate over the public good. This is not to suggest that such debates are inherently cynical, or conducted in bad faith; indeed, the most effective rationalizers are those who truly believe their rationalizations. But drinking your own Kool-Aid doesn’t change the fact that your ideology evolved to serve your elite class interests.

The DSA, like most progressive political groupings, is a vehicle for the cultural elites. You’re unlikely to find a lot of blue collar or even white collar workers at their meetings. More likely you’ll find creative class people or knowledge economy workers whose economic prospects have been stunted for a variety of reasons — the Great Recession, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. In this sense, they’re “larping” as working class. But only at their peril should DSA’s detractors dismiss this class faction as somehow fraudulent.

There is, in fact, no more transformational a political constituency than surplus elites — those who were promised a bright future that never materialized. Many, though not all, revolutions have been catalyzed by this group. Hong Xiuquan fashioned himself a messiah and led the Taipei Revolution after failing his civil service exam four times. Gerrard Winstanley led the communist Christian denomination known as the Diggers after his business as a London cloth merchant was destroyed by the English Civil War. Downwardly mobile surplus elites played pivotal roles as Crusaders in Medieval Europe, as Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, and as vanguards of the Great Awokening. They are a motive force in world history and their political formations should be taken very seriously.

And as easy as it is to ridicule the pretensions of this demographic to speak for the “working class,” that, too, should be taken seriously, if for no other reason than that every group that purports to speak for workers is equally disingenuous. This is a function of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, another topic I’ve written about here before.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy posits that any group that begins as an authentic workers’ organization will, by necessity, eventually become alienated from it. This happens because in order to succeed and grow, these groups need to navigate the world of elites in politics, media, and capitalist relations. To do so, they are compelled to elevate leaders who are rich in cultural capital, which usually means they’re formally educated and often come from non-working class backgrounds. Real world competition forces the organization to professionalize.

The American labor movement, for example, was utterly transformed by the generation of activists in the 1960s who championed Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers. The UFW was in bitter competition with the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO’s Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee for the right to organize farm labor in California. They won in large part by bringing in New Left activists like Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard. The cultural capital these outsiders brought to the UFW allowed them to out-strategize their rivals, especially when it came to things like gaining the sympathy of liberal elites. That generation of culturally elite union activists in the UFW then went on to lead UNITE-HERE and SEIU, the most dynamic unions in the country, which enjoyed enormous growth and success as a result. They easily outcompeted rival unions like the Steelworkers that had not brought cultural elites into their leaderships.

Detractors might assume that the domination of workers’ organizations by cultural elites necessarily alienates working class constituencies, but it can often result in precisely the opposite. Cultural capital, like economic capital, is an asset to any organization. It allows organizational leaders to navigate elite spaces in the political, academic and corporate worlds, building elite alliances and undermining elite adversaries. Elite-dominated unions are thus capable of winning substantial victories for the working class constituencies they serve, and thus securing the real allegiance of workers. The same can be said for socialist organizations like the DSA. Indeed, coalitions of cultural elites and workers have long been potent agents of historical change, as just about every successful communist revolution demonstrates.

But the lines of fissure are always there. As workers’ organizations professionalize, they begin to develop their own institutional interests, which are only indirectly aligned with the interests of their constituents, and sometimes are diametrically opposed to them. Unions cut deals with corporations that weaken their members’ contracts in exchange for organizing rights. Labor parties abandon traditional commitments to workers in order to “modernize,” raise corporate contributions, and win non-working class votes. Concessions such as these tend to pave the road of growth and advancement for organizational bureaucracies, and the bureaucrats who run them advance alongside the organizations they lead. The interests of organizational staff slowly diverge from those of rank-and-file membership.

These fragile cross-class coalitions often collapse under strain, blunting the radical possibilities of revolutionary moments. In revolutionary France, the Jacobins, based in the cities, instituted price controls on bread to ease the plight of urban consumers, a demand of the radical sans-culottes. This was to the detriment of rural peasant producers, who then abandoned the revolution; it was at this moment that the French Revolution came under the full control of the bourgeoisie instead of proceeding in a more radical direction. Likewise, after the English Civil War, the ascendance of Oliver Cromwell spelled the end for communist-minded agitators like Winstanley and radical sects like the Diggers and the Ranters and the True Levelers. The Commonwealth became an administration of the bourgeoisie and ultimately ended in a restoration of the monarchy. And closer to home, the economic elite’s embrace of working class populism as a weapon against the cultural elites was abandoned almost as soon as that faction took power.

The DSA has shown itself to be full of these class contradictions, readily adopting the avant-garde political pretenses and woke dogmas of the cultural elites who fill its ranks, however anathema they are to working class Americans, like clapping bans, land acknowledgements, and mandatory pronoun disclosures. If put to a real test of its loyalties, I suspect the DSA would side with the downwardly mobile professionals that actually run it over the working class Americans it pretends it answers to.

But that test has not yet arrived, and in the meantime, the happy alignment of the purported virtues of the cultural elites with the interests of workers, reflected in policies like universal child care, represent perhaps the only pro-worker force left in the Democratic Party. If the DSA is larping, they should keep doing it. If they succeed in taking over the party, at least it will come to stand for something.

I read this very persuasive piece by Scott Carney yesterday about why Substack hasn’t lived up to what a lot of writers hoped it would. I dragged Substack in a post just a little more than a month ago, so I’m a bit reluctant to return to the subject, as I don’t want to turn this newsletter into a navel-gazing exercise where I ask you to read about the practice of writing what I’m asking you to read. That said, as this has just become a blog anyway, I no longer aspire to hold up any kind of professional standards. So that’s a prologue to basically say I’m going to talk about Substack once more, against my better judgment.

Carney’s piece articulates what I’m guessing is intuitively obvious to most people who read and write on this platform: there are only so many paid subscriptions a reader is going to spring for, especially on top of all the other subscriptions to apps, streaming services, etc. that are constantly chipping away at our bank accounts. Eventually, Substack was going to hit a demand ceiling. That seems to have happened, as Carney points out, to Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor Lorenz has an order of magnitude more “followers” than probably 99 percent of people on Substack, and more internet fame than probably 99.9 percent of us. If it’s happening to her, it’s probably happening to everyone downhill from her, too.

Substack solved a particular problem for a particular type of journalist at a particular time. The company was founded in 2017. That was a few years into Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the first year of Trump’s first term. The Great Awokening was well underway, and over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 2020, the media industry would come to resemble a grumpy religious sect, with its theological dogma and mechanisms for punishing dissent. Journalists who refused to bend to the new rules had a refuge to escape to in Substack. That is, quite literally, the origin story of how Bari Weiss founded the biggest media outlet on the platform, The Free Press.

But while Substack solved a problem for journalists, it did not solve the problem of journalism, which is that its business model was broken into pieces two decades ago and has yet to be fixed. In the twentieth century, journalism was propped up by mass advertising, which, as Andrey Miroshnichenko has pointed out, was effectively a tax on corporations to sustain the jobs of journalists. Companies couldn’t find their customers without getting their brand names in front of them, and the only way to do that was by running advertisements in the newspapers that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning and on the TV shows that were piped daily and nightly into their living rooms. This was the marketing equivalent of trawling: it caught a lot of fish by casting a net wide enough to scoop up everything in its path. It was inefficient and expensive, and it produced enough revenue to sustain an entire profession of reporters, editors, producers, and news anchors.

But then came Facebook, and suddenly, instead of trawling, advertisers could fly fish, but on an industrial scale. Targeted advertising allowed them to pick their customers one by one out of the teeming mass of humanity on the internet, and for a sliver of what it cost to run a TV commercial or run a newspaper ad. Mass advertising became a relic of the twentieth century, and the economic floor it sustained for the journalism industry cratered. Laid off reporters were as mundane a part of the new economic landscape as 20-something software engineers making doctors’ salaries.

Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto news consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidizing reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers can pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

The upside, some might argue, is that journalists are now truly independent. When you’re not controlled by editors and producers who answer to corporate bosses who answer to shareholders, you can report candidly without fear of professional repercussions. There isn’t an upper floor of suits to stop you from running a story on the corruption of defense contractors because the toothpaste company that’s the network’s biggest primetime advertiser owns an overseas subsidiary that manufactures land mines. Your only bosses are your readers, and what they expect of you is honesty and integrity. The incentive to do good journalism aligns with the incentive of making money. That’s the theory, at least.

But that theory both overstates the level of corporate control over the old model and understates the malign influences insinuated into the new one. Noam Chomsky might have you believe that New York Times editors once quaked in fear of the punishment they would face from their industrially polluting advertisers if they reported too honestly about industrial pollution, but the nice thing about mass advertising was that there was so much of it that individual advertisers rarely had that kind of clout. There may have been some vague sensibility among media professionals about not wanting to fall too far afield of the establishment, but that wasn’t rooted in anxiety over advertiser boycotts; it was rooted in publishers sharing the same alma maters as Congressmen and corporate executives and their kids going to the same private schools.

If anything, the pressures that the new model exerts on journalists are more direct and specific. Journalists who work for major media outlets are salaried employees; journalists who sell Substack subscriptions are petty entrepreneurs. At least in establishment media outlets there are institutional divisions between the editorial side and the business side. When you’re selling your reporting directly to readers, by contrast, there is no firewall in your brain that separates the part that’s thinking about what you’re reporting and how you’re reporting it from the part that’s thinking about how this story will impact your subscriber base and thus your bank account. This makes Substack ripe for audience capture. You have very good reasons not to report on stories that might upset your readers or to arrive at conclusions that might anger them. You have equally good reasons to serve them slop that confirms their priors. After years of watching your subscriber graph go up and down and the Stripe payments to your bank account get bigger and smaller, eventually you shape your newsletter into a product. And since your newsletter is, effectively, you, you have made yourself into that product. You might not have to worry about some corporate suit telling you what you can or can’t say, but that’s only because you are that suit and you’re telling it to yourself. The call is coming from inside the house.

If Taylor Lorenz’s experience is indicative of a larger pattern, these perverse incentives are only going to get worse as people’s paid subscriber bases dry up. Substack’s executives would have you believe that the consumer market for email newsletters is only getting bigger, but it’s easy to imagine another possibility. As Carney points out, Substack is growing its user base principally by attracting more people to its Twitter knock-off, Notes. That doesn’t mean they’re generating more paid newsletter subscribers, and particularly not more paid newsletter subscribers for Substacks that aren’t already on the leaderboards (why do they even have leaderboards?). People who like to scroll aren’t necessarily people who pay to read long form essays. My own paid subscriber count has proceeded along the same downward path that both Lorenz’s and Carney’s have, even as my tallies of free subscribers and “followers” (whatever that is) have stacked up. If that’s happening for many others, we can expect that as paid subscribers become scarcer, the incentives to gain and retain them will become harder to resist. More and more Substack writers will conform to the demands of the market by flattering their readers, avoiding risky topics, arriving at prefabricated conclusions, and repeating formulas that have worked in the past. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

Substack hasn’t fixed the broken media model — it hasn’t even attempted to. All it has done is giggify it. That has given some established reporters the freedom to do their own thing and made a handful of already famous and wealthy journalists even more famous and wealthy — good things, I guess. But it has also likely further degraded the already broken down institutional structure of the journalism profession. That might bring joy to a few nihilists who simply despise the establishment media, but that doesn’t make it progress. It just makes it another step in the death of the craft.

Short of dropping a nuclear warhead, the scale of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was only physically possible through the use of Artificial Intelligence. In the early weeks of the war, the IDF was using so much of its munitions stockpile it was afraid it would literally run out of bombs, which it would need were a new front to open up in Lebanon, as it eventually did. The question was not one of how much to bomb, but how to maximize the lethality of each bomb dropped. This is where AI came in.

Israel deployed an AI system called “Lavender” to pick targets, and another one called “Where’s Daddy” to execute the strikes. Both were described in detail in 2024 by +972 Magazine. Lavender combed through an enormous amount of information on the residents of Gaza, including social media connections, geolocation data, phone call records, and biometric data, to assign every Gazan a threat score on a scale from 1 to 100. One’s score would constantly go up and down depending upon one’s behavior — whose houses you visit, who you call, who you befriend on Facebook, etc. If your score reached a particular threshold, you were put on a kill list.

The threshold could vary from day to day. When the IDF had plenty of targets, it might remain relatively high. When targets were scarce, Israel just lowered the score that would put you on a kill list, in order to generate more targets, which is to say more Gazans to kill.

If your name found its way onto the kill list, you would come into the aperture of Where’s Daddy. Where’s Daddy tracked your movements, waiting for you to return to your home. Once you did, the AI would send out an order to bomb your building. This meant that your family would likely be incinerated along with you, as well as whatever other families happened to live in your apartment building. It also virtually guaranteed that the overwhelming number of deaths would be non-combatant women and children.

It’s probably safe to stipulate that the Gaza War represents the extreme end of what is possible, with the current state of AI technology, in terms of the coercive power of the state. Post-October 7, the Israeli government became unconstrained by such intangible concerns as human rights, international law, or political legitimacy in carrying out its campaign to annihilate Hamas. The only limiting factors were physical ones: how many bombs the IDF had, and whether they could find their targets. Boiled down to the most basic of variables, these were laboratory conditions for measuring the degree to which the state’s capacity for violence has been enhanced by AI.

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In most places at most times, those conditions do not hold. Governments aren’t usually at war, and the physical power they wield over those who fall under their control on a day-to-day level is typically either threatened or assumed, not actually made manifest. We know that if we commit a crime, the government has a certain likelihood of finding out, and of identifying, capturing and imprisoning us. That likelihood is obviously increased with new surveillance technologies. But few of us actually test the hypothesis. We assume that we probably can’t get away with breaking the law, so we more or less obey it. A small portion of the population, of course, does commit crimes, and if and when they’re captured and imprisoned, they stand as a reminder to the rest of us that the government is still in control. That’s generally enough to maintain social stability; the state does not have to actually arrest and imprison each one of us to prove that it can do so.

This makes it a lot more difficult to gauge just how much increased control a democratic, peacetime government has over its population as a result of AI. Absent an armed insurrection, we can’t see for ourselves what the state could do to keep us in line if it were sufficiently motivated to do so, and if it were unimpeded by things like morals, laws, and concerns over its legitimacy. We can only imagine it. But Gaza gives us some theoretical ceiling. There is no technological reason why the U.S. government could not do to us what Israel has done to the Palestinians in Gaza. It obviously has the requisite firepower, and the AI tools it could access are, if anything, even more formidable than the ones Israel has used.

That said, there certainly are things that stand in the way of the U.S. government exerting the kind of coercive control over Americans that Israel has wielded over Gazans. It’s just that they’re not physical, but social in nature. We have certain rights afforded to us as citizens, or even as non-citizens residing in the territorial boundaries of the United States. The government isn’t allowed to do whatever it wants to us, as the Israeli government can to Palestinians. There are functioning laws and courts and elections. There are also fuzzier things like values and norms and traditions. These all act as powerful constraints on the government. But they’re not immutable ones. They’re not properties of physical reality. They’re not like running out of bombs, or lacking the technology to find and locate people in time and space. Under extreme social conditions, they could melt into air. The legal and normative system could break down. It’s easy to imagine that happening; in fact, it’s the premise of every post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel you’ve ever read.

So if the answer to the question “What happens if, with today’s technology, there’s a civil war or a social revolution or another total national emergency?,” is “Something like Gaza,” then a new question is begged: “What happens in the more likely scenario that social stability more or less endures in America, even as the technological capacity for social control by the state increases exponentially as a result of AI? Will we live under democracy or tyranny?”

I hate the analogy because I care about animal welfare, but it’s sort of like the frog asking what temperature the water is as it slowly approaches a boil.

Imagine a Lavender-type system that scores you on multiple threat scales related to national security. It tracks your level of “political extremism” across a matrix of issue categories. It scores you for how you will likely act upon your beliefs, whether it’s just social media posting, or attending a protest, or giving money to “extremist” groups. It gauges how influential you are within your social networks. It tracks whether you’re networked with others who have high threat scores, and how likely they are to influence you. Out of this it estimates the level of menace you present to the social order.

It’s hard for me to imagine that this does not already exist, or at least some variation of it. Certainly the technology exists; it’s basically a political application of algorithmic pricing, which is happening all the time and has been for years. You can get charged more or less for online transactions depending upon your ZIP code, your browsing history, or whether you use a Mac or a PC. Princeton Review has charged more for its test prep services to Asians than non-Asians. Uber has been accused of surging prices for users with dying phone batteries. Former FTC Chair Lina Khan cites the possibility of a retailer charging you more for a thermometer because it knows you have a newborn at home and are likely to be desperate, or an airline quoting you a higher price on a plane ticket because you received an email about funeral arrangements.

If corporations can track your behavior to determine how much you’ll pay for a product, there’s no reason the government couldn’t track it to assess whether you might engage in risky political behavior, as China has been doing for years. And if the U.S. government isn’t already doing so, then its incentives to adopt a Chinese-style social credit system will only increase with the advance of AI.

In China, if you’re a model citizen you can get discounts on bus fares. But if your purchase history indicates you’re an alcoholic, or if you post criticisms of the government on Weibo, or if you’re a journalist exposing political corruption, you might find yourself suddenly unable to travel when you go to the train station and are denied the purchase of a ticket. Your face might appear on posters in public or on apps that show who around you is a social exile.

None of this is likely to ever happen in America as long as we have a functioning Constitution, but there are more subtle and more legal ways to achieve the same end.

Imagine a social credit score that’s less like China’s in-your-face system and more like a FICO score. You don’t necessarily know what it is at any given moment. Perhaps the government doesn’t officially admit that it exists at all, like Israel and its nuclear arsenal. But like algorithmic pricing, you’re vaguely aware that it’s operating in the background, shaping the contours of your daily life. You can feel it in the ether around you as your social habitat tightens or releases its grip on you. The higher your threat score is, the more expensive things become, the harder it is to get a job, or to get your kid into private school, or to get a window seat on an upcoming flight.

It doesn’t operate at the textual level, as it does in China. In China, there’s no mystery to your status; you can look up your social credit score at any time. When you’re on a blacklist, you’ll be told so when you try to take out a home loan or even rent a hotel room.

In the U.S., things would be less explicit, more like a vibe. Here, where we have laws that are supposed to protect us from such things, the touch would be softer and harder to trace. You wouldn’t necessarily even know it’s happening. You’d be aware you’re paying higher prices than you were a year ago, and you’d suspect they’re higher than for other people around you buying the same stuff. But you’re not entirely sure. You’ve never had a problem getting insurance before, but suddenly you find every insurer quoting absurd prices or just denying you any policy at all. It’s weird and disorienting and anxiety-inducing.

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These could just be the mysterious workings of the free market. Or they could be that you’ve been singled out. It’s like being shadow-banned on pre-Elon Twitter: one day, after a particularly spicy post, your engagement would just drop off a cliff. It would seem pretty clear to you that your account had been flagged, but you couldn’t prove it. You could complain to whoever you wanted to, but there was no official notice, there was no appeals process, there was no way to know for sure that you were being throttled. It’s possible that your opinions just suddenly became a lot less interesting to your followers.

Likewise, maybe the reason you’re no longer finding matches on Hinge is just because you’re getting older and less cool. But maybe it’s because you’ve been posting a lot about the Palestinians, or questioning vaccine efficacy, or disputing election results. Maybe your account is being suppressed, just like it feels like it is on all your other social media platforms, and maybe that’s related to the crazy prices you’ve been paying lately on your online prescription drug service, and the months you’ve been waiting for your passport to be renewed, and the surprise visit last week from a city inspector following up on some anonymous complaints about the kitchen renovation done by the previous owners of your house being unpermitted. Or maybe none of those things are related at all.

You’ve also noticed you’ve been getting served up a different flavor of media content in your newsfeeds. You’ve started getting recommendations for podcasts about how there’s a civilizational war underway between the West and the Islamic world, and also tons of posts from people you aren’t connected to and aren’t sure are real rejoicing over how your local data center is going to create tons of new jobs in your community. Your streaming services have started promoting shows to you that you’ve never heard of. One is about the plight of a gay woman in an oppressive Muslim country. Another is about a computer genius who invents an AI that cures Alzheimer’s Disease. You haven’t been shy lately about your opposition to the war heating up in the Middle East, and you signed an online petition just yesterday against the proposed local data center construction. But maybe that’s just a coincidence.

But anyway, your trust in mass media ran out a long time ago. When you want to know how to make sense of the world, you listen to your favorite independent journalists and podcasters. But lately you’ve been questioning how “independent” they really are. For some reason, their political opinions all seem to have converged, and then evolved in the exact same way. They were once isolationists; now they’re all suddenly concerned about some obscure U.S. enemy you’ve never heard them mention before. They used to have regular meltdowns about environmental collapse and the end of civilization; now they’re claiming it will all be solved by stable coins. You’ve been surprised to notice that unlike you, their fans in the comments section now agree with them about all of these things. You also notice that they’re getting some pretty impressive sponsors these days.

Maybe you’re being paranoid. You’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. Or is it obviously real and you’d be naive to think otherwise? You’re not quite sure what to think, and whether suspecting one thing makes you a conspiracy theorist or believing the other makes you a sheep.

But what you do know is that it feels like things go more smoothly in your life when you’re not worked up about something or the other in the news. When you disengage, when you stop paying such close attention to what politicians or the big corporate oligarchs are doing, the world feels more frictionless. Things go according to plan. It’s like you have good karma or something.

This time, though, there’s an actual war shaping up, and you’re about half sure you’re going to lose your job by next year to AI. This is serious stuff, and your convictions can’t be so easily swayed. So you continue to post your opinions about U.S. militarism and the dangers of AI and the tech industry. You continue to show up to protests when you see them announced on Facebook, and you even occasionally make donations to the growing number of groups the government has begun regularly maligning as “extremist.” Things are getting costlier and more difficult and maybe it’s because you’ve been flagged by the system, but you don’t care. There are bigger stakes in the world.

Then, for the first time in your life, you get called into the local IRS office. You’re put through an excruciating audit and have to pay a ridiculous penalty to the Franchise Tax Board. At the same time, you start seeing your social media accounts “temporarily” suspended, one by one. You can’t figure out why; the platforms just keep saying there have been complaints and they have to investigate.

Then early one morning, the police knock on your door with a search warrant. You’ve been accused of financial crimes and they’ve come to take your computer.

Eventually you get the message. Your opinions haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve become even more strident — but you’ve already lost a romantic relationship over the stress, your friends have stopped returning your texts, and your co-workers don’t trust you anymore.

So you just back off. You stop being so loud in your opinions, pay less attention to stuff done by powerful people you can’t control anyway. And as you do, things start to fall back into place. The investigations of your social media accounts are resolved in your favor. You finally get your passport renewed. Your dating life picks up. The city inspection comes to nothing. The government drops its case against you, citing insufficient evidence. Instead of losing your job to AI, you get promoted. Things are going nicely. You’re happier.

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Maybe the scenario just described sounds like something out of Black Mirror. But then so does using robot dogs in warfare, which was an actual episode of the show and is now real life.

The U.S. isn’t China. We don’t have a clearly and explicitly authoritarian state to which the private sector is unquestionably subservient. But already, you can see the fusing of politics and commerce that would be necessary for such a vast social credit system to emerge in the absence of single party rule. The line between the public and private sectors in America has always been blurry, but today, with a president making billions off of cryptocurrency, the world’s richest man being tasked to run a new quasi-agency of the federal government, and one of the biggest tech investors in the world writing the administration’s AI policy, it’s unclear that there’s any line left at all.

And it’s not hard to see how sectors outside of tech could be corralled into the mix. The Treasury Department routinely puts out advisories on money laundering operations, sanctions evasion schemes and other alleged financial crimes and asks banks to issue red flags for these practices. The banks are then required to report suspicious activity to the government. This seems like common sense, but under the Trump administration, we’ve already seen it begin to reflect the administration’s political priorities, such as in a recent advisory about employers hiring undocumented workers. One can imagine myriad ways this could become even more politicized than it already is. And one can imagine similar memos going out to social media platforms and other private service providers.

A liberal administration intent on repressing its political enemies could direct banks and social media companies to root out the financial infrastructure of right-wing “domestic extremists.” We’ve seen such efforts before, as when the Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly accused PayPal of being “the banking system for white nationalism,” before it was revealed that the SPLC itself was laundering money and funding white nationalists as paid informers.

A conservative administration could do the same thing. In 2021, PayPal teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to root out “hate groups.” Today, the ADL routinely accuses anyone critical of Israel of being “anti-semitic.” One could easily envision the Treasury Department issuing an advisory asking banks and other corporations to help protect Jews by dismantling the financial and communications infrastructure of “extremist” groups that oppose Zionism. It’s almost surprising it hasn’t happened already.

Likewise, corporations could use the same shadow social credit system to target their own enemies, whether they’re antiwar protesters, environmental activists, unions, or just lawful competitors.

The IDF soldiers who informed +972 Magazine about Lavender and Where’s Daddy noted repeatedly that the systems were built on statistics. Their kill lists may have included many civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas, but in the aggregate, they were statistically accurate enough to justify ignoring these inconvenient tragedies. What AI enabled Israel to do is to take a population of millions and, to borrow a term from the late political scientist James C. Scott, to render it legible. It could divide that amorphous mass of humanity into a neat hierarchy of numbers that could be dropped into a spreadsheet. And then the extermination process could proceed in an orderly and rational process, like culling sheep from a flock.

Minus the killing part, we should expect no less of AI when it comes to governing the rest of us. As our jobs are replaced by machines, as our free time becomes limited only to the hours in the day and our sense of purpose is sapped from our lives, we will become more unruly. Rather than a citizenry or even a labor resource, we will be seen by the state as, principally, a threat to be managed. That threat will require new methods and technologies of surveillance, assessment, scoring, categorizing, rewarding and punishing. If there’s a Universal Basic Income, it could be pegged to the degree of our obedience as measured by our social credit score. There will be those who rebel, and whose punishment will serve as an example to others. But they’ll be marginal. At a population level, we will be evaluated, segmented, and incentivized into docility. America will finally be domesticated.

For America’s 250th, I wrote this piece about democracy and the myth of American exceptionalism for UnHerd.

Hope you’ll give it a read.

—LW

For a few years before the pandemic, I used Airbnb pretty regularly. At the time I was making a lot of short documentaries, mostly for The Intercept and Univision. We were typically on the stringiest of shoestring budgets, and it was way cheaper to lodge our crew, usually three people, through Airbnb than in hotels. But it was also kind of preferable. When we were lucky we’d find some pretty charming homes in residential neighborhoods with plenty of street parking that were just a few minutes’ drive from restaurants and breweries (we drank a lot on those trips). We didn’t have to deal with valets or parking fees or patronize overpriced hotel restaurants.

But in the last five years, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve used Airbnb, and most of those were for vacation house rentals that I could have just as easily found on VRBO or by sending an email to Sea Ranch. When I go on work trips I book hotels. I don’t even browse home share listings. I think the reason is that nowadays when you find a place on Airbnb, it’s almost certainly going to be a cheap investment property owned by a real estate corporation, furnished by Ikea, with a keypad by the door and a clean, empty fridge with some Poland Springs water and a single bottle of mustard in it. It will be practical but completely devoid of charm, perhaps even bordering on depressing. The individual homeowners who used to host Airbnb rentals have long been pushed aside by this nameless blob of corporate middleman agencies. I’d rather just stay at a Holiday Inn.

It feels to me as if the same thing that happened to Airbnb is now happening to Substack. In April, the company hosted a party in DC that was billed as an alternative to the White House Correspondents Dinner. According to the Washington Post, Substack had tried to buy a table at the actual WHCD, which, as it turned out, was abruptly adjourned by an assassination attempt on President Trump. The director of the White House Correspondents Association turned down the offer, declaring that “independent journalists were not news, would never be news, and would never be invited to the dinner.” So Substack hosted its own party instead, which became “one of the hottest tickets of correspondents’ weekend.”

The WHCA director denied the quote, and frankly, it sounds highly implausible to me. A legacy media organization saying such a thing about Substack seems about as likely as a scheming villain saying, “and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you kids” after being lassoed by the Scooby Doo gang. It’s not only just too childish and undiplomatic to be believed, but it also happens to perfectly cast the company as the heroic underdog vis-a-vis the arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment Media, which is fitting for a quote that was sourced from Substack’s Head of News and Politics. In this story, Substack is the Molly Ringwald character in Pretty In Pink, rejected and humiliated by the sneering rich kids only to come out on top, as a karmic reward for her virtue and humility.

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From an outsider’s point of view, Substack’s “alternative” party didn’t sound all that different from the main event. Jim Acosta was there. So was John Dickerson, former host of CBS’ Face The Nation, and Tara Palmeri, formerly of ABC, CNN, and Politico. So was Gavin Newsom and Sean Spicer, Meghan McCain and David Hogg, Joachin Castro and Marianne Williamson. If the party was meant to celebrate the ascendance of the “independent creator,” it achieved the opposite: it showcased Substack’s glee at being colonized by the establishment it was supposed to displace. The contradiction between these two postures was illustrated almost too vividly by Michael Tracey’s near fistfight with Acosta.

I’m picking on a party from months ago, but only because it’s emblematic of what I suspect almost everybody now recognizes about Substack’s trajectory. The top political publication at Substack is The Free Press, a $150 million company now owned by Paramount Skydance, whose founder now heads up CBS News. Next up is The Bulwark, which brings in $12 million in annual revenue and which was founded by a Republican political consultant, a journalist who has been a star on conservative talk radio since the early 90s, and the neocon founder of The Weekly Standard who almost single-handedly engineered the propaganda campaign that led to the Iraq War. The number three Substacker in technology is one of the most famous Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the world, who co-hosts a massively successful podcast with the guy who wrote the Trump administration’s AI platform. The Substack leaderboards are filled with celebrity household names, while the New York Times masthead is populated by people you’ve never heard of. Who is the media establishment here? Beats me.

I don’t mind Substack patting itself on the back for its success, which has been fairy tale-level remarkable. For decades, the legacy media has badly deserved to be disrupted, and Substack is the company that pulled it off. But the social impact of that success has been, on balance, a wash. The stars of the media establishment have not been displaced by Substack, but buoyed by it. That might be a good thing if you believe that Jim Acosta has finally been released from the choke chain CNN executives kept wrapped around his pit bull-like collar and will now revolutionize DC punditry. But if there’s a single person in the world who believes that, it’s Jim Acosta.

Airbnb once disrupted the hospitality industry, though hotels still seem to be doing fine. Not unlike Substack, the company boasted incessantly about how it was the champion of regular people in desperate need of supplemental income. What it became was a platform for corporate middlemen to corner a new market that peeled a few customers away from Hilton, Marriott, and La Quinta Inn. The power structure remained intact, but now Airbnb is a modest part of it.

That’s what Substack is. With a handful of exceptions, few are making real money on it who weren’t already getting paid extremely well in media or business. The company has tilted the balance of power in the media industry, but only between the executives in the C-suite and their on-camera or in-print star talent. And the legacy brands are already joining the party, like they did when Facebook, YouTube, and every other tech media disruptor started chiseling away at their business model. There is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s your grandmother’s capitalism.

Substack is great blogging software, and its subscription platform is a handy tip jar. The discoverability it provides through Notes and Recommendations probably compensates for Elon Musk burying its links on X.

These are nice things. They’re not great things. They don’t challenge anyone in particular. They don’t topple media empires. They don’t discover great talents in the wilderness and bless them with magical wings. The Substack platform is a feature. It’s fun and it’s useful. It gets a lot of attention and generates a lot of money for its investors. It’s Katie Couric at a house party. It’s Mehdi Hasan flying commercial. It is what it is, which is really not all that much.

There’s a scene in the documentary Predators in which Chris Hansen, the former Dateline NBC reporter who hosted the hit series To Catch a Predator, rubs his nose.

Once upon a time, Hansen was one of the most recognizable personalities on network television. To Catch a Predator, which set up pedophile stings and turned them into sensational reality television, was such a massive success back in the early 2000s that today, 19 years after the show ended, Hansen is running a successful YouTube show doing the exact same thing.

Hansen is a TV news star, a man accustomed to the camera. He knows when he needs to be on and when it’s ok to be off. He knows that if the shot is likely to make it to the screen, he shouldn’t be rubbing his nose. His TV instincts told him that split second was not going to be on air. But it was, because the film for which he sat for an interview was not network television or a YouTube channel he controlled, and the editors were not on his payroll. It was a documentary, and one that was profoundly critical of his life’s project. And off-script moments are to documentaries what perfect takes are to news shows.

I doubt he understood these things. He probably didn’t realize at the time he sat down for the interview that this was not a friendly environment for him. He’d done years of appearances on massive shows like Oprah and Jon Stewart; he could do a softball interview on Ambien if he wanted to. And at the time — which was in the last few years — he was 64 years old. At that point in life, you have absorbed who you are to the marrow of your bones. You’re not improvising your persona like you did when you were young; who you are is now in every facial tick, every reflex. If you’re a TV showman, then knowing when to be on and when to be off is muscle memory. Hansen thought he was off, so he rubbed his nose. But he was on.

Rubbing your nose isn’t some catastrophic faux pas, and I’m not pointing it out just to be catty to Chris Hansen. The point I’m making is that to a person like him, a man whose very soul is cast in perfect Rembrandt lighting, life is a performance. There’s a front stage and a back stage. There’s an On Air light that lights up red and triggers Newscaster Mode. His personality is constructed from this performance for his audience. It is who he is. And more and more, it’s the same for the rest of us.

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Shortly before I watched Predators, which is, by the way, one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, I watched another great doc, from 2009, called We Live In Public. We Live In Public is about a guy you’ve never heard of named Josh Harris, who at one point around the turn of this century was on track to become Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or at least Marc Andreesen. He saw the future of the internet and he rawdogged it. He started by creating an internet streaming channel back when modems could transmit video at about one frame per second. He left that business behind to start a fun but twisted intentional community called Quiet in the basement levels of some commercial building in Manhattan, in which hundreds of people lived in pods and were filmed live to the internet 24/7, flossing their teeth, eating their breakfasts, falling in love, breaking up, fucking, taking shits, showering, and slowly becoming unwound. The project, which included an underground shooting range, was eventually closed down by the NYPD, at which point Harris took the cameras into his own apartment and streamed his round-the-clock life with his girlfriend. That experiment also collapsed, for quite predictable reasons.

There’s a point in the film in which Josh is in his apartment fighting with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Tanya tells the camera that under normal circumstances, if you’re in a fight with your partner, the best thing to do is to really listen to them. But under the circumstances of her bizarre life, she admits, in which every moment is being observed by an anonymous digital viewership, you can’t do that because you have to perform for the audience. You have to win the fight. You have a crowd on your side, and so does he. Neither of you can let them down. So you become a version of yourself that you would not be without that audience present. And it’s not a better version.

It hardly needs to be said that the comment anticipated the life we all live today online. It’s not that Tanya was a soothsayer; she was just very early to the party.

Tanya was not like Chris Hansen. She was a young New York City transplant conscripted into the digital habitat of the 21st century before it had fully cohered, and before she was prepared for it. Her ambivalence about the alien world she found herself in is what makes her relatable as a human being.

Chris Hansen is the opposite. He’s a Boomer who came up in the age of television, not the internet. His personality was methodically shaped by well-paid producers and directors whose job it was to make him a star. He didn’t need to worry about rubbing his nose in between takes because he had editors to cut those seconds of footage if the camera was still rolling. He had a crew of professionals and a massive media corporation behind him. He was used to being taken care of, and those instincts show grotesquely when he’s interviewing for Predators. When he’s on, he’s on. The questions feel rote to him, and his answers are scripted and rehearsed. He keeps saying, “I’m OK with that” when answering serious questions about the complicated moral implications of his work. He’s trying to look like a man who has had time to reflect upon and resolve his quandaries, but it’s obvious to anyone watching that he’s “OK with that” because all the collateral damage he inflicted on others is incidental to his professional interests. He’s had decades to ruminate on it, but that moment in front of the camera shows that he probably never really has. He just doesn’t give a shit about the harm he does to other people — it’s not much more complicated than that.

I’m not saying that Chris Hansen is a fake person, though I would certainly bet that he’s a shallow, narcissistic, self-centered person. What I’m saying is that Chris Hansen is a real person, and precisely the kind of person a successful front-of-the-camera media career fabricates. He’s sort of a corporate humanoid. In his Golden Years, he’s still hawking YouTube videos to sell advertisements for skin care products, using the same exact formula of his glory days two decades ago, only sadder. And some of us are being made into clones of Chris Hansen by fame-seeking and social media addiction. Predators shows that dimension, too.

This is the world we see in its gestation in We Live In Public, one in which we’re both viewers and extras in the livestream of American life. We’ve become as used to the ubiquity of the cameras as the pod dwellers in Quiet had. But it would be unfair to stop there, putting the blame uniformly on that collective “we.” The responsibility is not uniformly distributed. Most of us are not an active part of the problem. We’re living normal lives, not radically different from those of a decade or two ago. We’re not clipping DJI microphones to our collars and being followed around by cameramen. We’re the audience, not the stars. The cameras are pointed not at us, but at Hansen and a hundred younger and more famous versions of him, from James O’Keefe to Nick Shirley to Tyler Oliveira. Our job is just to consume their content on our newsfeeds.

The new generation of viral “independent content creators” that has inherited the earth is the cultural offspring of Reality TV. As children, their brains simmered in the stew of shows like To Catch a Predator, Cops, The Bachelor, The Apprentice, and American Idol. Now they’re shaping our politics. Our government, led by a game show host, takes its cues from them, vilifying Haitian immigrants one week and Somali-Americans the next, according to whatever’s blowing up on their YouTube channels. Their conferences are attended by presidents and vice presidents. They’re getting themselves banned by foreign governments.

Granted, you’re much more likely to see them rubbing their noses on camera. The coiffed and manicured newsman of Hansen’s era, sporting a blazer and quipping in perfect sound bites, is now an anachronism. Today’s political influencers have more of Josh and Tanya in them; they grew up assuming the On Air sign was always lit up red. They got drunk and embarrassed themselves with the camera on. They shot their antics with phones and didn’t worry about lighting or acoustics or makeup. This is the new aesthetic. It’s edgier than network TV, less scripted than 2000s-era Reality TV, but beneath the surface it’s the exact same thing: tabloid entertainment dressed up as advocacy journalism, or worse — as democracy.

Many of us have celebrated the slow demise of network news, the monstrosity that brought us Chris Hansen in the first place. We had good reason to. But we should be cautious about embracing what has come to replace it. It’s not just in politics; it’s in everything. The respectable, airbrushed, lowest-common-denominator reality that was once curated for us by professional gatekeepers between blocks of advertisements for multinational corporations is now dirtier, less polished, more grassroots. It has all the trappings of being “real.” But it’s an industry, too. It’s populated by the same needy personalities endlessly seeking public attention and affirmation to fill the gaping cavities in their self-esteem. Its gatekeepers are every bit as jealous as the ones they replaced, only instead of searching for the bland middle on behalf of mass advertisers, they seek out the hysterically polarized edges on behalf of targeted advertisers. Their irreverent rawness is every bit as mediated as Chris Hansen’s dignified poise was. They’re products of the same machine, only the machine’s firmware has been updated.

Note to (non-paying) readers:

A while back, I decided I was going to stop using paywalls. That’s been working out exactly as I expected: my stress levels have gone down a bit, my posting has become more erratic and infrequent, and my revenue has been cut almost in half. All of that is fine with me, but it would also be fine with me — in fact, I’d love it — if you chose to become a paid subscriber anyhow. And if enough of you do, then maybe I can keep the content un-paywalled but also keep up a more regular publishing schedule. That’s the dream, anyway.

—LW

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In late October 2001, while the entire country reeled in the shell shock of 9/11, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act. For a few weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers, a moment of collective grief, introspection, and solidarity had seized the nation, but by now it had largely passed, and the mood had turned toward jingoism, paranoia, and thirst for vengeance. The legislation passed easily, with only a single dissenting vote in the Senate.

But even in the context of that bipartisan consensus, the legislation was shocking. Under its surveillance powers, the government could mass collect Americans’ phone and internet metadata, access your medical, banking, and phone records without a warrant, and even find out what library books you’d checked out.

The law was sold as an emergency measure to pursue the conspirators behind the 9/11 attacks. Many of its provisions were subject to Congressional reauthorization four years later. But as everyone knew, those sunset provisions meant very little. Congress might tinker with reforms around the edges, but it was never going to repeal the bulk of the law. Today, 25 years later, there’s a member of Congress who was in preschool when 9/11 was perpetrated, but the legal surveillance infrastructure the PATRIOT Act put in place remains.

Passage of the PATRIOT Act birthed the political and legal apparatus that grew into the gargantuan NSA domestic spying machine exposed by Edward Snowden — the real “deep state.” Snowden’s revelations led to some significant reforms, such as the end of the direct collection of telephone metadata by the government. But again, the apparatus remains in place, and an entire new industry has emerged to operationalize it, led by Palantir.

I suspect that very few people seriously believe that there’s meaningful oversight of domestic surveillance by the U.S. government — that, on the whole, our Congressmembers are jealous of guarding our privacy, antagonistic toward the surveillance industry, and sufficiently skeptical of the White House’s routine invocations of national security. For the most part, we’ve just gotten used to it. Yes, of course the government is spying on us. Of course they could freeze our bank accounts to punish us for dissent, as has already happened in Canada. Of course facial recognition could be deployed by federal agents to punish Americans for expressing dissent on social media, like the owner of the New York Knicks is already doing.

I suspect that, on an intuitive level, most Americans understand the way this stuff works: if a technology emerges that the state can deploy to consolidate its power over the public, the state will seek to use it. If the government overreaches, then Congress may make a show of putting some constraints in place while voters are still paying attention, but those constraints will be limited and, with time, they will erode in the face of new technological and legal workarounds. Authoritarianism will continue to expand, sometimes in leaps, but more typically in small increments.

I say all this as a prelude to posing the question that is the title of this post: Why does it matter if China dominates AI?

The idea that if we don’t plow forward on AI advancement as freely and recklessly as possible then China will do it first is by now so hackneyed that our brains barely detect the massive assumptions underlying it. One of those assumptions is that the Chinese government will have some kind of unilateral control over whatever they create, or in any case more control than we do, which is curious since it’s China that is building its AIs open source and American companies that keep their LLMs proprietary. Another assumption is that China’s military power will quickly achieve parity with ours, which is probably true, but a bit puzzling to hear from those who have pushed the administration to relieve the export controls on Nvidia chips to China that are designed to prevent precisely that outcome.

The main thrust of the argument, however, seems to be just the general idea that China is autocratic and we’re democratic, and you really don’t want such dangerous and powerful technologies falling into the hands of dictators. Who knows what they’ll do with such power?

I have a lengthy piece that will come out close to America’s 250th birthday making a detailed historical case that American democracy has always depended on certain material conditions, and that those conditions no longer prevail. But for now, suffice it to say that it’s foolish to assume, even if you believe the questionable proposition that America does in fact remain a democracy, that it will continue to be one in an age of AI. Judging by the recent history of mass government surveillance in the United States, it’s safer to assume that the more AI advances, the less free we will become, whether you live in China, the United States, Switzerland or Brazil. Not only will we be subject to novel, Black Mirror-style regimes of monitoring and control, but as human labor diminishes in value, the public will lose our ability to bargain with the institutions that rule over us over such things as our civil liberties.

It’s funny that there’s a trend in the tech industry to name their surveillance products and companies after made-up words from Lord of the Rings, like Palantir and Anduril. The lesson from that whole series, which is not in the least bit subtle, is that whoever gets the Ring of Power becomes corrupt and evil, no matter how virtuous their initial intentions. People like Alex Karp claiming that the end of the world will come if China beats us to AGI is a lot like Gandalf telling Frodo he needs to wear the ring so that Sauron won’t put it on first. The tech right are a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. My guess is that they’re well aware of this literary irony. Their appropriation of Tolkien is a winky-noddy admission that they literally do want to be Sauron. That’s the whole point. Either the CCP will become Sauron or the American tech oligarchs will, and Silicon Valley is mustering their orcs to make sure it’s their own.

In a grainy, black-and-white film from 1947, Jane, an infant girl, lies in a crib looking up at the smiling face of the man looming over her. She beams at him, gesticulating, touching his cheeks. There’s no sound in the film, but you can see that she’s babbling with joy. Her eyes are fixed on him. He has her complete, ecstatic attention.

Next we see Jane a few weeks later. A week before this next footage was shot, circumstances had forced Jane’s mother to leave the baby with strangers. Now she looks subdued, despondent. The man who had brought her such happiness the week before tries to cheer her up. But this time, she bawls hysterically while rocking on her back, kicking the bars of her crib. He strokes her head but she cannot be consoled. “Jane did not scream while weeping,” words on the silent screen explain, “she only moaned.”

The short film, which documents the despair of five children at a foundling home, was made by Dr. René Spitz. He showed it to doctors at medical conferences around New York City. The point he was trying to make, from today’s perspective, is so self-evident it’s astonishing anyone ever had to argue it: that children need the comforting touch of their parents. At the time, however, that claim was not just novel; it was heretical. Dr. Spitz’s peers reacted to his message with open hostility.

The scientific consensus in Dr. Spitz’s time was that children did not need to be shown affection from adults. Experts strongly discouraged hugging, kissing, cradling, rocking, and cooing to your kids. That kind of pampering, they warned, would shape them into irresponsible, needy adults of weak character. Dr. Luther Holt, who wrote an enormously influential book on how to properly raise children, argued against the “vicious practice” of picking up your baby when she cries.

These experts did not purport to speak merely as clinicians with years of relevant experience in the field. They were speaking as scientists conveying findings that had been firmly established in laboratory research. Outside of a handful of fringe dissidents like Spitz, their claims were not controversial among their peers. They were affirmed and applauded at the highest levels of the discipline. This was not just the conventional wisdom or the latest research: this was proven scientific knowledge.

The better part of a century later, it’s clear not just how wrong they were, but in terms of human impact, how catastrophically wrong they were. Sometimes it takes the distance of time to see through the mystique of authority. And there is no authority more mystical than Science.

The doctors who championed this frigid philosophy of child development, led by James B. Watson, were cut from the cloth of the Progressive Era. The crusading reformers of that time recognized no human problem that could not be solved by the tenacious application of scientific expertise. This neo-religious faith in the healing power of science fueled a surge in new technocratic social engineering philosophies, from the “scientific” management of workers on assembly lines to the sanitization of populations through eugenics. It turned every economic, cultural and political problem into an object of scientific inquiry.

Psychology was a fledgling science back then, as in many ways it still is. In this time of fetishization of technocratic authority, the field was riddled with professional status anxiety. Academic psychologists were desperate to prove that human behavior could be observed, measured and predicted as precisely as a moving object in space or a chemical reaction in a test tube. They pined for the credibility of their colleagues in the natural sciences, and strove mightily to earn it.

Emulating the natural sciences required regarding human actions as predictable phenomena subject to natural laws, which lent itself to a conception of human beings as fundamentally mechanical objects. Behaviorism provided just that model. In the eyes of behaviorists, humans differed from animals only in their level of complexity, and animals were soulless biological machines with no intelligence or emotional life. Every action, whether by an animal in a lab or a human in the world, could be accounted for by “conditioned response,” the same mechanism that caused Pavlov’s dogs to drool at the ring of a bell. There was no need to entertain the concept of a soul, a will, or an inner life. It was all action, reaction.

The institutions tasked with treating the sick and the vulnerable reflected these behaviorist assumptions. In foundling houses, to control the spread of germs, infants were kept in the most sanitized of conditions — clean sheets, sequestered spaces — but were rarely picked up, held, or spoken to. In asylums, those with the most severe mental illnesses were locked in back wards for years or decades, observed and attended to by psychiatrists and orderlies in a doomed effort to re-condition them into sanity.

Like those institutions, the family household, too, was regarded by mainstream psychologists as a glorified Skinner Box. Children were the rats pushing the levers, being rewarded for mimicking the correct response or punished for deviating from it. Parental love was a mushy, unscientific concept that had no role to play in this tidy, rational arrangement.

Plenty of parents, of course, paid no attention to expert advice. But those who did — typically the educated moms and dads of the professional class — were made to feel selfish, irresponsible and negligent for succumbing to their instincts to show love to their children. And many of their kids, never knowing the security of unconditional love, grew into emotionally stunted adults.

And then the theory was proved wrong.

At the cost of subjecting rhesus macaque monkeys in his laboratory to some of the most unspeakable suffering imaginable, the famous experimental psychologist Harry Harlow, at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated that maternal love was not just good for child development, it was as vital as food, shelter, and modern medicine. And he did so with the kind of meticulously collected data that the hard-nosed behaviorists could not ignore.

The findings Harlow derived from his maternal deprivation experiments on macaques were not so much a scientific breakthrough as a correction. Various medical sciences — psychology wasn’t alone in its culpability — had contrived the fantasy that humans were, effectively, organic machines that required material sustenance and behavioral conditioning but not love or connection. Harlow, who prided himself on how much his discoveries accorded with common sense, proved that this was an intellectual delusion.

At roughly the same time that Harlow was demonstrating the intellectual bankruptcy of behaviorism, psychology was falling short of its aspirations to emulate the natural sciences in its most famous institution: the asylum. Asylums were places of healing, or at least they were supposed to be. And some who suffered from mental illness did indeed receive life-changing care at state psychiatric hospitals. But those patients with the most severe diseases, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, proved impervious to psychological treatment even after languishing for years or decades in their back wards. The stubbornness of their sicknesses became an embarrassment for the discipline of psychology, showing that its clinical application was limited and, perhaps, its insights specious. As their beds filled with the most hopeless cases, asylums degraded into filthy dungeons of cruelty, negligence and despair. Freshly minted psychiatrists began to avoid them, going into private practice instead. Psychological counseling became a therapy for the “worried well” rather than the truly sick. The asylums were shuttered, and the only effective treatment for the most severely afflicted came not from psychology but from biochemistry: psychotropic drugs. Little has changed for schizophrenic patients since the discovery of Thorazine in the 1950s.

Today, most of us understand that Psychology will never be a “hard” science like Physics, nor will its medical application likely ever achieve the specificity and concrete efficacy of practices like cardiology or oncology. But in 1947, when Dr. Spitz made his film, its limitations had not yet been reached. Its practitioners still believed, or at least wished to believe, that their knowledge was every bit as authoritative as that of a molecular biologist or a cardiovascular pathologist. They spoke of their psychological theories as if they were laws of nature.

Of course, scientists are allowed to be wrong. Indeed, flawed scientific consensuses are part of the structure of Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. Scientific theories are meant to be challenged, disproved, and replaced by better ones; that’s how science progresses.

But if Kuhn was correct about the contingent “paradigms” of science, then so was Michel Foucault. Like Kuhn, Foucault understood that science was not just an act of revelation, but a discourse between human beings. That discourse could reflect objective reality, but it could also shape it. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault described the scientific invention of the homosexual, which served as a means for the state to insinuate its control into the intimate relations of the household.

But unlike Kuhn, Foucault traced a connection between these scientific and other technical discourses to the administrative needs of the state, which is to say, to the exercise of political power. His concept of “power/knowledge,” though horribly named, is indispensable to seeing through the many spell-binding disguises that cloak raw power in the legitimizing costume of authority. The state ultimately wields power through its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but rarely is it called upon to deploy force directly, or even threaten to do so. Instead, it exerts control over individuals by laundering it through intellectual disciplines that expand the ideological authority of those at the helm of the social order and justify their intrusion into every layer of society: macroeconomics, environmental sciences, public health, urban planning, critical race studies. Those who seek to resist that consolidation of power are forced to do so by critiquing its rationalization within those same discourses, forming dissenting schools of thought within every discipline and sub-discipline. Thus every discourse becomes a battlefield, almost always with the dissidents on the downhill side.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of the physical expression of this discursive power than newborn babies sequestered in orderly rows of sterile cages, handled on a routine schedule by professional staff. This was the recurring pattern of the industrial age, seen in everything from public education to mass manufacturing to factory farming. In the era of mass industrial competition, the power of the state was a function of the mechanical efficiency and precision with which societies were organized. In the Soviet Union, Marxism provided the intellectual basis for the rationalization of this social re-ordering. In the United States, it was Taylorism at the level of the shop floor, and among the professional classes, it was the technocratic governing philosophy that emerged from the Progressive era.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Harlow’s research on love emerged in the 1960s, when that industrial paradigm was breaking down under the strain of its internal contradictions. The most visible expression of that breakdown was the political foment and countercultural resistance of the Baby Boomer generation, whose rebellion was not so much “leftist” in orientation as anti-conformist and individualist. The New Left adopted the aesthetics and rhetoric of socialism, but in its loathing of “The System” and its valorization of individual freedom and expression, it was firmly in the tradition of American frontier libertarianism, a legacy of the Scots-Irish. In violently rejecting the organization of American society on industrial lines, far from being agents of outside forces, the youth of the ‘60s were acting as antibodies expelling a foreign pathogen.

Scientific management of society failed because it was always a fantasy. Communist utopia did not spring forth from the clash between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie because the world is not a giant Rube Goldberg machine and history cannot be explained by scientific laws. American free market capitalism collapsed in the 2008 global financial crisis because the self-regulating global marketplace is as much a fairy tale as Dialectical Materialism. The asylums failed to heal the severely mentally ill because one cannot re-engineer the human brain through response conditioning. James B. Watson did not produce a new generation of well-adjusted, happy, functional adults because a baby isn’t a tiny humanoid in a laboratory.

We are now entering a new era of post-industrial society, the age of Artificial Intelligence, and already you can feel the discursive apparatus of power shifting its gears to meet it. Suddenly, all talk of apocalyptic climate change has vanished, as governments scramble to “10x” the energy output of our electrical grids to feed the bottomless pit of data center demand. I expect that soon we will start to hear “scientific” arguments that humans don’t actually need to learn new things, that work is bad for you, and that a human-centered world is a suboptimal one.

I’m not a “postmodernist,” whatever that means. I believe that science, at its best, reflects an objective reality, and that over the course of generations, it advances incrementally closer to the truth. But science is also political, and it is especially so when it comes to its most conjectural parts, like the “science” of raising a child, creating a prosperous society, or managing an ecosystem. It is funded by vested interests, and it tends to operate within a received set of parameters and assumptions that reflects establishment thoughts and beliefs. It is deployed to rationalize ideology and it eventually becomes inseparable from it. It is there, in part, to enchant you, to make you believe that choices that are ours to make are not choices at all, but are immutable properties of nature itself. It speaks with authority, and beneath authority is power. And power is a different thing from truth.

Recommended reading:

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (2011), by Deborah Blum

The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (2011), by Gerald N. Grob

Last month, I accompanied hundreds of activists in an attempted mass rescue of thousands of Ridglan dogs. I made this short documentary out of it, which I’m co-publishing with Glenn.

Hope you enjoy it.

—LW

Real Clear Investigations just published my story on the beagles of Ridglan Farms, an industrial breeder that sells dogs to laboratories for heinous scientific experiments. After years of activism and advocacy, 1,500 of the 2,000 beagles have secured their freedom, and the 500 that remain are likely to be released for adoption, too. The victory was achieved by a pressure campaign that spanned the political gamut from the far left to the MAGA right and all points in between. Where rabid partisanship and political polarization is a recipe for achieving nothing, unexpected coalitions formed around the values we share in common can produce miraculous results.

Hope you enjoy the piece.

—LW

The first thing you notice when you get hit by a cloud of tear gas is the sickeningly sweet, acrid smell. The chemical isn’t technically a gas; it’s a powder that disperses into a fine mist. When it touches your body, it activates pain receptors, causing a severe stinging sensation on the skin and in the eyes and lungs. You can mitigate the respiratory impact by breathing shallowly, but the chemical induces a sensation of suffocation, so your instincts compel you to gasp, which makes the pain and nausea much worse. Your eyes shut tight reflexively, and when you try to open them severe discomfort surges into searing pain. You can wash it out with water, but that requires blinking, which is agonizing. As you recover, you begin to be able to open your eyes for longer — a quarter second, a half second. But every time you do, the feeling of needles in your eyes becomes more like knives, and you’re forced to shut them again instantly. Sometimes it passes in a couple of minutes; sometimes it takes a half hour. If you’re getting bombarded with it, there’s a good chance you’ll start choking on a new round of gas while you’re still trying to recover from the previous one.

CS gas, the most common form of tear gas for riot control, was banned from use in warfare by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. But it is routinely used by police against civilians. On April 18, when over 1,000 protesters converged on Ridglan Farms, a dog breeding facility outside of Madison, Wisconsin that sells beagles to laboratories for use in painful and lethal scientific experiments, the 17 law enforcement agencies assembled there to defend the property fired tear gas at crowds of unarmed people continuously and prolifically, for hours.

I was there as a reporter, but to my surprise, the drifting clouds of poison did not bother to check my press pass. The powder crawled into my eyes and lungs and alighted on my skin like some ghostly extraterrestrial parasite, just as it did for everyone else.

It’s an eye-opening experience to witness your body become incapable of obeying your mind no matter how much willpower you summon to the task. When you’re in the middle of a tear gas cloud, naturally, the first thing you want to do is get out of its way. But the anatomical apparatus you require for that action simply shuts down. You find yourself sprawled out on the ground, or stumbling around like a zombie, blind, coughing, dry heaving, moaning and cursing and thinking of only one thing: pain. If you hear the pop of another tear gas canister fired in your direction, instead of trying to get away from it you just bear down, moaning more loudly, breathing more desperately, preparing yourself psychologically for another few endless minutes of hell. It’s all you can do.

I’m a modern American white collar professional. I’m soft, unaccustomed to suffering. The closest I can come is when I used to run marathons. By mile 22 you become intimately acquainted with pain. But it’s of a different character: it’s vital, wholesome, debatably healthy, and voluntarily contracted. It’s an achievement. You can take pride in it.

The pain of tear gas, like the pain of a beatdown, is hostile, alien, destructive. It’s a foreign invader that’s trying to kill you. The smoldering lactic acid of a long distance run generates the kind of controlled discomfort that a middle-aged, middle-class dad can embrace. Being physically subdued by weapons engineered to turn you into a cowering domesticated animal is a whole different category of ordeal. It’s not just physical; it’s also symbolic. Someone more powerful than you has demanded that you submit, and you have submitted. You are literally powerless to do anything else. For this handful of minutes, you are a slave. This is not part of the repertoire of daily life for the average member of the American bourgeoisie.

I remember in graduate school when a sociology professor was comparing social forces to physical ones. As many a natural scientist would be quick to point out, things like laws or norms or market forces are not real in the way that gravity or velocity or disease is. They’re social constructs; they exist only because we conjured them into existence and agreed to recognize them as “real.” But, the professor pointed out, go out and smash the window of a police car. You will quickly find yourself pinned to the ground and handcuffed, then put in a cell you couldn’t escape in a hundred years. In a society with functional social structures, the physical consequences of resisting those forces are just as intractable as those of cancer or falling off a roof.

Though less direct, things like market forces are consistent with that tangible reality. The cost of being poor is, in part, a physical toll: hunger, malnutrition, exposure to coldness or heat. To be sure, you can get around the condition, sort of, by breaking laws — stealing food, or robbing a house to get money for rent — things you can’t do to evade the force of gravity. But sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in that cell again, contemplating the profound non-social-constructiveness of the concrete walls surrounding you. Even social forces like norms, which do not exist in a legal context, have tangible consequences you cannot escape, from the panicky, accelerated heart rate of devastating humiliation to the exclusion from social and often physical spaces that your degraded reputation has earned you.

These kinds of consequences are more familiar to the average, law-abiding, middle class American than physical assault and detention. We don’t often flirt with brazen crime and court the risk of incarceration. The authority of the state is something of an abstraction. There are laws, and we know we’re not supposed to break them. Intellectually, we understand that if we were to commit a felony, we would go to jail. But the deterrent effect of the law usually doesn’t feel quite that specific. It’s more like religious prohibitions against sinning: we just have a taken-for-granted sense of how to comport ourselves such that we continue to fit in with other normal, respectable people. We don’t have to think too hard about the consequences of breaking the rules, because we’re simply not rule breakers. We drive within our lanes. We never even come close to hitting the rumble strips.

Most of the protesters at Ridglan Farms that day, like most people everywhere, were rule followers. They were normies. There were plenty of vegans and radicals, but I also interviewed a retired pilot from South Carolina, a retired machinist from Wisconsin, and a welder who served in the military. They told me how much they loved their steaks and how their politics generally leaned rightward. What brought them to the action that day was not ideological fanaticism but the very normal, middle-class moral conviction that abusing puppies for profit was bad. Within minutes of showing up, like me, they were choking on tear gas.

As Max Weber’s famous definition of the state suggests, the government’s authority is, at its foundation, a function of its capacity to exert violence. In Weber’s formulation, what differentiates the government from criminals is that its exercise of violence is legitimate, by which he means perceived to be legitimate by the broader public. When that government is pulverizing people trying to save puppies, its legitimacy can be cast in doubt, but the violence part is beyond question when you’re choking on it. These are the moments when the scales fall from one’s eyes, when power becomes visible, when the state appears as it actually is rather than what it pretends to be. It’s when you learn what it means to truly disobey.

I wrote this book review for Compact Magazine about the inefficacy of both political violence and normal politics to make meaningful social change, looking at two episodes from the 1990s: Ruby Ridge and the Earth Liberation Front.

Hope you give it a read.

—LW

When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, when the tidal wave of job loss from artificial intelligence has submerged every household in the country, when, no matter how hard we squint, we can barely discern a future for our children anymore, we will turn, in panic, to the government for relief. All the policy ideas for managing the crisis that sound so radical today — Universal Basic Income, treating AI like a public utility — will appear, in that moment, hopelessly meek. Facing annihilation, we will seek acts of heroism from the state commensurate to the scale of the emergency.

But by then, it will be too late. Whatever is left of what we know now as “government” will no longer respond to our needs. In a world in which humans play no productive role in the economy, our interests will have no relevance to the state. The only interests that will register to it will be those of the oligarchs.

We have never before seen a society devoid of human labor, but we have seen many in which such labor was cheap. And we know that democracy is impossible in such societies.

In the late nineteenth century, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that the fundamental difference between “primitive” and “modern” societies was the degree of complexity of their respective divisions of labor. In societies with simple divisions of labor — say, a community composed largely of subsistence farmers — there is no immanent social glue that ties one self-sufficient household to another. Like a colony of ants, if a typhoon wiped out a quarter of the population of such a society, little would necessarily have to change in the way of its larger social structures. Religion, Durkheim argued, emerged to create, through ritual, that missing social glue.

In modern societies with highly complex divisions of labor, by contrast, we are all materially dependent upon one another. A few thousand TSA agents don’t show up to work and air travel across the country becomes a nightmare. Ships are blocked through the Strait of Hormuz and the global food supply is threatened. The difference between pre-modern and modern societies, in Durkheim’s view, is like the difference between a plant and a complex animal. If you cut off a few branches of a tree, they’ll just grow back, with no impact to the health of the overall organism. If you cut a few limbs off of a human being, we will be permanently disabled if we survive at all.

The relative value of the individual to the whole of society is thus greatly enhanced by a more complex division of labor. Durkheim believed that this is why, in such societies, individual rights are accorded an esteem that verges on the sacred: it’s a reflection of the greater community’s material reliance on each of us. The degree to which the state responds to the needs of its citizens or subjects, in other words, isn’t merely a matter of morality or ideology. It is a function of the material balance of power between a governed population and its government.

But what happens in a world in which human beings no longer play that vital role? Can individual rights survive in a society in which humans continue to consume resources but produce no economic value?

Modern examples would suggest not. A paper titled The Intelligence Curse (which I’ve discussed before) compares the future before us to the circumstances of people living in countries with abundant natural resources. Take the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. The DRC is the richest country in the world measured in its trillions of dollars of extractable minerals, yet one of its poorest in terms of human welfare. The government of the DRC is flush with wealth from foreign companies — now primarily Chinese — that purchase leases to mine the country’s cobalt, a critical mineral for rechargeable batteries. There is no incentive for the government to invest in education, urban infrastructure, or decent housing for the vast majority of its citizens, because the state’s fiscal health does not depend on taxing a prosperous citizenry, and the poverty of the Congolese provides foreign investors with cheap labor. The results are predictable: mass poverty, rule by oligarchs, tyranny. Economists describe countries like the DRC as suffering from a “resource curse.”

The paper’s authors expect the same to happen in an A.I.-dominated economy in which wealth is overwhelmingly produced by machines and not by humans. Why would the state, in such a world, continue to recognize such things as the civil liberties and personal property rights of a human population with no value to it? Why would it make concessions to those dispossessed of all bargaining power? Why would it regard us any differently than we regard the fish of the ocean?

Short of stopping A.I. research altogether — a prospect so unlikely as to be basically inconceivable — the main solution proposed by those in the field who worry about such things as democracy and human survival is AI alignment. “Alignment” refers to the process of bringing the ethical values of AI into harmony with those of humankind. It’s a technologically challenging task, potentially an impossible one.

It is also a wholly inadequate technical solution to this profound political problem. You can’t hard code democratic values into a large language model; you can only train it and hope for the best. But even if you could achieve that end, there’s no reason to believe that the frontier AI corporate leaders and politicians of the future will choose to do so. When people are handed power, they rarely decide voluntarily to forfeit it to the public. In a society in which the mass of humanity has little power, we can expect those who rule us to concede nothing.

It’s easy to see the outlines of what such a future governing regime will look like, because we’ve seen it before. After the barbarians sacked Rome, the kingdoms they established lacked the former Empire’s bureaucratic capacity to tax their subject populations. In place of taxation emerged a system of political patronage, in which favors, mainly in the form of land rights, were distributed to local strongmen with the military power to extract agricultural surpluses from the peasantry. Feudalism was the formalization of this mafia-style extortion economy.

We can expect something similar to arise in a world run by AI. Power and resources will accrue to the tech titans who still possess economic value to the new regime. The rest of us will compete for the favor of those elites by finding some way to serve their interests in a way that machines cannot yet do: perhaps by providing them human company, or menial servitude, or some other form of social subordination. Those who cannot compete in that arena will simply fail to survive. With time, those elites will find themselves fewer and fewer in number, as they are supplanted, like the rest of us, by machine intelligence.

Democracy is not just a set of values. It’s a social structure that rests on certain economic conditions — conditions that are not long for this world. Training ethical values into LLMs will do nothing to address this transformation. We will not prosper in a world of benevolent dictators, whether machine or human. As the economic value of human labor declines, our social value, in the eyes of the state, will decline accordingly. We are creating a successor society in which we have no future.

When the Iraq War broke out 23 years ago, the world saw the biggest wave of anti-war protests in human history. That included in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of Americans poured out into the streets of Manhattan. In San Francisco, where I was living at the time, massive peaceful protests were accompanied by widespread civil disobedience and direct action as well as property destruction. Thousands were arrested.

We’ve seen no such public response to the war in Iran, despite its being even less popular than Operation Iraqi Freedom. That may be, in part, because American ground troops have not yet been deployed in theater. But I suspect that the reason is deeper than that: it’s because nobody has the sense that anything we do matters anymore.

It’s hard to overstate the level of shock the post-9/11 Bush administration administered to the American political system. Back then, the idea of the United States engaging in a “preemptive” war of choice was almost inconceivable. The U.S., of course, had engaged in wars of aggression before, particularly in Vietnam, but we at least invented Gulf of Tonkin-type precipitating events to allow us to claim we were fighting in self-defense. Other than the preposterous conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein secretly orchestrated 9/11, we made no such claims about Iraq. We simply insisted that, despite the enormous amount of evidence to the contrary, Saddam was secretly manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, and that, in itself, justified an invasion and occupation.

Once the invasion got underway, the political convulsion of the war itself was followed by a series of equally violent aftershocks: “enhanced interrogation,” Guantanamo Bay, the PATRIOT Act, “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping, Abu Ghraib. Each of these episodes felt like a step toward fascism. It seemed as if the White House was systematically annihilating the idea that it was accountable to laws at all.

But even that moment didn’t feel as lawless as this one. The Iraq War, unlike our current one, was preceded by a solid year of non-stop propagandizing. We were being lied to, but the fact that the government was even taking the trouble to invent stories about a secret Prague meeting and Chinese aluminum tubes and yellow cake uranium showed that public opinion still mattered to the administration. Likewise, the intelligence services’ kidnapping and torture programs were justified by endless internal legal memos. The Bush administration apparently believed that courts still mattered, and the spies carrying out its dirty work assumed that, someday, their actions would be reviewed by a judge and that they better have legal cover for all of it.

None of that is the case today. The Trump administration couldn’t even be bothered to launch a PR campaign to promote the drive to war in Iran. The very idea that its acts of aggression, from bombing “drug boats” in the Caribbean to kidnapping and assassinating heads of state, require some sort of legal justification feels quaint and vaguely nostalgic. This is a government that appears to care neither what its citizens think nor what the laws say. So what exactly is the point of protesting? I don’t think anyone in 2003 expected the Iraq War to be called off because millions of people were demanding it, but it at least felt like an attempt, however desperate, to manifest some kind of political pressure on decision makers. The No Kings marches feel purely cathartic. Does anyone who participated in them actually believe there’s even a theory of how they might produce actual change?

By that I mean no offense to the No Kings protesters. Political expression is important even when it’s just therapeutic. The alternative to participating in them is to do nothing at all, other than wait for the November midterms, if you still have faith in such things as elections and the Democratic Party.

But doing nothing is not, in fact, an irrational response to our current state of affairs, which is why, in my opinion, that’s what most of us are doing. It just doesn’t seem like the public has any leverage with this White House, which is an alarming thing to say in a supposed democracy.

If you’ve ever expressed dissent about any aspect of U.S. foreign policy, you’ve probably had some idiot ask you why you you’re not out protesting the way Iran, or China, or Venezuela treats its citizens. The answer is obvious: because you’re not Iranian, Chinese, or Venezuelan. Your opinions have no impact whatsoever on those governments’ decisions. You’re an American, so you’re concerned with what your government does in your name. You register your objections in order to influence your government to act differently.

But it increasingly feels like we have just as little say in our own government’s actions as those of a foreign government. No normal person wanted this war, and millions of people voted for Trump precisely because he said he’d keep us out of these disasters. The President didn’t care. No normal person wants American troops on the ground in Iran, but it looks as likely as not that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The Republicans are facing rising gas prices, the risk of global recession, and a likely rout in November, and still Trump presses forward wherever his whims lead him. There are people whose opinions do matter to Trump — people who have his cell phone number in their contacts — but the American electorate isn’t fortunate enough to be among them. So we do nothing, because there’s nothing to be done.

The feeling isn’t restricted to foreign policy, either. We’re all sitting around waiting for our jobs to be vaporized by A.I., a technology nobody asked for. Oracle just laid off 30,000 workers in order to divert their salaries into A.I. data centers. Remember when Trump directly intervened to try to prevent the Carrier Corporation from moving a couple thousand jobs from Indiana to Mexico? Oracle is owned and operated by his buddy, Larry Ellison, but the White House isn’t lifting a finger for its laid off workforce. The same Larry Ellison is about to own half of American media, so in the future you can expect not just inaction from the government, but cheerleading from the press when your boss destroys your family’s future to impress his investors with his blind devotion to the promise of agentic A.I., too.

We all know whose interests and judgments register with this president. It’s largely the same people whose net worth will rise from your job being replaced by a robot, and whose patented technologies are picking targets to bomb in Iran. The Iranian government knows who those people are, too, which is why the IRGC is about to start bombing their data centers. That small clique of presidential whisperers has a stake in the bleak future this government is helping to usher in — the one where you have no job and your country is endlessly at war. Their views matter. Ours don’t. Not long ago, the world was more complicated than that, but it isn’t anymore. And we all know it.

Last April, I wrote a post titled, “Do We Still Have a Democracy?” Back then the answer to that question wasn’t entirely self-evident. The administration was clearly acting as if it were above the law, snatching legal immigrants off the street without due process, making policy by government decree instead of through the legislature, and ignoring federal court orders. But we’ve had many presidents who have stretched the legal bounds of their authority before, including Trump during his first term, and still the Republic survived.

In the intervening ten or so months, things have started to look clearer both in degree and in kind. Snatching immigrants off the street escalated into killing American citizens who interfered with ICE operations. The very idea of passing a significant bill into law in Congress has come to feel as obsolete as a Congressional declaration of war. And the administration’s violations of federal court orders have become, if anything, yet more brazen.

Those are the differences in degree. But in the last week we’ve also had two examples of differences in kind.

The first was the Secretary of War’s designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” in response to the AI company’s refusal to agree to his contractual terms for use of Claude by the military. Since news is coming this week at a thousand miles per hour, here’s a brief recap of events:

During the Biden administration, Anthropic licensed its AI to the Pentagon. It stipulated two conditions in its contract: that its technology not be used for mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans (which the government can legally do with commercially available metadata), and that it not be used in autonomous weapons systems with no human involvement.

When the Trump administration renewed the agreement, it initially agreed to these terms. But at some point along the way, the Pentagon changed its mind. The two conditions, it now argued, represented a usurpation of state powers by a private corporation. As a matter of principle, no democratic government could ever allow it.

However you may feel about mass surveillance, fully autonomous weapons systems, or the Trump administration, it’s not a crazy position to take. Most people would agree that private corporations shouldn’t dictate U.S. military policy, strategy, or tactics. Whether that’s what Anthropic’s contract terms represented is debatable. As Dean Ball points out, every defense contractor stipulates restrictions on the use of its products — that’s why they have a contract in the first place. But the principle is hard to dispute.

But even if you agree with the Department of War’s characterization of Anthropic’s contractual terms, the normal thing to do when you reach an impasse is to call off the negotiations and go seek another vendor. But Pete Hegseth, being Pete Hegseth, couldn’t restrict himself to just doing the normal thing. Instead, he designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which, according to his dubious interpretation of the law, not only bans Anthropic from any further defense contracts and bans other defense contractors from using Anthropic when working on military projects, but also bans any company with a defense contract from having any commercial relationship with Anthropic at all. Such companies would include Anthropic’s biggest investors, and AI infrastructure companies like Nvidia that no AI company can operate without. It’s a Cuba-level embargo. There is no way Anthropic could survive under these conditions.

The implications of this threat are astonishing. As Ball points out, they represent nothing less than the end of private property. Consider this analogy: One day, government agents show up at your front door and say they want to buy your house at fair market value. You’ve been thinking of selling anyway, so you’re happy to negotiate with them. But then you learn that their purpose for buying your house is to convert it into a bomb factory. You don’t feel great about that use of your house, so you say, look you can buy my house and move into it, but I’m going to put in the contract that you can’t use it to make bombs.

The government isn’t interested in your house if they can’t make bombs in it. In the normal course of events, both parties would just walk away from the deal, disappointed. But these government agents go further. They accuse you of trying to dictate government policy and designate you a terrorist. Now nobody will hire you or do business with you or invite you to their Super Bowl party. You become an unemployed social pariah and lose your house to foreclosure.

Your next door neighbor has been watching all of this happen to you. The next day, the government knocks on his door and tells him they’re interested in buying his house. What do you think he’s going to say?

Just days after Hegseth’s supply chain threat designation, the United States went to war with Iran (using Claude). This is the second “difference in kind” we’ve seen in the last few days.

The absolutely undemocratic nature of the decision to attack Iran has been too amply commented on to be worth reciting in detail. Suffice it to say that the President never even bothered to make a case for war to the public, so little do our opinions on the question matter to his decision-making, let alone to seek authorization from Congress. One can feel free to make the case that it’s within the President’s legal authority as the Commander-in-Chief to do whatever he wants with his military, short of using it against American citizens. But normally you expect the government to at least to pretend to care about public opinion. Those days are apparently over.

But things are even worse than that. This war has put not only the health of our democracy in question, but the extent of our sovereignty as well. Iran is a regional power, not a global one. Its geopolitical rival is Israel, not the United States — Iran is an American preoccupation only because it’s an Israeli obsession. And at least the timing of the attack, if not the attack itself, was, by the administration’s own account, determined by Israel, not the White House. Not only do Americans’ opinions no longer matter to the American war machine — our interests don’t count, either. Our government is more than happy to risk American lives for foreign interests if that’s what the donor class wants.

Among the many threats posed by Artificial Intelligence is the deterioration of the conditions that make democracy possible. As our jobs are replaced by AI agents, human beings will become less essential to the health and growth of the U.S. economy. And as we become less essential, we will see our bargaining power with the state erode along with our economic value. Aside from philosophical ideals, why would the government recognize our civil rights if it had the option not to? In oil-rich countries where human labor is less essential to economic growth, we see how little bargaining power citizens have with their oligarchical states, and how little their individual rights are respected. Economists call this the “Resource Curse.” The threat posed by AI is the same; some writers have called it “The Intelligence Curse.”

One could make the case that this is already happening. Our government no longer concerns itself with what you or I think about a new war in the Middle East. It doesn’t need to, as long as it can safeguard its access to the technology that makes warfare possible. And to secure that tech, it has shown itself willing to question the principle of private property itself.

We live in a stage set version of a democracy, where the props and the furniture are plain to see but their only function is to help us voluntarily suspend our disbelief. If there’s a ghost in the machine it is fading away. Soon there will be only machine.

Last week, a federal judge in California issued a ruling that accused the Trump administration of directly violating a series of court orders. The government, Judge Sunshine Sykes wrote, “far crossed the boundaries of constitutional conduct,” and was determined to “continue their campaign of illegal action.” She referred to the government’s legal position as “shameless” and accused the administration of trying “to erode any semblance of the separation of powers.” The government’s conduct, Sykes wrote, could only be allowed “in a world where the Constitution does not exist.” George Pappas, a former immigration judge, told me he believes the present impasse amounts to a constitutional crisis. “This is direct interference in judicial impartiality,” he said.

The court orders that the government is accused of defying were issued over the summer and fall of last year. On July 8, 2025, DHS made an internal announcement of a change in policy. From then on, ICE’s Acting Director, Todd Lyons, instructed his agency, any undocumented immigrant arrested in the United States would be subject to “mandatory detention” and denied the possibility of release on bond.

This was a stark break from decades of past practice. Historically, ICE and other agencies have interpreted the Immigration and Naturalization Act to require mandatory detention for people who had landed in the government’s custody immediately after having presented themselves at a port of entry. As they awaited a removal hearing, the government held those immigrants, freshly arrived and with no ties to the United States, in locked facilities.

By contrast, undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for years before being arrested were typically released on bond. These were people with jobs and apartments, kids in school, and often American citizen relatives. They were unlikely to flee.

Now, however, ICE was saying that even these immigrants had to be incarcerated for the months or even years it took to go through removal proceedings.

That internal memo was followed, in September, by a precedent-setting ruling from Teresa Riley, the Chief Immigration Judge at the Department of Justice, that made the same determination: even immigrants who had lived in the country for years or decades were subject to mandatory detention.

Hundreds of lawsuits were filed in response. Individual judges suddenly found dozens of such cases on their dockets. “The vast majority were saying, ‘yes, they’re entitled to a bond hearing,” former immigration judge Sarah Cade told me, but still, the government would come back to court again and again claiming that they were not. “A lot of judges were getting really irate.”

In November, ruling on one such lawsuit, Judge Sykes ordered the government to reverse its new practice, declaring it unlawful and unconstitutional. But two months later, Judge Riley instructed immigration judges to defy it, claiming that the federal ruling was “not a nationwide injunction” and had no bearing on the case she had ruled on in September.

This was the memo that prompted Judge Sykes’ ruling last week, which opened with a quote from James Madison referring to the concentration of judicial, executive and legislative powers “in the same hands” as “the very definition of tyranny.”

The quote points to a structural feature of the immigration courts that is at the heart of the current stand-off. Unlike most justices, immigration judges are not part of the judicial branch of the federal government. Instead, they’re part of the Department of Justice. They belong to the executive branch and are ultimately answerable to the Attorney General and the President. If the administration shows a clear preference that they rule in a particular way, they don’t have the independence of a circuit court judge to confidently do otherwise.

“The judges making these rulings fear for their jobs,” said Pappas. “They have a financial interest in how they rule.” Pappas himself was fired for not bowing to the government when the administration wanted him to dismiss cases before his bench, which would enable ICE to arrest respondents at the courthouse. Nearly 100 immigration judges have been fired by the Trump administration, which is unheard of in the profession. The threat, Pappas believes, has chilled immigration judges’ freedom to make determinations independent of politics.

The Trump administration is currently in-filling the gap with military lawyers.

University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Adam Goodman, author of The Deportation Machine, believes that the administration’s goal is to keep as many migrants in detention for as long as possible in order to coerce them to waive their rights to hearings by signing voluntary departure forms. “This is a power play by DHS,” he said. “Over a period of months or years, a certain portion of people will agree to leave the U.S. out of desperation.”

In her ruling last week, Sykes expressly vacated the precedent-setting case that Teresa Riley was relying on to defy the circuit court's orders. Cade suspects the administration will, at some point, agree to comply. But by then, perhaps thousands of immigrants who had a right to a hearing and who had legitimate claims to remain in the country will have been pushed out under the duress of detention. Justice delayed will have become justice denied.

I got in an argument with Chris Rufo on Twitter over the weekend about “white culture.” Twitter is, of course, the worst place in the universe to have any kind of productive disagreement about anything, but as I don’t regard Chris as a good faith interlocutor in the first place, maybe the platform doesn’t much matter. Chris has a political project, the goals of which take precedence over everything else for him, especially honesty and accuracy. It’s why he eagerly jumped into the “Haitians eating pets” hoax, and then invented a connection between the Somali fraud scandal and the Al-Shabaab terrorist group.

But the discussion about “white culture” is a good one to have out in the open, as the Republican Party drifts further into overt white nationalism. The kind of discourse that was shocking back in 2017 when Charlottesville happened is becoming normalized. If we don’t talk about this stuff explicitly, we’ll wake up one day and half the country will take for granted that there’s a white genocide afoot, having absorbed it more or less by osmosis.

My argument with Chris is just one little clamor in a cacophony of noise over the last few days that was ignited by this exchange in a Senate confirmation hearing. You can watch it if you want to; the details of it don’t matter that much outside of the fact that it shoved the idea of “white culture” and it’s supposed disappearance to the front of the public discourse. Chris is of the opinion, shared by many, that it’s self-evident that there’s such a thing as “white culture,” that’s it’s synonymous with “European culture,” and that it’s the bedrock of American civilization. He’s of the further opinion, also shared by many, that that culture is under attack from mass immigration, and that America is losing something vital and existentially precious in the process. It’s basically The Great Replacement but on a level of abstraction that makes it plausibly respectable to the right-of-center.

There are three steps, as far as I can discern, to the argument. First, that there’s a singular culture that united Europe over the course of the continent’s history. Second, that there is a biological race called “white people” that is synonymous with “Europeans,” such that we can speak of European culture as “white culture.” And third, that this “white culture” was the foundation of an earlier, purer, better American culture that has been contaminated and degraded over the last 65 years by immigrants from non-European countries.

All three are questionable, in my opinion. A couple of them are asinine.

Let’s start with the first.

Europe, unlike Australia, Antarctica, Africa, or North or South America, is not a discrete landmass. It is contiguous with the continent of Asia, and the borders between the two have always been a matter of debate. In my opinion, the boundaries between them are defined more by culture than geography. Specifically, Europe is the part of the world that was historically unified under the religion of Christianity. Asia is the the land to its east that Christianity was never able to dominate.

Before Christianity’s arrival, large parts of what we now know as “Europe” were integrated under the Western Roman Empire. Roman conquest created a common culture throughout southern Europe and as far north as England, with, of course, regional variations. That common culture is reflected in stately architecture, urban planning and in the Romance languages.

While extensive, however, the Roman Empire neither fully enveloped what we now call “Europe,” nor was it limited to Europe’s current borders. Vast swathes of Germany and Scandinavia lay beyond its reach. At the same time, the empire stretched to North Africa and the Middle East, and was centered not just in Rome but also in modern Istanbul.

When the Western Roman Empire fell, the European continent, both within and beyond the empire’s former borders, underwent a millennium of commingling of once distant and alien populations. This was the Age of the Great Migrations, also known as the Age of Invasions. During this time, the Germanic “barbarian” tribes, once beyond the direct control of the empire but nonetheless subservient to it, descended into the formerly imperial lands, settled into Roman ruins and became feudal kings.

The ninth century saw the Viking invasions. Scandinavian invaders colonized almost all of England and the swathe of France that would come to bear their name, Normandy. In the east they established Kiev, from which would emerge, after much genetic mingling with the Slavs, the Russian people. During the same period, the Carolingian Empire unified many of the Germanic kingdoms under the banner of Christendom. Eventually, the Vikings, too, would embrace the new faith. Then, in the eleventh century, the Norman kings invaded England, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the only domain to survive the Viking conquests of the ninth century, would finally fall to their descendants.

Emerging from this violence and bedlam were the embryoes of the various national cultures of Europe. As kingdoms consolidated into nation-states, the outlines began to appear of countries such as England, which developed a national culture that blended Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences, as reflected in its syncretic language. It would be centuries, however, before England would unite politically, and even longer — within the lifetimes of some of our parents and grandparents — for the continent of Europe to do so.

But politics isn’t everything, and one could make a reasonable case that Europe had unified culturally far before the twentieth century. Doing so would suit Chris Rufo’s argument. The world wars, from this perspective, were more like blood feuds between distantly related clans than clashes of mutually distinct civilizations.

I think that argument is partly true. But what was it that unified Europe culturally? It wasn’t language. It wasn’t politics. It was religion.

Over the course of the centuries that separated antiquity from the modern age, Christianity claimed one kingdom after another in Europe. The church was able to achieve this largely through a top-down strategy of persuading rulers to convert. Those newly baptized rulers then imposed their new religion on their subject populations, though often with enough lenience to allow them to fuse it with their traditional pagan folkways.

Christianity had much to offer these monarchs, even if they had to cede some of their formal authority to the Pope. It provided them with political legitimacy. It lent them a doctrine that allowed the state to more minutely control the day-to-day lives of its subjects. It gave them a bureaucratic administrative system through the dioceses, which facilitated things like tax collection and military conscription. And it afforded them membership in the club of great European powers.

The borders of historical Christendom became those we now recognize as “Europe.” Rufo is thus not entirely wrong that there emerged, in this time, a common “European culture.” The values of Christianity were the foundation of what we understand today to be “European”-descended beliefs in such things as the equality of humankind, individual rights, and democracy.

But to call Christianity “European” is to reject the entire premise of the religion, whose hallmark is its universalism. Christian values became European values, to be sure, but the religion’s constituency was never the population of Europe, but that of the entire human race. It is also ahistorical, insofar as Christianity spread beyond Europe, even during the Roman era, to North Africa, and, of course, throughout much of the Middle East. There is, undoubtedly, huge overlap between Europe and Christendom, but they are not interchangeable terms. The faith began, of course, outside the European continent; its origins were oriental, not occidental. Europe didn’t invent Christianity, it submitted to it. The moral philosophy that came to characterize the continent, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, were as much borrowed as created.

At a certain point, however, this distinction becomes semantic, as it quickly did in my quarrel with Chris. When I pointed out to him that, while Europe was unified by the culture of Christianity, Christianity isn’t “European culture,” Chris chose, for the purpose of dunking on me on Twitter, to interpret this claim as some kind of nonsensical logical paradox. To me it’s as simple as a Venn Diagram. But it’s a waste of time to get caught up on this point. Though I reject the characterization of Christian values as “European culture,” I’m willing to go along with it for the sake of argument. The more important point is that this isn’t “white culture.”

The conception that there’s a “white race” of humans is only a couple of centuries old. Some would put its origins in the eighteenth century, when American colonists were compelled to define themselves against the Indians. But that would be a mistake. As Peter Silver documents in Our Savage Neighbors, while the American colonists routinely referred to themselves as “white,” it was used as an adjective, like “short” or “blonde.” The term “white people,” as used by the colonists, didn’t purport to describe a biologically distinct race of human beings in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the idea that there was a separate white race was an Indian concept before it was ever an American one. In the eighteenth century, Indian nativists such as the Delaware prophet Neolin began to understand their conflict with the whites as a war between two mutually alien races of human beings, made separately by the Creator. That conclusion was harder for the colonists to swallow for a straightforward reason: it stood wholly against the teachings of their religion. Christianity taught of a single creation of humankind. For many generations, this was a conceptual obstacle with which would-be Christian racists and slavery apologists were forced to grapple. It took Social Darwinism and the “discovery” of eugenics in the nineteenth century to square that circle.

But square it they did. By the nineteenth century, with Southern slavery under political attack, there was enormous demand in the United States for an ideology that could reconcile the contradiction between the practice and Christian doctrine by dividing humans into separate “races.” We’re so familiar with this reasoning that it’s hard now to fathom that at the time, it was something new under the sun. Slavery had been practiced for thousands of years all over the world, but not until Christians adopted it did it become necessary to justify it morally on racial grounds. Neither the Vikings nor the Saracens nor the ancient Greeks and Romans felt obliged to argue that the slaves they sold and kept were a different order of human being. Having no conception of universal, inherent human rights, there was no need to justify their violation. But slavery in the United States existed against the backdrop of Christianity. Its practice flew in the face of the conception that all of humankind were God’s creatures, and that the oppressed were closer to God than their oppressors. This brazen contradiction was impossible to ignore, invoked, as it constantly was, by Christian abolitionists. In response, as Barbara and Karen Fields show in Racecraft, slave owners contrived the notion that blacks were a distinct and lesser “race” of humans than whites were, and, accordingly, undeserving of the moral equality mandated by the Bible. This loophole was fused with the idea that it was slavery that brought the African heathens to Christ, so that their subjection was, in fact, part of the divine project of soul-saving. The idea that there were separate races of blacks and whites was, in other words, cope.

In objective reality there is no such thing as biological race, or to the extent there is, it’s a social construct — real only insofar as we choose to believe it’s real. Yet it’s so firmly baked into the American worldview that Chris Rufo and others who share his assumptions can use “white” interchangeably with “European” without anyone as much as scratching their heads. And now, Rufo and his allies are reifying the fiction of a “white race” yet further with the claim that America has a “white culture” that is being destroyed by non-white immigration.

Which takes us to the third and final point. Rufo appears to conceive of the founding culture of America — the Anglo-American, “European” culture — as some kind of pure form of American culture that has been corrupted over the centuries by the influence of foreign settlers. This is, at heart, a simple expression of prejudice, of valuing Anglo culture over the many other admixtures in the mongrel culture of the United States.

But it’s also ahistorical. The American colonies were never unified under a common English culture; they were divided among multipe, irreconcilable English cultures. Even after confederation, their moral and philosophical disagreements with one another were so intractable as to culminate in the Civil War. And even that didn’t result in the cultural integration of the country. Those wounds lay open and oozing through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, all the way up to the 1960s. They still resonate in our politics today.

Mainstream American culture didn’t really cohere until westward expansion. But westward expansion was exactly the period when that culture became far less exclusively English. The settling of the West ushered in the globalization of the United States, creating a new ethnic pecking order in the process. The Gold Rush brought seekers from China to South America, as well as Europeans from all over the continent. The conquest of the southwest integrated the Hispanic cultures of the former Mexican territories into American culture, fusing it into Western cowboy culture. The ten gallon hat evolved from the Mexican sombrero; the term “buckaroo” derived from the Spanish word for cowboy, “vaquero.” It would be overstating the case to say that these foreign influences had a discernible impact on the political structures and ethical values of America; these were already set more or less in stone by the founding generations. But they merged into our lifestyles just as the cultures of every succeeding wave of immigrants has.

Rufo and his allies would have you believe that there is a before-and-after story to America; that once upon a time, we were united as a nation, but then the foreigners came. The reality is closer to the inverse. We, ourselves, were once the foreign-born, and we brought the divisions of the Old World with us to the new one. But as we traveled west, we began to forget where we came from. We lived among each other, married one another, and our ancestral ties became lost in our common identity as Americans. That process continued with the wave of mass European immigration through Ellis Island and the global wave of immigration that began in 1965. Rufo insists that this integration of outside cultures has made us less American. It has in fact made us much more so.

I wrote this for the New York Times, based on themes I’ve explored here on Social Studies.

Hope you like it.

—LW

Over a period of about 200 years, beginning in the late eighth century and ending in the eleventh, a warrior civilization emerged among the pagan clans of the farthest northern wildernesses of Europe, and transformed a substantial part of the human race. These were the Vikings, and at the height of their power, their physical presence as traders, explorers and conquerers extended from Baghdad to the eastern seaboard of North America. As their ventures abroad evolved from small scale raids to wars of conquest and settlement, they merged with the populations they overran and birthed entire new peoples: the Normans of northern France, the Russians, and the English.

Before the Viking Age, there was a distinct regional culture in what would later become Scandinavia. First and foremost, the peoples of Denmark, Sweden and Norway were united in a common occult belief system which we would now somewhat inaccurately call a “religion.” But there was not a Scandinavian nation, nor a Swedish, Danish or Norwegian one. These polities weren’t even kingdoms yet. But by the time the Vikings passed from historical view, scattered and absorbed into the various nascent medieval empires of Europe, their homelands were well on their way to becoming what we would come to know as “countries,” as were the foreign lands they had taken for themselves.

The Viking story is one lens through which we can view the emergence of the modern nation-state. It’s a useful heuristic because it was short, discrete and pronounced. The social engines that drove it appear in something like bas-relief against the long and complex background of medieval European history. It is conducive, intellectually, to being reduced to three variables: violence, trade, and religion.

Of the three, violence is perhaps the most fundamental. Indeed, it’s what separated what Western Europeans experienced as the arrival of “the Vikings” from their earlier, long-standing interactions with the people of the North who would come to assume that name. One of the earliest acts of wanton, predatory violence by Norsemen was the pillage and destruction of a monastery on the Holy Island of Lindesfarne off of Northumbria in what is now England. “Behold,” wrote the English cleric Alcuin, “the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.”

The victims of the Viking massacre at Lindesfarne knew the people who had come to kill them. They had traded with them before. Indeed, it was likely from such trading expeditions that the Norsemen had come to know of the wealth to be plundered from the monastery, and its vulnerability to attack.

What accounted for this sudden, radical change of behavior, from peaceful traders to bloodthirsty butchers and robbers? The answer lay in the North, specifically, on the west coast of Norway. A rising new elite was emerging there, whose power was based not on control of land nor on bloodline — they had neither — but on their domination of the seas. They were, essentially, pirates, but their ambitions were reflected in the name the locals gave them: the sea-kings.

Where the kings of the European continent battled one another for control of land and the right to exploit the peasants who worked it, in Scandinavia, where arable land was scarce, an enterprising warrior could find surer and more lucrative prospects by setting sail for one of the many largely undefended settlements of the lands to their west, south, and east.

One might object here that violence was not an end in itself, but a means to another end: the accumulation of treasure. The desire for wealth, not violence, was thus the principal social engine driving the process of state formation. But that would be to ignore what underpinned that hunger for wealth in the first place. The medieval kings were not hedonists, pining after lives of comfort and luxury. That would come later, with the emergence of court society and absolutist rule. Rather, they sought treasure with which to pay their armies, erect fortifications, build ships, purchase weapons and engage in years-long military campaigns.

Wealth, in other words, was the means by which warlords accumulated the capacity for violence, rather than the other way around. Violence, as the ultimate foundation of all forms of power, was the guarantor of the security of one’s kingdom.

This is what drove the expansionism of the Vikings, as it did the expansionism of all of the noble warlords of Europe and the world over. As Norbert Elias describes in The Civilizing Process, the constant state of warfare that the competition between kings necessarily produced yielded the conditions for the consolidation of power in the state. As petty kings won battles, turning rivals into vassals, annexing their fiefs and agglomerating them into the victors’ expanding domains, their realms grew, individually, larger and, collectively, less numerous. A thousand principalities became, over the centuries, hundreds, and then dozens. Finally, a handful of vast territories, each united under one crown, faced each other: Spain, France, England, Denmark, Russia, Austria, Prussia. The machinery of governance advanced within these kingdoms, meeting the ever-more-challenging needs to administer huge and sprawling populations of subjects, to tax them and to raise them into armies. Kingdoms became nation-states.

But there were other forces at work, too. Murder, rape and plunder weren’t the only activities the Vikings were engaged in. They also wanted to trade.

As far back as the ninth century, the Rus’ — the Vikings of the east who would become the Russian people — traveled as far as Baghdad, which they reached on camelback, to trade. Some of them even spoke Arabic. These far-flung trading routes reflected the imperative of commerce to the Scandinavian economy and political system.

Trade was driven by the same domestic demand that spurred raiding: the material wealth required for political competition among the sea-kings and other elites back home in Scandinavia. And, in fact, the two were so closely related as to be essentially the same activity carried out through different means. Sometimes, trade exposed the Vikings to the targets they would later pillage, as at Lindesfarne, or, on a much bigger scale, Paris. And the fruit of the Vikings’ raids was also their principal trading commodity: slaves.

Trading, raiding, or a combination of the two established Viking colonies throughout Europe that developed into proto-nation-states. One of them was the French province of Normandy; another was the English region of the Danelaw. When the Normans invaded England from the south in 1066, in the same year that the Norwegians invaded it from the northeast, the victory of the former represented the Scandinavian diaspora’s conquest over the one place left in England that the Vikings had failed to defeat and occupy: the kingdom of Wessex.

In the East, too, both trade and violence spread Scandinavian genes and culture alike throughout Europe. “Rus’” is derived from the Old Norse word for “rowers,” and it likely described the Scandinavian traders who rowed down the Baltic coast and onto the rivers that brought them into Ukraine and to the Black Sea, on their way to Constantinople. They both raided and traded on these routes, and eventually settled in points along them, producing a diaspora, just as they did in the realms of the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. That eastern diaspora merged with the indigenous Slavic population to become Russians and Ukrainians, both of which, as the decades became centuries, evolved into nation-states in their own right, if just tenuously in the latter case.

Trade also brought foreigners to Scandinavia. Indeed, most of the reliable historical records of Viking culture come from outsiders, including Arab Muslims and Jews. Traders also brought to the Vikings the cultural influence — or contagion, depending on where you stand on the matter — of Christianity.

The earliest Christian converts in Sweden were merchants who did business with their counterparts in the Frankish empire. Likewise, the first communities to adopt the new religion were located in trading villages. Alongside them, the Norsemen learned of Christianity from the raiders who brought it back from Christian lands along with the rest of their plunder, and from captured priests and other slaves.

The Scandinavian pagans resisted Christian conversion for three centuries; indeed, their raids of their Christian neighbors can be read in part as a defense against the encroachment of the Carolingian Empire and the strange evangelical faith tied to it. But ultimately, as in Rome, Christianity prevailed because it was useful to the region’s rulers.

For one thing, as in other polytheistic societies, they regarded the Christian God not as a replacement for their traditional deities, but as a powerful addition to them, who could bring them yet more fortune and glory. And Christianity had other things to offer them, foremost, divine sanction of their right to rule, a political blessing that Odin had only ever offered to those who could claim direct descendence from him. It also provided them with a doctrine that empowered them to regulate the everyday lives of the people they governed. And lastly, it afforded them entry into the club of great powers in Europe that, by now, were almost entirely united under the Vatican. Christianity was a new form of power, one that had been shaped over centuries by Christian kings, with the help of the church, to bolster their reign.

Curiously, it was the religious unification of Europe that paved the way for the secular rationalism of the modern nation-state. The primacy the Reformation put on the separation of church and state, in order to break the political power of the Catholic church and afford Protestant dissenters a measure of religious liberty, freed political leaders to govern according to the rational needs of the administrative bureaucracy, without the messiness of doctrinal disputes that had torn the continent apart for more than a millennium. And as Max Weber has taught us, modernity was not possible without bureaucratic rationality; the two are basically synonymous.

The conversion of the Scandinavian rulers, as they transformed themselves into monarchs, spelled the end of the Viking Age. Europe was becoming an entirely new kind of system: one of sovereign countries with defined borders and novel principles of political legitimacy. The Vikings accelerated the development of that system even as they were carried along by its currents. In the end, the transformation was so complete that their distant descendants, from Kiev to Dublin, are barely conscious of the gossamer threads of their common ancestry. Beginning about a half millennium ago, they became new peoples, divided by national boundaries but united in their broad set of values and political philosophies. This was the age of the nation-state, and the birth of its subject, the modern citizen. It is the world that made us.

Recommended reading:

Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price

Dominion by Tom Holland

Feudal Society, Vol. 1 by Marc Bloch

There’s a very good book called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev, about life in Vladmir Putin’s Russia. “The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” is its subtitle, and the stories in it live up to that promise. One of them is about a woman named Yana Yakovleva, a successful entrepreneur who runs a company that sells industrial cleaning chemicals. She lives with her boyfriend, drives a Lexus and works out with a personal trainer. One day, at the gym, she’s arrested by some government agents in cheap suits. She has no idea why. And then, hour by hour, her reality unravels.

Having done nothing illegal, Yana is bewildered by what’s happening to her, but also confident that it’s a mistake that will be sorted out by the courts. With each passing day that assumption becomes more far-fetched. She’s informed that she’s a dangerous drug dealer, because the chemical she has sold legally for a decade has suddenly been deemed a narcotic, even though it isn’t one. She’s transferred from the police station to prison. Days become weeks. With every failed bail hearing, her sentence is extended. She serves seven months, until she is at last found innocent and released.

Behind her arrest were the machinations of bureaucrats. The head of the Russian security agency tasked with drug control was attempting to shake down the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. A tranche of formerly legal chemicals had been re-listed as narcotics. Veterinarians were being imprisoned for having prescribed ketamine to cats. The point was to terrorize the industries into submission to the gangster state.

Those same bureaucratic designs lurked behind her exoneration, too. The head of the agency that had targeted Yana coveted the job of the director of Russia’s premier spy agency, the FSB. The two administrators despised each other. So when the FSB chief heard Yana’s story, he engineered her very public release and exoneration to embarrass his rival.

This is a signature trait of Russian authoritarianism: laws exist as weapons to be wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and oligarchs in their conspiracies against one another. Ordinary Russians are routinely ensnared in these power games, their lives turned inside out for reasons they could never imagine. One day you’re living a normal life, following the rules, keeping your head down, making a living. The next moment you’re a high value target of the state.

David French wrote an insightful piece a few days ago that points to how the United States under Trump is being transformed into a similar regime. He relies on a different analogy — Nazi Germany — but the pattern is the same. Borrowing a concept from a Jewish refugee who taught law at the University of Chicago, French describes what is emerging here today as a “dual state.” The dual state is comprised by the “normative state,” which is the sovereign system of law and order we’re all taught to believe in, and the “prerogative state,” which is the parallel system of hazy and ephemeral laws and procedures that is entirely subordinate to the arbitrary will of those in power.

One might presume that tyranny depends upon the displacement of the former by the latter, but, in fact, it works best when both operate in tandem. Under a dual state, most of the population live their lives within the ordinary framework of the normative state system. They know they don’t live in a democracy, but they can sustain a more or less normal existence if they keep their disagreements with the government largely to themselves — and don’t, like Yana, have a stroke of terribly bad luck. Things aren’t perfect but they don’t feel dystopian, either. Should they step over an invisible line, however, they will find themselves in a topsy-turvy world in which the familiar old rules become twisted, amorphous and incomprehensible, as if you had accidentally wandered out of the laws of Newtonian physics into the subatomic, quantum realm.

As French points out, we can now dimly perceive the existence of such a line in America today:

(Y)ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. Your killer might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

In Minneapolis, ICE is routinely pulling over American citizens who dare to follow them in their cars, film their activities, and blow whistles to alert neighbors of their presence. And it only takes one of those actions to find yourself face-to-face with the prerogative state. On the New York Times’ Daily podcast today, an activist described having followed an ICE vehicle for about 40 seconds before the agents stopped the car, got out, surrounded her, pepper sprayed her vehicle’s ventilation system, smashed her front windows, pulled her and another activist out, handcuffed and arrested them, just to release them later with no charges. The activists have found themselves operating in a world straddling the two sides of the dual state. It’s entirely unclear what the rules are from one moment to the next: Are you safe if you’re not blocking traffic? From what distance can you follow ICE? Is it ok to film from across the street, where you’re clearly not impeding? Is there even a policy to discern at all, or is it whatever the agent in front of you decides it is at a given moment?

If you’re an American citizen and you keep your nose out of ICE’s business, you can keep living a normal life in Minneapolis — albeit deprived of some of your former political freedoms. But not always. You might get questioned at the bus stop. You might have your door kicked in and be pulled out into the cold in your underwear. The van that takes your kids to school might get pulled over. You might choose to keep your kids home and do online learning, just in case.

Just a few weeks ago, it was pretty clear what counted as constitutionally-protected activity. Documenting law enforcement actions fell squarely in that category. Now it’s contested terrain. Until this month, in Minneapolis, if you were a U.S. citizen, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind to carry your passport with you to the grocery store. Suddenly it’s unclear whether agents are now allowed to stop you randomly and demand your papers. The law may be clear on the matter, but does the written law matter anymore? Minneapolis now exists in a purgatory in which neither regular people nor federal agents know what they are and are not allowed to do. But the agents have guns and badges. By default, they get to decide what the rules are at any given moment.

For those of us outside of Minneapolis, it is, if anything, even more uncertain what rights we still have. Our day-to-day lives still appear to be governed by the normative state. But is that an illusion? When ICE comes to your town, will you suddenly find yourself bargaining with men with guns over what you thought the Constitution guaranteed you? Is it still safe to voice your opinions on social media? Should you start deleting your old tweets and Substack posts? Should you start keeping your head down now, before it’s too late?

The new rules are inscrutable to us, because they’re dictated not by statutes or facts on the ground, but by the whims of sycophantic office holders competing for Trump’s ever-shifting favor. Like Yana’s imprisonment and release, it’s all a show for others. One of the audiences is you: you and your neighbors need to be adequately intimidated in preparation for the day when the White House turns its attention to your state or city. The other audience is the President, who rewards those who humiliate his enemies in ways he can watch on TV.

So you have to just keep licking your finger and putting it up in the air, to see which way the breezes are blowing. You have to guess where the written laws end and the real laws — the ones that are followed in practice — begin. You don’t know quite what you are and are not allowed to do anymore in protest of your government. You can only guess at what you’re still allowed to say. Or you can play it safe, and say nothing at all.