Trump<\/a> took the oath of office in January 2025, flanked by the very technocratic elite whose fortunes had grown beyond all precedent, the possibility loomed that the preceding 10 years was crystallizing into a name: techno-fascism \u2014 an authoritarian, corporatist order in which a narrow caste of technocratic elites deploys digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, intensify surveillance, and erode democratic accountability, all while presenting their dominion as the neutral application of expertise.<\/p>\n\n\tFor the past decade I have written about the almost theological divide between two competing creeds. The gospel of nostalgia promises to \u201cmake America great again\u201d \u2014 its default logic being that the America of the 1950s, when white men\u2019s assumptions went unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or queer individuals, was a more stable and legible world worth recovering. The gospel of progress, as Andreessen has written, holds that \u201cthere is no material problem \u2014 whether created by nature or by technology \u2014 that cannot be solved with more technology.\u201d Its default logic is simpler: stop complaining. Flat wages, rising social media\u2013induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet \u2014 perhaps, but at least we have iPhones. But the philosopher Antonio Gramsci had foreseen this dialectic in 1930: \u201cThe old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n
\u201cFlat wages, rising social media\u2013induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet \u2014 perhaps, but at least we have iPhones.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022, Thiel called for a party that could unite \u201cthe priest, the general, and the millionaire\u201d\u2014 a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump\u2019s second administration: Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state. By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump. The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.<\/p>\n
The Copernican Moment\t<\/p>\n
\n\tA deep unsettlement runs beneath our society today. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, we are now displacing the human from the center of consciousness. New discoveries about cognition in other animals and organisms \u2014 octopuses dreaming, bees counting, trees retaining memory of drought \u2014 suggest, as Michael Pollan has written, that thought and feeling are not human monopolies but properties of life itself. The first Copernican revolution humbled our astronomy; the second threatens to humble our very being.<\/p>\n
\n\tYet the revelation carries its twin anxiety. If mind is no longer our exclusive inheritance, what becomes of that inheritance when machines begin to mimic it? Artificial intelligence poses not merely a technical challenge but a metaphysical one. It asks whether consciousness can exist without vulnerability \u2014 without the pulse and jeopardy of a life that can be lost. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us that the brain evolved to serve the body, that consciousness begins in feeling. Machines, however elaborate, know no hunger, no pain, no desire. To be conscious in the human sense is to participate in necessity \u2014 to be held by one\u2019s own fate.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics \u2014 the imaginative labor of collective destiny \u2014 has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThis interregnum, then, is not a pause but a rupture \u2014 a suspended time in which institutions still stand yet no longer persuade, in which the future arrives in forms no one quite intended. What began for my generation as the optimistic dream of a communications revolution has matured into a general condition of American life: a digital oligarchy adrift between orders, armed with enormous power but uncertain whom, or what, it serves. Some of us glimpsed the terrible risk when it was still only a risk \u2014 that the principles of kleptocracy would become America\u2019s own. That grim vision is now arriving, in real time, in the person of Trump. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, \u201cThe brazenness of the self-enrichment now underway resembles nothing from any earlier White House, but rather the corruption of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial state.\u201d And the techno-fascist oligarchs are at the trough, waiting to be fed.<\/p>\n
\t\tThe Age of Surveillance and Simulation\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden\u2019s disclosures in 2013, when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state. What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.<\/p>\n
\n\tBy the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit. A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed. Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door. The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work. What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly, a panopticon of self-restraint.<\/p>\n
\n\tInto this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers. Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information \u2014 tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life. Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes. The point was not simply that we were being watched, but that we were being rendered legible \u2014 sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us. As Anthropic\u2019s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times, the Fourth Amendment\u2019s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:<\/p>\n
\n\tIt is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It\u2019s a public space \u2014 you don\u2019t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn\u2019t record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition \u2014 and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?<\/p>\n
\n\tWe are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Anthropic drew them first. The company refused to allow its systems to be turned on the American public in the name of security and declined to let the Pentagon wire its AI into autonomous weapons capable of identifying and killing without human authorization. To the Defense Department, accustomed to purchasing compliance along with contracts, the idea that a vendor might set moral limits on military use was borderline insubordinate. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. President Trump, on Truth Social, called the company \u201cradical woke\u201d and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Anthropic had been, in effect, blacklisted for conscience.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. \u201c<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat happened next revealed something important about the moral landscape of the AI industry. OpenAI, which had publicly positioned itself as sharing Anthropic\u2019s red lines \u2014 Sam Altman insisted his company, too, opposed mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons \u2014 moved swiftly to fill the vacuum. While Anthropic was being frozen out of Washington, D.C., OpenAI quietly negotiated and signed a deal of its own with the Pentagon, granting the Defense Department access to its models for deployment in classified environments. OpenAI then published a blog post with a pointed aside: \u201cWe don\u2019t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.\u201d The company that had stood shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic in principle had, in practice, used Anthropic\u2019s exclusion to capture the contract.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe backlash was swift \u2014 and came from inside the house. Caitlin Kalinowski, who had led OpenAI\u2019s hardware and robotics teams since late 2024, publicly announced her resignation. Her statement, posted on X and LinkedIn, was brief and precise: \u201cAI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe formulation was careful, almost scrupulously fair to her former colleagues. But the substance was damning. A senior technical executive, one who had spent her career building the physical systems through which AI meets the real world, had concluded that OpenAI had crossed lines it had publicly promised not to cross \u2014 and had done so without the internal deliberation those lines deserved. Some users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Claude, Anthropic\u2019s AI assistant, became the number-one free app in the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. The market, in its way, had registered a verdict.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat the episode exposed is the hierarchy of pressures operating on every AI company at this moment. Altman\u2019s public statements and OpenAI\u2019s private negotiations inhabited different moral universes, and the gap between them is a measure of how quickly principle buckles under the combined weight of government contracts, competitive anxiety, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Hegseth and Trump have sent the clearest possible signal: Companies that draw lines will be punished; companies that erase them will be rewarded. The outcome of this first moral battle of the AI era will do much to determine the shape of every battle that follows.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut erasure, in this case, is not incidental \u2014 it is the business model. The questions that seem separate \u2014 who controls the weapons, who watches the citizens, who owns the culture, whose labor trains the machine \u2014 are in fact a single question, asked of us all at once: whether humanity will remain the author of its own story, or be quietly written out of it.<\/p>\n
\t\tThe Technocracy\u2019s Bargain\t<\/p>\n
\n\tArtificial intelligence functions in this landscape not only as a tool, but also as an ideology. The systems that now summarize our news, grade our tests, and generate our images are built entirely from accumulated human expression, yet are heralded as replacements for the slow, wayward work of thought. By design they remix rather than originate; they automate style while evacuating risk. The consequence is a flood of synthetic prose and imagery that feels like culture but carries none of the scars of experience. Anyone with a prompt can simulate the surface of artistry, further collapsing the distinction between the crafted and the merely produced.<\/p>\n
\n\tWe need to insist on the human self as something more than a flicker of circuitry or an echo of stimulus \u2014 to hold that our consciousness is not reducible to mechanism, that our art, our music, our capacity for beauty and sorrow carry a dignity no machine can counterfeit. We need to imagine a future in which humanity still governs its own creation \u2014 not as the object of its inventions, but as their author and their measure. A world that offers consumption in place of purpose courts a different and more corrosive kind of unrest.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe outlines of that unrest were already legible by the middle of the decade. In labor reports and think-tank bulletins one could trace the quiet unmaking of the white-collar world. Young graduates, credentialed and deeply indebted, were discovering that the jobs they had trained for no longer existed in familiar form; whole categories of administrative and creative work were being absorbed by AI or retooled around its efficiencies. Commentators spoke of an \u201cAI job apocalypse\u201d not as metaphor but as demographic fact \u2014 an educated stratum slipping downward, its ambitions collapsing into precarity. History offers a warning: When a surplus of the educated meets a scarcity of opportunity, turbulence and unrest follows. The clerks and interns of the knowledge economy can become the dissidents of a new era.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut many of the technocrats already sense what is coming and prefer to prepare their escape. They buy compounds in New Zealand, secure airstrips in remote valleys, fortify estates on distant islands stocked and wired for siege. The gesture betrays everything: They, too, expect the storm. They simply mean to watch it from a safe distance \u2014 beyond the reach of the graduates, the strivers, the displaced millions who will inhabit the world their machines made. In that distance \u2014 the gap between those who build exits and those who have nowhere to go \u2014 the interregnum takes on its most recognizable shape: a society waiting, with gathering impatience and anger, for a new settlement that has yet to arrive.<\/p>\n
\n\tSean O\u2019Brien, president of the Teamsters, said something recently about AI and labor that hangs in the air like a change in pressure: For once, those who have never known economic danger are about to feel what it means to be exposed \u2014 to live without insulation from the market\u2019s weather. According to The New York Times, \u201cThe unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor 30 years, the country has drifted ever further from the world of things. The old economy of matter \u2014 of tools, factories, and physical production \u2014 was gradually exchanged for an economy of signs. We learned to believe that the future belonged to those who trafficked in abstractions: the managers of systems, the manipulators of symbols, the custodians of information. That belief became the moral core of the professional class. To think was noble; to make was obsolete.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor decades, the professional class watched the industrial world hollow out and mistook the spectacle for confirmation of its own permanence. It confused exemption with destiny. Now, the correction is arriving \u2014 not from the shop floor, but from the circuits.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis is one meaning of the interregnum: a pause in which the old class myths no longer align with material reality, and no new story has yet cohered. In the space between, people who once felt like authors of the future are discovering that they were also characters, written into a script whose logic they did not fully control.<\/p>\n
\n\tYet another path exists, if we can summon the imagination to take it. Rather than waging a doomed Luddite resistance, we might seek a grand bargain with the architects of the new order \u2014 entering into direct negotiation with Big Tech<\/a> over the political terms of the transition. The question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.<\/p>\n\u201cThe question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHow much of the immense stream of revenue flowing through the platforms and hyperscalers could be redirected toward a sovereign fund, a common dividend for those whose labor has been displaced? Anthropic\u2019s Amodei has suggested a tax of three percent of AI revenues to seed the sovereign fund. It is a moment that calls less for purity than for negotiation \u2014 an uneasy but deliberate partnership between humanists and technologists, aimed at keeping a frustrated graduate class from becoming the raw material of a larger revolutionary breakdown.<\/p>\n
\n\tMarshall McLuhan believed that new media were creating \u201can overwhelming, destructive maelstrom\u201d into which we were being drawn against our will. But he also believed in a way out. \u201cThe absolute indispensability of the artist,\u201d McLuhan wrote, \u201cis that he alone in the encounter with the maelstrom can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the awareness to tell us what the world is made of. The artist is able [to give] \u2026 a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOur great inquiry now must be: How do we quit the politics of national despair \u2014 a maelstrom that our own ingenuity has created? It will be hard, because a vast media industry depends on your engagement with its outrage. Three companies \u2014 X, Meta, Google \u2014 monopolize the advertising revenue that flows from that outrage. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say these social media companies hold too much power. To break the spell, we need to understand the roots of the phony culture war they have cultivated \u2014 and remember that America has had a real promise. Only when we recover that memory can we begin to imagine what the new promise of American life might look like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O n Jan. 11, 1994, I drove to UCLA\u2019s Royce Hall to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,516,897,111,139,69,370,145,2179],"class_list":{"0":"post-353935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-tech","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}