This newsletter is usually more of a scratchpad for my other obsessions (I read a book a week and am currently on a diet of Garry Wills and Saul Bellow). But sometimes I also write about the state of today’s information ecosystem. This subject reliably produces pieces with lighthearted and optimistic titles like “Journalism’s fight for survival in a postliterate democracy,”1 “AI could cause newsprint to outlive the hyperlink,”2 or “You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried.”3 Infopessimism resonates with people, who will share such essays along with helpful comments like “smart but depressing,” “ugh” or sometimes even “ugh!!” Who’s to argue? Conditions in the trenches of the info wars are indeed ugh and have been getting ughlier overall.

But the poison pen of the media critic is not well suited for the actual work of media reform, which is earnest, practical and — are you sitting down? — produces good news from time to time.

This week is one of those “good news” times.

One of the coolest things I’ve been working on recently is California Assemblymember Christopher Ward’s Assembly Bill 2222, called the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act (the Community NEWS Act for short). This week, supermajorities in both the Senate and the Assembly voted to send AB 2222 to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.4

AB 2222 is a local journalist employment tax credit and would be the largest local news subsidy of its kind in the United States, generating more than $40 million a year to make it cheaper to employ journalists at every kind of outlet covering every part of the state. Bills like these have been snowballing in legislatures across the U.S., and this one is the biggest and baddest yet.

AB 2222 would be fully funded by taking away California’s corporate tax deductions for executives who make more than $1 million a year. Is it sad that California taxpayers would stop subsidizing the salaries of a handful of overpaid CEOs so the state tax code would instead keep thousands of local journalists on the job covering your local schools, city councils and community life? It is not sad. Practically every local news association and journalist union in the business have endorsed the idea because it rules so hard.

A journalist employment subsidy is the answer to one of the simplest and most devious math problems in local media: MC > MR. At almost every local news outlet these days, the marginal cost (MC) of hiring a local journalist is likely to exceed the marginal revenue (MR) that journalist’s work brings in via ads, subscriptions, philanthropic grants, events, so forth.

MC > MR is a bad place to be, especially compared to MR > MC, which is where the revenue generated by hiring a new journalist exceeds the cost. When MR > MC, business is good: Hiring more journalists would mean getting more money, so you end up with more journalists. MR > MC is the magical condition in which jobs are “created.”

But when MC > MR, hiring more journalists means more bankruptcies. It is math. You are losing money with every extra reporter you hire to cover City Hall. So you stop hiring reporters to cover City Hall. Troublingly, when MC > MR, profits actually increase if you lay the City Hall reporters off. This condition is exactly why news outlets of all kinds are increasingly reliant on foundation grants to plug the gaps.

Here’s what would make the math make better sense: An employment subsidy that lowers the marginal cost of employing a journalist. This should be done for lots of reasons, but most importantly because local news acts like a “public good” with all sorts of positive side effects, like lower bond prices from less wasteful government spending, lower loneliness, higher civic engagement. This stuff benefits everybody, even the people who don’t directly consume local news, who are probably getting it filtered to them via AI and social media without paying.

The rub in economics is that the money for a subsidy always has to come from somewhere. In AB 2222’s case, decreasing the marginal cost of employing thousands of local journalists would be funded by increasing the marginal cost of employing a handful of corporate executives who make more than $1 million a year. I would call that a bargain.

On a very basic level, every society gets to choose how it wants to structure its information environment. On one hand, we could choose to spend years dismantling practically every economic incentive to pay journalists to produce original, accurate, high-quality work. On the other hand, we could choose to stop doing that; we could choose to do something more constructive instead.

Views here are my own, but the views — the views are very good.

When I think back on the authors who ruined me as a writer, there was that postrecession era after 2008 where, like a lot of other Millennial men, I had the experience of reading David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction essays for the first time and seeing the voice inside my head printed on the page. I got really wowed, and unfortunately this produced a period of heavy ironic footnoting for a short while after.

Then there was Proust. Those languorous but precise sentences in “Swann’s Way” really damaged me on some lymphatic level, like a leukemia I would never really get over. I had to go back to journalism school and embark on a career as a hard-boiled newspaper writer to beat the Proust into remission and out of my prose.

Just know this: Whenever you see a short, clear sentence out of me, it is an act of training, discipline and will.

But when I was an undergraduate English major studying creative writing, it was really short story author Stuart Dybek who cast a mind-control spell on me for a while. In class we were assigned Dybek’s “Pet Milk,” printed in the New Yorker in 1984.1 Barely several paragraphs long, the story was to me, a small-town Missouri kid, an act of literary sorcery that would eventually imbue me with strange if not terribly useful powers.

“Pet Milk” starts with a Proustian act of remembrance, except instead of a madeleine, the narrator is sipping on instant coffee with PET Milk. (It’s not for pets, that’s just what the Illinois company that made the evaporated milk was called.)

“There’s almost something of the past about it, like old ivory,” the narrator writes of pet milk. He sips, and the memories come crashing into the present like train cars, one after another.

He remembers grandma, who had always used the pet milk for the cream in her coffee, listening to something Ukrainian or Spanish or Greek on her warped little radio in Chicago, where “all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial.”

The clouds of the pet milk in the coffee looked like the clouds over the skyline outside grandma’s window, which reminds the narrator of the swirls of crème de cacao in the drinks the narrator would get with his girlfriend Kate at a neighborhood restaurant in the Pilsen. It was their first year out of college, that time of lovers with star-crossed futures:

She talked of going to grad school in Europe; I wanted to apply to the Peace Corps. Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

And so out they tumble from the restaurant one night, looking to hook up and knowing it’s almost over. They jump into an express train on the El up to Evanston and lock themselves into an empty conductor’s apartment for a bit more time together, speeding away from a past together in Chicago that they’re already leaving behind. Then comes “Pet Milk”’s famous ending, reminiscent of James Joyce’s transcendent conclusion at the end of “The Dead” in “Dubliners.”

Dybek:

The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station. I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass—businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags. I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by. A high-school kid in shirtsleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave. Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything—the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her—but that arrested wave stayed with me. It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.

I spent years trying to figure out all the writerly tricks in “Pet Milk,” from the selection of the details, the archaeological layering of memories on top of each other, the flexibility of the metaphorical “as if,” and especially Dybek’s mastery of the sentimental past tense: all his past-habitual “we woulds,” modal “I coulds” and past-continuous “-ing” verbs.

This is how you write about a past that’s both dead and alive, long gone but which you can’t let go.

Of course, the irony of spending so much time slavishly copying Stuart Dybek in my own writing is that I would grow up to be a much different type of writer. I don’t even write fiction anymore and very rarely dwell on my past anyway, lost or not. My preferred archaeology involves rummaging through the great treasury of the humanities to look for what we might have completely forgot, like those antikythera mechanisms and Greek fires and self-healing Roman concretes that we forgot how to make. If I practice a literary necromancy, it’s not the sentimental kind.

I prefer the dislocations of the present, the weird here, even as I somehow ended up with a conservative prose style that was probably better suited for readers in the 20th century. My writing has a foreign accent it can’t shake. I seem to have time-traveled from the past into a future ruled by agentic AI and advertising on Instagram, and I may not actually hold citizenship in this timeline.

At this point I might normally be expected to impart some thoughts to today’s 19-year-old who’s trying to figure out their own style in a world that has largely given up on that sort of thing as some kind of major problem. Well, I couldn’t say. Stuart Dybek had me thinking that I was going to move to Chicago and become a great Chicago writer too, and all these years later I’m in Los Angeles without even really feeling like an “L.A. writer.”

If pressed, my advice would be:

• You really don’t need that many -ing verbs.

• Don’t write a first sentence that could work as the first sentence for a completely different piece. (“John was in trouble.” Etc.)

• Constraints are great for creativity.

• You may not get the chance to have an editor but just know that you need one anyway.

• Read a lot, find somebody you want to slavishly imitate and don’t feel bad about being totally derivative. The butterfly breaks out of the cocoon.

Of course, if you’re reading a newsletter about writing, you’re probably not the kind of person who needs advice. You’ve already made some kind of wrong turn somewhere and can’t turn back. You’re probably already on your way; you may have already arrived.

It’s an insult to call someone a “cynic.” In modern dictionaries, the cynic believes everyone is self-interested. But the word’s connotation conveys something more than that, a bitterness. The cynic sucks. They’re negative all the time. They make snide remarks. They put down someone’s earnest best efforts. We don’t like the cynic and the cynic doesn’t like us, asshole.

The great irony, of course, is that we Americans have erected a cynical society on cynical foundation, even if we won’t always face up to it.

Consider the premise of democracy, a social contract between individuals who are presumed to be the best advocates for themselves. You have been constitutionally entrusted to know better than a king what’s good for you; off you go to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the greatest declaration of self-interest ever committed to paper.

And therein lies the paradox of democracy for the social reformer: If we’ve created a society for everyone to pursue their own best interests, this presents the unpleasant possibility that the cynic who sees self-interest everywhere is the only one accurately describing what’s actually going on.

In his 1993 book “Love & Friendship,” the archconservative Allan Bloom observed that a democracy of atomistic contractual relationships is built on a foundation of perpetual low-grade social anxiety. Any of our relationships could be cut off at any moment if we no longer serve someone else’s purposes:

The psychological effects of this unending alert are devastating. A being concerned only with himself has to spend his time worrying about the intentions of others and trying to hide his own from them, threatening, flattering, lying. In his selfishness, he forgets himself. His soul goes wandering out over the world of men and never returns, while he becomes hypocritical, envious, vain, slavish, measuring himself relative to the success or failure of others. This is the condition of alienation, which Sartre defined as “Hell is — other people.”

When out in the world with our neighbors, friends and lovers, we walk on loose rough gravel, where anyone’s footing could slip at any moment. I remain haunted that the great humanistic economist Albert O. Hirschman spent his career confounded by Mancur Olson’s work on the irrationality of collective action,1 wherein being a free rider and letting others do the work of fixing society becomes likelier the bigger the problems get.

The role of the cynic in society

The guilty thrill of reading a cynic is like the sting of scalding hot water in the shower when it’s sending caked-on mud and dirt down the drain.

The acerbic maxims of the French noble François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) have exactly this power-washing pleasure. For La Rochefoucauld, self-interest made the world go ‘round. Whatever appeared to be virtue was, for him, exactly that: the appearance of virtue, a false storefront for a reputation-laundering operation busy at work in the back.

I especially loved this couplet of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims:

27. We often pride ourselves on our passions, even the most criminal ones; but envy is a timid, shamefaced passion, which we never dare to acknowledge.

28. Jealousy is, in a way, just and reasonable, because its aim is merely to retain something that belongs to us, or that we think belongs to us; whereas envy is a frenzy that cannot endure the fact that other people possess anything.

But can there be some greater end for the cynic than depressing everybody about the suffocating realities of self-interest?

In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” there is the spectacular collision between the story’s two great social perceivers, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. They notice subtle faults and pierce through vanities, including each others’: the Bennet family really is an embarrassing mess, and Darcy really is too scornful to love. For Elizabeth and Darcy to be together too early would be a condescension. It takes Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s desperate offer of marriage — a rejection of self-interest in not marrying one of the most eligible men in England — to prove she’s not merely another one of Mr. Darcy’s many possessions. But this, too, was an act of pride that would need to be overcome, like Mr. Darcy’s prejudices, in order to submit to the happy ending and its declarations of mutual surrender.

Or take one of the greatest cynics in literature, Gustave Flaubert, who practically suffocated me with his ruthless pinioning of human vanity in “Sentimental Education.”2 (“Flaubert’s colossal poetic instrument, his genius of language, was destined to the excruciating labor, a self-crucifixion, of depicting a scene and personages that nauseated him,” Bloom writes.) There is not much redemption to be found in Flaubert apart from the elegance of the prose and the accuracy of observation for accuracy’s sake.

But toward the end of the great novel “Madame Bovary,” there strangely appears a respectable character amid all the idiocy of men around Emma Bovary’s deathbed. “The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion,” Flaubert writes of the enigmatic Dr. Larivière’s arrival:

He belonged to that great line of surgeons that sprang from Bichat, that now-vanished generation of philosopher-healers who cherished their art with a fanatical love and practiced it with zeal and sagacity. When Dr. Larivière was angry, the whole hospital quaked. His pupils revered him to the point of trying to imitate him in everything as soon as they set up in practice themselves; consequently, every town for miles around had its replica of his long merino greatcoat and his loose black jacket, the cuffs of which hung down unbuttoned over his firm hands beautiful hands, always ungloved, as though to be the readier to plunge to the relief of suffering. Disdaining all academic honours, titles and decorations, hospitable and generous, like a father to the poor, practicing virtue without believing in it, he might almost have passed for a saint had not his mental acuity caused him to be feared as a demon. Sharper than a lancet, his eyes looked straight into your soul, piercing through all pretence and reticence to dissect the lie beneath. So he went his way, in all the easy majesty that comes of the consciousness of great talent, wealth and forty years of hard work and irreproachable living.

For Bloom, it was the quality of “practicing virtue without believing in it” that set Dr. Larivière apart from all of Flaubert’s other fools and madmen: a sort of artist’s statement about the importance of stripping away bullshit. (See last week’s newsletter.3)

“Larivière does not fit into the plot of Madame Bovary” — he’s too late to save poor Emma from the arsenic — “but he is not to be ignored as a human possibility,” Bloom writes. If there is someone who would heal the world, the first requirement would be to see its injuries clearly.

If you were to ask the average journalist what’s going wrong with their work, you’d get back a biblical list of plagues.

Low and stagnating pay, unstable employment, difficult career advancement, uncooperative subjects, sexists/racists/harassers bringing you down, an indifferent public, extractive Big Tech companies, clumsy or malign employers, AI-deluded management, endless waves of social media hucksters, so on. Getting a staff job is hard, making freelancing pay is hard, going solo in the creator economy is hard, a lot of the people who say they’re doing great are churning out crap, everything is hard. The signals scream to quit and move on if you don’t get laid off or forced out first.

Yet the journalist sticks with it and keeps slamming the like button on Poynter’s Friday meme dumps from TyLisa C. Johnson.1 Something in all this doesn’t add up. How there could be all this news happening and no one to cover it? It’s like that old poster from New American Movement in the 1970s:

Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.

So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs.

Whereas, the journalist resolves: When there is all this journalism that needs to be done, there should be more journalists with more resources to do it.

Journalists and standpoint epistemology

That’s the labor analysis of what’s wrong with journalism, which can sometimes be totally distinct from, say, the management analysis, the academic analysis, the philanthropic analysis, the reformer analysis, the investor analysis, the tech analysis, the consumer analysis, the innovator analysis, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

Everybody’s take on what’s happening with media is often strongly shaped by a personal perspective, which in philosophical jargon is called “standpoint epistemology.”

Journalism has been one of our most important practices for acknowledging and navigating conflicting standpoints in democratic societies, where a lot of people have unique insights but horrible blind spots and are reliably vulnerable to believing their own bullshit or failing to notice its existence.

The reporter is a bit like Socrates, running around the agora annoying people with questions; at the end of the process, a proper pile of decreasingly conflicting answers will add up to something resembling a useful truth. Or at least an accurate set of coordinates describing where social conflict is happening and where people stand.

Of course this is where I remind everybody that Athens made Socrates kill himself.

The journalist is their own blind spot

The rub for the labor analysis of journalism is that it starts with a vulnerable philosophical presumption, a big bias, which is that there is such a thing as a journalist and that there still should be such a thing as a journalist going forward. This is the journalist’s own critical blind spot, a belief in our own existence; our self-love.

Well, not every standpoint in media theorizing need believe that the journalist is the protagonist of the story or even necessarily has any part in the plot going forward. If subjects can reach the public via social media, do the subject really need the journalist anymore to get their viewpoint out there? If the publisher or consumer can collect a variety of viewpoints via AI crawling and synthesize them via chatbot, does the publisher or consumer really need the journalist to be the storyteller?

And so on. If journalism isn’t a job or an identity but a bundle of functions, those functions can be disaggregated and recreated through a variety of other means. Maybe you could even create something better (and cheaper) than what we had before.

Journalists and the theory of bullshit

But as I was attending the Strategic Labor Researchers Conference at UCLA this weekend, I was reminded of one of the epistemological tendencies that journalists and labor advocates have in common: a cantankerous belief that self-serving bullshit is one of the major ordering forces of society, and the importance of creating countervailing pressure against the oppressive presence of someone else’s bullshit, or multiple streams of bullshit, or a whole bullshit biome.

What is bullshit? Bullshit is when the hotel says you can skip housekeeping to help save the environment, when it’s really better at saving the hotel on housekeeper wages. Bullshit is when the prediction market advertisement says you can win! betting on major world events, while knowing that attracting money-losing suckers like you is the only thing keeping the whole casino in business.

Bullshit is self-interest disguising itself as something greater, a part that mistakes its interests for the interests of the whole.

To believe in bullshit’s ever-present existence is to have a somewhat skeptical view of the fallibility of people, though no more skeptical than the belief that self-interest is central to human nature, which is the driving principle of modern economies.

In this view, the bullshit generated by self-interest isn’t something spewed by the occasional bad actor. It’s something more like unlisted dark matter on the Table of Elements, exerting its own heavy gravity on everything.

“Calling bullshit” is the phrase we use for the dialectic that too much bullshit creates. For example: The boss says sales are down and there isn’t enough money for raises this year. Well, is that true? The problem isn’t that the workers didn’t hear the boss’ perspective but that they didn’t believe it. The workers unionize, point to executives’ pay and that big stock buyback, and conclude there’s plenty of money; they demand raises. Then comes management’s turn to accuse the workers of being delusional and irrational and so on.

In the end, every negotiation is a bullshit resolution session. So is every journalist’s reporting and fact-checking process.

The opportunity cost of losing a journalist job

Beyond the qualitative miseries of journalism, one of the journalist’s other blind spots tends to be how mathematics is ruining your life. One of the most important concepts in economics, with the stupidest possible name, is “opportunity cost.”

It’s like this: Whatever you’re doing right now, ask, “Is this the most productive use of my time?” Since you’re reading this newsletter, the answer is obviously yes. But even reading my magical words has a cost: You could instead be trading on the stock market, cooking supper, or falling in love with somebody right now. Except you aren’t. You’re doing this and not that. “Not that” is the opportunity cost. Sometimes you can even stick a dollar estimate on it.

Over the past two decades, our society has collectively decided that most people who are journalists have something better that they could be doing with their time. The opportunity cost of having so many journalists has become too great to bear. By some calculations, reporting on the latest meeting of the school board in Lee’s Summit, Mo., is a less economically productive use of time than doing PR for an AI company that was previously hoovering up that journalist’s work without compensation.

Of course, the communities resisting AI data centers everywhere think they’re calling bullshit on the big robot boxes being such a mathematically good thing, tax-wise, jobs-wise, energy-wise, water-wise. Is it true? Who’s doing the fact-finding, and whose “facts” are trusted enough to believe? The crusty third-party validators like journalists have been getting stripped away, and the local officials have been signed to NDAs. There are volleys of claim and rumor; there are allegations of misinformation.

There’s certainly some bullshit afoot. There’s more of it all the time.

As always, this newsletter represents my views and mine alone, however they are obviously correct.

While visiting friends in Portland, Ore., this weekend, I picked up a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collection “Words Are My Matter.” Le Guin writes of community:

Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it — whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.

Your “community,” your “people” — these are ideas that live in the head, not in empirical science. (See if you can find community under a microscope. How many electrons does it have?) The mind is amazing. It can conjure citizenship and fellow-feeling with billions of people. What other choice is there? The world is so vast that imagination is necessary for the feeling of belonging. The believer in nationalism cannot know or love another countryman except by through the shared idea — or shared delusion. So too with our towns, fandoms, la raza and the ummah, and so on. This is how Le Guin can argue, with force, that community is a creative act, a connective fantasy.

We must respect the hallucinogenic properties of communal feeling, which are overpowering. The desire for connection breathes life into objects, the way a child finds company in toys and gives them names, or how the lonesome love their AI chatbots. These psychic projections are not tricks of code or plastic. The impulses are ancient. Humans have divined messages from the wind and the falling star and have loved the invisible gods forever.

I have my own delusions. Like Le Guin, I’m a patriot in the republic of letters. We have no borders. It’s a community unbounded by nation, language, even death. Niccolò Machiavelli, trundling around in exile, described his daily companions in one of the most famous letters in all of literature1:

When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking. Then I move on along the road to the inn; I speak with those passing by; I ask them news of their places; I learn various things; and I note the various tastes and different fancies of men. ...

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

I look at my shelves and see my community. There is a breath of life between each set of covers, released into the air when it’s time to read. I judge the books but it’s like they judge me too, sitting there lined up like a jury, taking in their evidence.

There’s a special law of relativity for storytelling: Time will make small tales taller but shrink epics to more modest dimensions. What was epic in one era will be a Tuesday in another.

In the millennia since Homer’s “Odyssey,” nature has been tamed, the one-eyed cyclopes driven extinct, and the gods abolished. Wars are no longer fought over stolen princesses. The vast horizons of Homer’s world, which took the hero 20 years to travel, now shrink to a pixel with a pinch of the fingertips on Google Maps. A travel planner would notice all the 1-star ratings for Circe’s restaurant and make other plans for lunch. Ithaca itself is reachable by a short flight from Troy. Odysseus could text the Penelope/Telemachus family group chat that he’s boarding for home but running a little late.

But the modern reader will still discover more to Homer’s “Odyssey” than memories of long-lost gods and monsters and of travails now avoided. Something in this old poem sticks to our ribs like a fatty dinner. Odysseus was a “complicated man,” as the classicist Emily Wilson controversially called him in her recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey, and aren’t we all? As the German ironist Heinrich Heine once wrote of the bloody little Odysseus that dwells inside all of us:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door, and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.

The primary task for modern readers of Homer’s “Odyssey” is to reckon with the sheer amount of death that follows Odysseus around and to assess what kind of hero this ancient hero really is.

The director Christopher Nolan’s major innovation in the new “Odyssey” film is to make tricksy, bloody, victorious Odysseus a repressed neurotic. This Odysseus is calm on the outside but all fucked up in the head from winning the great war, at the cost of losing not just a generation of men but the whole empire. (Very British.) He lands on Calypso’s island, and instead of being delayed because of a goddess’ seven-year sex spell, he medicates on anti-depressants until Calypso guides him out of self-exile through the restorative power of talk therapy.

And when I say that Nolan’s Odysseus is repressed, I mean repressed: I’m not the first to notice that, unlike the ancient poem, there’s no sex in the movie after the departure for Troy, even when Odysseus makes it home to pining Penelope. (The telling exception is when Clytemnestra murders a waiting Agamemnon in bed, leading the king of kings to tell Odysseus from beyond the grave to not do what he did. The erotic symbolism here is impossible to ignore.) After seeing the orgy of violence at the sack of Troy, it’s as if Nolan’s Odysseus goes chaste to start rebalancing the books on what Freud called the “economics of the libido,” those acts of self-denial that make polite society possible. Freud likened the controlling power of guilt to “a garrison in a conquered city,” which was embodied — literally — in Nolan’s moving scene with Odysseus’ ghost army in the fields of asphodel, led by an excellent Elliot Page as the betrayed Sinon.

In the ancient poem, Homer’s Odysseus’ only has self-discipline when it comes to telling bigger and more ambitious lies; he otherwise exuberantly butchers every suiter and hangs every disloyal maid and aggrieves every powerful suitor’s family on Ithaca until finally the goddess Athena has to intervene to stop a civil war. “Must you have battle in your heart forever?” Athena asks Odysseus in the translation by Robert Fitzgerald, already knowing the answer. For the ancients, it was Atlas holding the world up on his shoulders; in Christopher Nolan movies, that burden falls on father figures. Nolan’s self-restraining Odysseus stops short of a full palace massacre and then flees his own country, doing only what duty, not passion, demands. This is the cinema of stiff upper lips.

Political philosophers across the ages have disagreed whether people are naturally good but get led astray by their societies, or if people are naturally nasty and need to be held in check. Nolan’s recent movies are about decaying civilizations and declining orders yielding men who loose anarchy upon the world, which is what makes him one of our foremost conservative artists working today. He’s a decline artist. Homer’s “Odyssey” is about the end of the Trojan War. Nolan’s “Odyssey” is about the end of the world.

Readers of this newsletter will have noticed that the close family relationship between democracy and loneliness has been bothering me in recent weeks.1

Media has been one of those essential compensating forces to collect democracy’s wandering spirits, as Alexis de Tocqueville said. But I’ve gotten curious about different kind of community coping mechanism, the secret society.

The secret society is an exclusive club. Not everyone is allowed. (I use the term “secret society” here as a general concept, not something very specific and literal, like the Skull and Bones club.) It forms after some of democracy’s wandering spirits have been gathered, but the gatherees are seeking shelter against democracy’s other social pressures. These days we talk a lot about needing more community — admittedly a term whose vagueness is in high abuse on LinkedIn right now — but the secret society is not a community we think of as respectable. The secret society is a democratic contradiction, the club that doesn’t want more members.

The secret society I’ve been thinking about this week are the Straussians, one of our strangest sets of observers and critics of modern democracy.

In Francis Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man,”2 the famed political scientist talks about why he put his name in support of the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. While all memoirs are inherently suspect — as has been said since olden times, no man can be judge in his own cause — Fukuyama blames his own participation in groupthink. His intellectual fellow-travelers were supporting the war; so would he.

Turning against the Iraq war later would not just require changing thinking. It would require Fukuyama making a public break with longtime friends, putting himself through a kind of self-exile. But what was he exiling himself from?

Fukuyama belongs to a famous, strange (and famously strange) set of thinkers, many but not all of them conservative, who were influenced by the esoteric 20th century philosopher Leo Strauss. Straussian thought can’t be summarized easily3, but to oversimplify in my own words: Strauss believed, like some ancient Greeks, there was such a thing as eternal truths that philosophers of all eras can pursue. However, these truths are not accessible to just anyone: Societies of all kinds have been resistant to philosophizing. Socrates lived in a democracy that made him drink the hemlock for corrupting the youth. Strauss was a German Jew who had to flee the Nazis. The Straussian story might say that philosophers sometimes live and write obscurely to protect themselves from their given social regime, even sometimes democracy.

And Straussianism is concerned that modern democracy indulges an anything-goes attitude toward truth that leads to nihilism, the nihilism of the Nazis.

One of Strauss’ most famous students was the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, who in turn had taught Fukuyama about those ancient problems as Plato wrestled with them in Athens. Bloom was one of the weirdest characters America has ever produced. He was an archconservative gay man who passionately defended the emanicipatory power of a liberal education, who was addicted to luxury shopping but hated the business school, who saw it as his life’s work to pass on the Straussian insights to those elect few students ready to receive them.

Bloom was loved and despised by many, even moreso after writing the shocking runaway bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy an Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” (1987), one of the first and probably still the most sophisticated of the conservative “campus books.” Bloom’s bestseller status, which made him fabulously rich and even more cartoonishly spendy, was shocking because his big book was filled with dense passages like this one, about the detachment between individual and collective life in modern democracy:

The modern economic principle that private vice makes public virtue has penetrated all aspects of daily life in such a way that there seems to be no reason to be a conscious part of civic existence. … The petty personal interests of youth — “making it,” finding a place for oneself — persevere throughout life. The honesty of this generation of students causes them to laugh when asked to act as though they were powerful agents in world history. They know the truth of Tocqueville’s dictum that “in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself,” a contemplation now intensified by a greater indifference to the past and the loss of a national view of the future. The only common project engaging the youthful imagination is the exploration of space, which everyone knows to be empty.

The implicitly anti-conservative messages in the book didn’t sink in with Bloom’s newfound fans. Bloom wasn’t rah-rah about capitalism or traditional family life. Here was Bloom’s Straussian suspicion of a nihilism inherent in modern democracy, from which Bloom tried to rescue his students. Bloom’s close friend, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, described Bloom’s esoteric teaching methods in his loosely fictionalized 2000 novella, “Ravelstein”4:

This is what [Bloom’s character] Ravelstein’s books and articles had to tell us. He took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment, and then — by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche, Heidegger — to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech America, its culture and its entertainments, its press, its educational system, its think tanks, its politics. He gave you a picture of this mass democracy and its characteristic — woeful — human product. In his classroom, and the lectures were always packed, he coughed, stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their feet and debated, provoked them to single combat, examined, hammered them. He didn’t ask, “Where will you spend eternity?” as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?”

But Bloom’s true method was less to rescue students from nihilism book by book or class by class, but one by one. Bloom was democratic in that his protégés could come from anywhere; he was undemocratic in that he thought not every student could be reached. Bellow in “Ravelstein” again:

[Bloom’s character Ravelstein] himself had very important secrets to keep, information of a private, dangerous nature which only a few could be trusted with. Teaching, as Ravelstein understood teaching, was tricky work. You couldn’t afford to let the facts be generally known. But unless the facts were known, no real life was possible. So you made your choices with a jeweler’s touch.

This created intense loyalty among the elect, as secret societies often do. Handpicked grad students, having survived Bloom’s close gaze under the jeweler’s loupe, in Bellow’s accounting, got to come to Bloom’s apartment to watch NBA games and eat pizzas, while powerful fellow Straussians resembling Paul Wolfowitz phoned in from the Pentagon to gossip about war and Great Politics. Amid democratic nihilism, here was community.

It was a boy’s club.

Wolfowitz would be one of the central figures of the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion. Fukuyama — who had drawn from Strauss’ correspondence for his own surprise-bestselling philosophical book, “The End of History” — was, in my reading, left wondering where all this collective genius had led everyone. Fukuyama doesn’t think Strauss or Straussianism was to blame for the war, though Straussians were certainly personally involved. For all that reasoning, old-fashioned peer pressure turned out to be an omnivore that eats the rationalist and the unthinking alike. An eternal truth, known by the ancients, is that wherever there are people, there is folly, terrible folly.

Note: The views here are mine alone, but they could also possibly be eternal truths passed down by the ancients.

Loneliness is one of the great challenges not just of our time but of our whole form of self-government. A new report from Columbia World Projects1 sums up America’s civic “supply problem,” in a litany reminiscent of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”:

[T]he institutions that once connected ordinary people to democratic life have hollowed out. Private-sector unions that once anchored working-class communities and provided year-round civic education, social life, and political connection have nearly disappeared. Local party organizations that once operated in neighborhoods, helped people with everyday problems, and gave citizens a real stake in politics have been replaced by national data operations that go quiet between election cycles. Civic education in schools has been cut. Religious congregations that have operated as sites of meaning making and anchored civic life are disappearing, with 100,000 churches projected to close over the next five years. The basic conditions that make democratic participation possible are in short supply for millions of Americans.

The report then identified a partisan asymmetry in the American system: “evangelical networks, conservative media, and organizations such as Turning Point USA” often “meet people where they are, offer genuine community, and make members feel like they matter. On the left: not much.”

The report’s call was to rebuild civic life “from the bottom up,” with “organizations and parties that are physically present in communities year-round, which treat members as people with vision who develop their own ideas and strategies and articulate future goals, rather than as an audience for professionals.” Ads and emails need to get replaced by “slow, relational, place-based work.”

I agree. My own biases are toward wanting more community, and my day job involves promoting local media subsidies so that people feel better connected to where they live.

But I also have to constantly confront my own assumptions for why community is such a good thing, given how much Americans, as a people, persistently behave as if there is too much community or resist creating more of it, even now. Over and over again, Americans choose to sever bonds that connect us with each other: We move away from our hometowns, we leave our churches, we quit our unions, we quit our parties, we stay in instead of going out, we donate instead of volunteering, we let friendships fade away. Whenever faced with some unsatisfactory civic situation — to borrow Albert O. Hirschman’s formulation — Americans frequently choose “exit” over “voice” or “loyalty.”2

Problematically, the most powerful cultural centrifuge that flings Americans apart is American democracy itself.

In pre-Revolutionary America, social life would have been unrecognizable even just for the density of its civic webs, as I wrote about last week in a review of Gordon S. Wood’s “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”3 Everybody was tied to somebody else:

Servility smothered everything: the slaves in the fields, the indentured servants in the homes, the wives treated like the children of their husbands, the yeomen who doffed their hats to the gentlemen, the gentlemen who answered to Crown appointees of whatever quality, all of them bowing under a faraway King. Life in the American colonies was simple, poor, stupid and subservient.

The Revolution — freedom — shattered American communal life as it was then known. Universal emancipation and suffrage would take longer to come along. But as early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville perceived democracy’s annihilating power:4

Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

The coarseness and atomism of American democracy came as a shock to the Founders themselves, who had dreamed of a new Roman Republic and instead woke to Andrew Jackson. “This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected,” Wood wrote. Ralph Waldo Emerson, like de Tocqueville, was similarly unsparing about America’s democratic individualism5:

It is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they were. … There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors; almost the laws. … The age tends to solitude.

Of course, in time America would also come to be known as the nation of joiners, home to countless social clubs and the budding art of voluntary association, boosted by spates of unionization and religious revivals. But it’s also hard not to compare today’s anomie with America’s early years and wonder if our communitarian periods and institutions are the aberrations, if democratic culture is simply experiencing a regression to a lonely mean.

The harsh reality of community life is that it can be coercive, if not held together by coercion itself. I’m not just talking about religious communities. When I was the president of a union, I was perfectly aware that I was in charge of something that was practically alien in 21st century American life: legally imbued (under federal laws created in the social-democratic 1930s) with the exclusive power to bargain members’ working conditions and require them to pay for the costs of representation, even if they strongly protested the process, its outcome or even my existence as the president. Of course, this power had been won through years of painstaking organizing and via the popular consent of democratic election; this power could also be undermined at any moment by calling for a work stoppage that no one participates in.

But the parts of unionization that were transformational — the ethic of solidarity, the sharing of information, a greater sense of belonging, the communal gatherings — could be seen by skeptics completely through antonyms: the potentially lifelong stigma around scabbing during strikes you didn’t agree with; the loss of some privacy around sensitive personnel matters; suspicions of groupthink; and the enormous time commitment of communal gathering on top of having a full-time job. To be together was powerful, and it was also a burden. Succeeding as a 21st century union was to be aware, at all times, of this burden and to maintain a constant consent for the burden’s continued existence. To fail to do so would be to become another statistic in the broader trend of the American labor movement’s long decline.

Having gone through the union experience — and having changed many journalists’ lives for the better because of it — made me far more sensitive to the delicate character of the American civic movement, which often explores how to achieve the same benefits of community (which Americans like) without the same intensity of social obligation (which Americans apparently don’t). The movement’s gentle aspirations are coincidentally spelled out in its preference for the adjective “civic,” with its Latin connotations of wreathed republicanism, and not “political,” with its grimier democratic origins in the rough-and-tumble streets of the Greek polis. I often imagine the sensibilities in tension with each other, the reformers versus the public. “There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement,” Emerson wrote. The uncomfortable question for the civic movement of the future is whether the establishment opposition — the real leviathan — is the culture created by democracy itself.

The Columbia report, to its credit, sees civic and political strength as connected solutions to the problem of democratic isolation:

Three practical frameworks stood out. First, the idea of socially thick and politically thick parties: parties that are embedded in everyday community life and that have real internal debate, not just top-down message discipline. Second, the role of para-parties, which means organizations like Mom’s for Liberty, Voto Latino or Faith in Minnesota that work alongside political parties and could play a larger role if given formal seats in decision-making. Third, the observation that electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting, fusion voting, and proportional representation are valuable but not sufficient on their own. They have to be paired with the harder work of rebuilding civic infrastructure.

And media’s role in the civic infrastructure, as I am fond of quoting de Tocqueville on, is to gather the wandering spirits of democratic isolation who otherwise can’t afford the burdens of communal gathering:6

The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. It frequently happens, on the contrary, in democratic countries, that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it, because as they are very insignificant and lost amidst the crowd, they cannot see, and know not where to find, one another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite.

The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united. In order that an association amongst a democratic people should have any power, it must be a numerous body. The persons of whom it is composed are therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his income, or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns it. Means then must be found to converse every day without seeing each other, and to take steps in common without having met. Thus hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers.

Of course, even de Tocqueville’s idea of communal life in America recognized that media was a solution to a practical democratic problem: often, in a free society, people like to stay home.

The views in this newsletter are mine alone, though maybe they’re also anybody or everyone else’s.

A lot of people I know were bummed and conflicted about this year’s Fourth of July, which marked the 250th anniversary of the American Independence. I felt it too. The most personally wounding episode for me recently was watching birthright citizenship take a stiff challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Almost all of my ancestors immigrated the U.S. in the 19th century seeking a better life, mostly found it, and many fought for it. Most of the military-aged men in my family enlisted with the Union during the Civil War, though a few chose the confederacy (and saw their wars end in ignominy). One of my Unionist ancestors who was too old to fight, George Gewinner, who immigrated from Bavaria in 1848, became a bandmaster in Lincoln’s armies instead and claimed to have played at Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Old George wasn’t a natural-born killer but a natural-born music teacher, and his immigrant contribution to American freedom was to teach the slavers what defeat sounded like. May he rest in honored glory.

But today, my own American citizenship rests not on my ancestors’ bloodlines or their military service but on the 14th Amendment won in law during Reconstruction: one of the great leveling amendments that bulldozed mistakes of history to clear way for the America of the future.

To be some other type of natural-born citizen other than a birthright citizen — to be what Vice President J.D. Vance ominously calls a “heritage American” — would make my citizenship a matter of property inheritance, like a title to a farm or a boat, passed down like chattel. It would shackle me with ancient privileges instead of modern rights. It would, in short, make me an aristocrat of a country whose great historical innovation was abolishing aristocracy.

This holiday weekend, I’ve been reading Gordon S. Wood’s 1993 Pulitzer Prizee winning history book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” which has broadened the way I’ve thought about American Independence.

One of the things I hadn’t appreciated before reading Wood’s history was the practically feudal character of American society before the Revolution. Servility smothered everything: the slaves in the fields, the indentured servants in the homes, the wives treated like the children of their husbands, the yeomen who doffed their hats to the gentlemen, the gentlemen who answered to Crown appointees of whatever quality, all of them bowing under a faraway King. Life in the American colonies was simple, poor, stupid and subservient.

Immigration changed everything in America. The population exploded. The explosion of commerce turned debt from a social obligation into an impersonal business tool. It got harder to keep servants. It got harder to disinherit disobedient kids and have it mean something. It got harder to control people moving from town to town. It got harder to control anybody. Even husbands and wives started getting their portraits painted standing at the same height, instead of with the man always standing at the top of the frame.

Republicanism infected the culture, both socially and as a literary phenomenon. The American gentry, although locally rich, were new money and had no noble titles to draw upon; they sought social legitimacy as adamant cosmopolitans who read ancient writers like Cicero and Tacitus to draw from Roman ideals about what the good life should look like. After winning the Revolutionary War, George Washington genuinely shocked the world when he took after the ancient general Cincinnatus and retired to his farm instead of becoming dictator for life. Here was something new.

Revolutionary republicanism quickly gave way to the revolutionary reality of American democracy, which set the stage for the next 250 years of national political life. Voters quickly elected a lot of pretty normal-looking guys to office instead of Latin-reading gentleman farmers. Political life turned out to be pretty grimy, full of electioneering, horse-trading and pork-barrel spending to appease local voters. Interest groups formed and started lobbying for favorable economic treatment instead of the universal public good. Local merchants had done fantastic business supplying the American, British and French armies during the war, and they wanted to keep the good times rolling. It turned out that Americans took a liking to working hard once it meant they got to buy more stuff and increase their pitiable standards of living.

The Founders’ republic was supposed to be disinterested, benevolent, Roman. Instead, the American democracy they created was practical, self-interested and fully modern. It would only be the first time that American inventors cooked up a popular product that got away from them. The Founders had made a country that was great for making money.

Freedom for all Americans would have to wait a few decades longer — “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” as Abraham Lincoln later put it. (The suffragists would need a while longer.) But the abolition of aristocratic culture by the American Revolution signed the death warrant for American slavery, Wood argues:

For a century or more the colonists had taken slavery more or less for granted as the most base and dependent status in a hierarchy of dependencies and a world of laborers. Rarely had they felt the need either to criticize black slavery or to defend it. Now, however, the republican attack on dependency compelled Americans to see the deviant character of slavery and to confront the institution as they never had to before. It was no accident that Americans in Philadelphia in 1775 formed the first anti-slavery society in the world.

To be an American and to know our history is to know its hypocrisies, inconsistencies, crimes and tragedies. It’s also to know our potential and when that potential is being frustrated. We go to work in that delta between what is owed and what is actually paid under the Declaration of Independence, the “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described it: that all men were created equal and entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Not just the aristocratic “heritage Americans.”

I’m not one for blind nationalism (which would have been totally alien to the Founders anyway) nor to hopeless pessimism, which never did anybody any good. When I was a local union president, we’d start Communications Workers of America conferences with the pledge of allegiance. When this group of troublemakers who knew better got to the ending part, promising “liberty and justice for all,” we added another word: “someday.”

Note: Since it no longer goes without saying, the newsletter is 100% human-written, because the author believes that writing is an act of learning by doing.

As reality sets in, and the most egregious propaganda of recent years gets exposed by increments to have been so much bullshit, it’s clear that artificial intelligence as of 2026 is just a normal technology.

AI causes disruptions much like any other innovation. Its impacts, while real, are not fantastic or mysterious. The jobpocalypse — mass human unemployment caused by AI — is obviously not coming soon, nor is robot superintelligence. Like all other machines fashioned by human genius, AI is not conscious. The familiar drives of human nature and capitalism have not been fundamentally changed by AI’s arrival. People, companies and societies will use AI for logical and illogical purposes; these uses will have benefits and harms.

This is because AI is a normal technology.

It’s important to sweep away the conceptual clutter around artificial intelligence so we can talk more plainly about the appropriate role of AI in our communities and societies.

AI does not have a destiny. AI is not even inevitable. It is software. AI is simply here, much like trains, cars and computers are here. The effects of trains, cars and computers are good and bad, both for the people who use them and those who don’t. So too with AI: because AI is a normal technology.

But the unique hype around AI gives us a chance to talk about the kind of society we would want to live in, and what more might be necessary to create it.

AI’s complicated role in a “learning society”

This decluttering of AI rhetoric — the normalization of AI debate — is especially critical for those of us for whom journalism, technological innovation, libraries, universities, an open web, etc., are means to a particular end: creating a more enlightened public.

The Nobel-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald called this the work of “creating a learning society” and wrote a 2015 book of economic theory of the same name.

Creating a “learning society” is a fantastic goal. When people learn more stuff, they become more engaged citizens, better workers, cleverer innovators, more insightful artists. In a learning society, everybody benefits. Standards of living get higher, we cure more diseases, we get more magnificent art.

But a learning society doesn’t happen by accident. You need public policies (like taxes and subsidies), institutions (like schools and news organizations) and norms (like openness and intellectual integrity) that proactively support lifelong public learning.

The intent to create a learning society is very important, because we do not live in the most knowledgeable of all possible worlds.

Markets for information are inherently “inefficient,” meaning we usually don’t produce or spread as much information as might be ideal for society. There is a fundamental conflict between how easily information spreads and the ability for information providers to recoup the costs of producing or obtaining that information.1

This is called the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox, and it’s why information producers so frequently lock up, patent or paywall socially valuable information, and why too few people pay for information they can otherwise get freely.

Solving this paradox is a real problem, because the most important economic function of a learning society is creating more knowledge “spillovers” where good information travels far and wide in a society.

Think about impactful investigations from news organizations, new management best practices from field-leading entrepreneurs, and new technologies. Knowledge spillovers ripple through other companies, fields and communities and help eliminate waste and corruption and spur growth.

AI — much like libraries, universities and Google Search before it — aspires to be an ultimate “spillover” technology, by collecting all that has been thought and said and delivering the most useful knowledge more efficiently than before.

But AI in 2026 presents some serious problems for this work of creating a learning society:

• There is a persistent misalignment between AI’s actual capabilities and users’ beliefs in its perceived capabilities.

• AI is causing cognitive offloading in schools and workplaces and increasing short-run productivity at the cost of longer-term learning, which is the true source of long-term economic growth.

• AI as an information source is harvesting not just the content but the audiences that other knowledge producers rely upon to fund or inspire further knowledge creation (which AI itself relies upon).

• AI as a source of content pollution has nullified presumptions of integrity and harmed the openness of academic, creative and intellectual communities: Teachers increasingly fear their students to be cheaters, freelancers are feared to be AI fakes, and slush piles are feared to be slop.

• To the extent AI causes unemployment in certain jobs or careers — one of the most socially and economically destructive things that can happen to a worker — AI hurts longer-term economic dynamism by eliminating the ability of workers to learn by doing.

In short, the evidence suggests AI is drawing from the pool of public knowledge without doing enough restock the pond.

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The need for public policy to support a learning society under AI

The benefit of thinking of AI as a normal technology is that we’re not obligated to think of its disruptions as necessary or inevitable. AI is another means, not an end unto itself.

The estimable Gina Chua recently said of AI agents that “our energy should be spent on making them more accurate, not just complaining that they aren’t.”2

I disagree, and I’ll talk about this problem from the perspective of the news industry (since it’s what I know best) to illustrate why everybody’s incentives are out of whack from what might be ideal for a learning society. Public policy is going to have to intervene.

For example: A marginal analysis might strongly suggest that news providers’ limited time and energy is more productively spent not making AI more accurate.

The world in which AI is really good at providing current-events information is a world in which AI becomes a better destination than the news providers who collected that information — creating what economists call a “substitute good” to replace the original. This is a bona fide social problem when it’s news providers, and not AI companies, funding journalists to keep stocking the pool of public knowledge.

Even in a scenario where AI companies were required to pay fair licensing or similar fees to news companies for scraping, this is why there can be bona fide competition reason for some news outlets not to participate. This is not even factoring in the unknown math of whether the unknown revenues of AI licensing nets out to a profit once you factor in the unknown transaction costs of setting yourself up for those kinds of deals. These transaction costs are especially daunting with regards to smaller news outlets.

Well, from the macro perspective of the welfare of a learning society, who cares about the existence of news companies? If AI companies voluntarily funded their own armies of journalists to feed AI agents with accurate original reporting, then maybe society might be better off from an information-maximizing perspective. (Though the history of Silicon Valley suggests this kind of strategy is highly unlikely.)

But a world without publishers and journalists has problems even beyond information production. News providers don’t just produce knowledge but also community, serving as collectors of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “wandering spirits” of democracy.3 AI, by comparison, is practically inherently anti-community technology.4 Much how freedom and equality are the binding agents for liberal democracy, so too do knowledge and community work together to create the learning society.

Furthermore, 20 years of Facebook and Twitter strongly suggests that the arc of tech development does not bend toward accuracy — if anything, tech’s history strongly suggests a teleology away from accuracy and toward slop for the sake of pursuing maximum market share.

The history of social media and the journalism industry, if anything, is a graveyard of sunk costs. The tolerance for declining returns is shockingly alive and well, as evidenced by the number of journalists still fucking around on Elon Musk’s X, nursing legacy follower counts at the expense of anything else they could be doing more productively with their preciously limited time and energy.

One of the benefits of Joe Stiglitz’s work and of behavioral economics in general is that we can say plainly that consumers are not utility-maximizing robots who gravitate toward the most accurate or useful information. Sometimes people just get stuck because of status-quo bias or annoying “switching costs,” even when they don’t even like the services they’re using.

Polling on the increasingly negative public opinions about AI suggest there might be a lot of this sort of sentiment already running around, which suggests that standing apart from AI might be a viable strategy for news publishers.

Last week I was talking to high school students at a journalism camp at Mizzou, and interestingly, they all resented how much time they had to spend on social media and knew that what they saw on the services was not inherently trustworthy.

But one of the students said she’d become an avid reader of the New York Times due to a subscription program run through her high school: essentially a de facto public subsidy to cancel out the paywall that NYT erected to protect and sustain its own journalism. While modest, this is an example of a valid intervention to correct the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox and resolve the inherent conflict between the funding and sharing of accurate information.

A future where AI is an increasingly accurate source of information, just like a future where there are still news organizations providing news and creating communities for democracy’s “wandering spirits,” are not necessarily a given. It’s not even clear if we can have both those futures at the same time. But if we do, public policy will probably have played a part. The learning society is something we have to want to build.

Note: These are my own views and not necessarily those of my employer, my loved ones or anybody else, really.

2

(Re)Structured News

What's It All About?

So what are we talking about here, anyway…

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2 months ago · 1 comment · Gina Chua, Tow-Knight Center

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. An example of ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters:

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”

Two other responses to ELIZA disturbed Weizenbaum, a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany as a child. Some experts thought the machine could be perfected enough to supply actual therapy to real people, reducing the need for real therapists. Others thought the program demonstrated that computers could understand natural language, when Weizenbaum, who’d created the program, knew it wasn’t doing anything of the sort. It was becoming clear that the problem wasn’t the technology, but people’s flawed understanding of it:

This reaction to ELIZA showed me more vividly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attributions an even well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand. Surely, I thought, decisions made by the general public about emergent technologies depend much more on what the public attributes to such technologies than on what they actually are or can and cannot do. If, as appeared to be the case, the public’s attributions are wildly misconceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and often wrong.

I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this.

Neil Postman’s biggest criticisms weren’t of technology itself, exactly, though he was an adept of Marshall McLuhan’s influential formulation that “the medium is the message” — meaning that the form of communication dictates what is capable of being said. Postman was harsher on the instrumentalist view of technology that puts humans second. This instrumentalist view happens to be the organizing principle of a culture that has just made Elon Musk our first trillionaire while he used his social media network to help foment the race hate in Northern Ireland.1 When someone like Musk is both medium and message, there’s no point expecting a rotting pipe to do anything but spew its bilge all over everything.

“You must try to be a loving resistance fighter,” Postman wrote in the conclusion of “Technopoly,” describing the anti-technopolists as people:

who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why;

who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations;

who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth;

who refuse to allow psychology or any “social science” to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense;

who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding;

who do not regard the aged as irrelevant;

who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they “reach out and touch someone,” expect that person to be in the same room;

who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth;

who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity’s sake;

who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement.

“In short,” Postman concludes, “a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.” This is technoconservatism: Standing athwart history, yelling for people to log off, or to at least stop falling in love with your computer.

On the way to the coffee shop to write this newsletter today, I listened to Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s NYT interview with Scott Pelley about his firing as a “60 Minutes” correspondent by new CBS bosses Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton.1 I was struck by Pelley’s rage (he compares the changes to his wife getting murdered), which will grab onto something inside many journalists with the misfortune of having watched an institution erode from within.

As I listened to Pelley’s tale in that famous broadcast baritone of his, I could picture him at Bilton’s patronizing first address to the “60 Minutes” staff: Pelley, looking around, realizing he’s the most senior person in the room; the one with the burden to defend his colleagues’ honor, and his own. In his downfall, Pelley remains a world-class storyteller, unmatchable in talent by the people who just fired him.

Of course, it’s the fate of every true craftsperson to love a job that can’t love them back. Money and prestige are nice if you can get them. But in the balance of life, talent is something you give away.

Anyway, the rest of today’s newsletter is about the logic of using AI to replace workers, though the common theme here is that the fundamental replaceability of workers is almost always a wounding discovery to the workers.

When I flip open my tenth edition of “Managerial Economics" by Samuelson, Marks and Zagorsky, I find simple formulas that can help news executives mathematically decide when to, say, lay off journalists and replace us all with AI. Production inputs are classified as either labor (workers) and capital (stuff, like tools). A savvy manager can use the “marginal rate of technical substitution” to figure how much capital you need to replace labor and produce the same results.

[Imagine I printed the actual microeconomic formulas here. Now imagine at least a dozen readers’ eyes immediately scrolling up into their sockets, a terrifying darkness descending, a final bioelectrical signal sending their hands toward the “unsubscribe” button just before catatonia.]

Imagine the CEO is a little sweaty because it’s too warm inside the office. The CEO could bring on board a team of interns to cool him down (the CEO is a man in this anecdote) by fanning his face with their hands in the manner of an ancient imperial retinue, with some extra bowing and scraping to optimize executive morale. But unless the interns are unpaid and/or can’t be put to more productive use doing something else around the office, the science of marginal economics will probably say it’s more profit-maximizing for the CEO to just replace these labor inputs with a capital input: in this case, an air conditioning unit. This is automation, and its purpose is identical to why farmworkers are replaced by tractors, receptionists by phone trees, copy editors by spellcheck, analysts and writers by Google Gemini, so on.

There’s nothing new happening just because the capital input is called “artificial intelligence” instead of “a stapler” or “a hammer.” The process of substituting capital for labor is constant, ever-present, sometimes boring, frequently career-shattering, and, when done a certain way, insanely profitable. It’s how productivity increases and the economy gets bigger; old industries are destroyed and new ones created; goods sometimes made cheaper and tasks a little easier; and how so many more mansions are built and inequalities multiplied on behalf of whoever’s holding the equity. It’s because of this inexorable process that executives are practically mathematically obligated to be excited about AI. After all, if they don’t implement the technology, someone else will — won’t they? And aren’t the first movers likelier to win, to knock out their clumsier competitors? What if you’re one of the clumsier competitors, is the status quo even an option? Under the laws of competition, what looks like innovation is more like an obligation. This is why the disruptive impacts we blame on AI are more accurately attributable to capital, humanity’s first and most powerful autonomous technology.

It’s math the whole way down. If you add in costs, figure for changes in quality and demand elasticities, estimate changes in revenue, then you can figure whether a productivity increase means your profits increase more by increasing production using the people you already have or by maintaining output with a smaller workforce. (Which depends on the level of competition and consumer demand.) These are the formulas behind whether CEOs decide precisely to fire a bunch of people while announcing to investors that your company is “pivoting to scalable AI enterprise solutions.” However, the coming chokepoints of chip availability, data center siting and energy costs all suggest that AI usage won’t be as cheap as executives prefer, and a higher cost of “capital” means it’s less mathematically favorable to axe half your human workforce. The jobpocalypse will probably have to wait for another day.

Still, it’s the math that workers are correct to be skeptical of — where the two primary outcomes of successful innovation are that 1. you lose your job, or 2. you do more work for the same pay while the corresponding new profits accrue to somebody else. According to the Wall Street Journal, “hourly wages are up 3% since the end of 2019 while profits are up 50%,” a disparity that preceded the explosive growth of AI deployment.2 Looks like the kids are completely right to boo AI at their graduations. Well, what are we going to do about that? A society that wants more innovation needs fewer good reasons to resist it.

Once you cut through all the wizard bullshit (and we are against wizard bullshit around here, unless it has some kind of literary or aesthetic value), the principles of modern managerial science and labor theory say there’s nothing special about generative artificial intelligence. AI is a normal technology, meaning it can be adopted and analyzed using normal business principles; the abnormality is in how we talk about AI.

It’s my 41st birthday, and since I officially get one grouchy fortysomething wish, it’s for readers to consider this: Artificial intelligence is an anti-community technology whose principal civic innovation is to reduce social trust and engender a greater sense of unreality in our lives.

A few weeks ago, I read an essay from somebody in the tech business who compared the rhetoric around AI’s current capabilities to Mao’s Great Leap Forward.1 I shared the piece with a couple friends and mentioned how much I enjoy it when I encounter somebody from a non-humanities career track who’s a lively writer. Of course, as soon as I shared the compliment, I realized the essay could have been written in part or in whole by AI itself. As a proud 100% organic writer, I’d have no choice but to Immediately Kill Myself. Just one thing stood in the way of me reclaiming my honor: I had no way of knowing if the writer used AI.

…In seriousness, the real victim of AI here wasn’t my own pride as an English major™ (who cares), but the increasingly fragile ways we engage each other through media.

Not all innovations reduce costs. AI increasingly pushes non-users to engage each other through a prism of doubt, almost evoking Eve Sedgwick’s famous description of the “paranoid reading” style from queer theory: “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious or complaisant.”2 Assailed by this unwelcome technology, readers and writers have responded by witch-hunting AI infiltrators using detection software that I would not place my own faith in.3 An open culture, an ethical culture, requires a presumption of innocence even when in the presence of guilt. But I can’t deny AI makes this presumption more challenging.

Using AI for writing is not like traditional plagiarism, where proof of the crime is right there on the page. If somebody writes “To be or not to be?” in the AI era, you won’t know if that was the question or the prompt. I go on LinkedIn and have no idea which super-poster executives might have been rotting their brains on AI all day (though I feel like I have a pretty good idea). The most recently available Princeton University senior survey from 2025 found that “the number who used ChatGPT on an assignment when it was not allowed rose to 27.7 percent, up by 12.5 percent from the Class of 2024.”4 But you don’t know which one out of every four students it was.

Journalism is at least slightly more immunized from AI sludge in that facts, once stated, can be checked: The writer either interviewed the subject (if the subject was real) or they didn’t. But this has not stopped prominent publications from getting tripped up by “journalists” who were AI confections just lifelike enough to be taken for the real thing.

Increasingly the desire for confection is the point. In a coming preprint paper titled “Towards a Post-Social Media Studies,”5 Petter Törnberg and Richard Rogers of University of Amsterdam touched on this broader trend of dehumanizing the human media:

Whereas 52% of the US population reported to talk to AI chatbots in 2025 (Elon University News Bureau, 2025), only 35% of the US population reported to have posted on Facebook, and 20% on Instagram, and 11% on Twitter/X (Gallup, Inc., 2023). Hundreds of millions of users now engage with these systems not merely as tools for completing tasks, but as primary interlocutors: for news and information, for advice, for creative collaboration, and for conversation, including forms of social and emotional engagement previously associated with both media consumption and human relationships.

It’s an earnest embrace of AI’s surreality that is in some ways more challenging to cope with than the lying, because at least a liar knows they’re doing something wrong. Around L.A., I’ve been seeing cartoonishly AI-illustrated billboards for the reality TV star Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign, who lost his Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 wildfires and has apparently been spamming social media with AI videos as well. Pratt, currently one of the top candidates, is running to take over an L.A. that exists in his head but not in mine, and this passage from Vanity Fair is like a capsule study for the post-media era to explain how we can live in the same city without our realities ever intercepting:

He showed me his average daily screen time on his iPhone: 16 hours and 49 minutes. (None of that time is spent listening to podcasts or reading news publications. “I don’t listen to anything or read anything,” he says. “I haven’t watched a single thing on my TV since it burned down.”)6

Feelings can be honest, but only facts can be true. It’s against these conditions of unreality from which the writer, the journalist, the artist, the judge, the academic are supposed to stand apart, even when it’s lonely. “The political function of the storyteller — historian or novelist — is to teach acceptance of things as they are,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “Out of this acceptance, which can also be called truthfulness, arises the faculty of judgment — that, again in Isak Dinesen’s words, ‘at the end we shall be privileged to view, and review, it — and that is what is named the day of judgment.’ ” The rest of us might call it Election Day.

Healthy democracies have to support the separateness of fact-finders even while the actual practice of democracy subjects citizens to being “canvassed by a multitude of applicants, who seek to deceive him in a thousand different ways, but who instruct him by their deceit,” as Alexis de Tocqueville put it. In the democratic tradition, AI is another supplicating deceiver for us to learn from, but not necessarily believe.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the state of media.

But too easy? Let’s review the record.

When I look at the newsletters that broke containment outside my usual readership over the past two years, several titles share a particular gloominess: “Journalism’s fight for survival in a postliterate democracy,”1 “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history,”2 “Meditations in a journalistic emergency,”3 “You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried.”4

Unfortunately it’s peak vanity for a writer to get high off public reaction from playing the hits while our other obsessions live quiet lives on Al Gore’s internet (where blogging about Hegel doesn’t get the same traction for some reason). There’s simply a wide audience out there that strongly believes shit is downright rotten at the intersection of media, tech and democracy, and that all the exits are blocked. If you say things are bad, they’ll say you’re right.

Well, what are we doing here? A bleak worldview about digital life in 2026 doesn’t leave much new material for the critic to develop, which at a certain point defeats the purpose of writing the same sort of stuff over and over again. You could just say Neil Postman nailed it in 1985’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that everything downstream of TV (up to and including AI) is a brainrot technology that threatens our civic vitality and call it a career. If the pessimistic case remains true 40 years later, what can you do?

Enter Albert O. Hirschman, the optimist’s economist.

In another field and another lifetime, the legendarily heterodox Albert Hirschman coined a term, fracasomanía, for obsessions with failure that become self-fulfilling prophecies. “The paradigm-based gloomy vision can be positively harmful,” wrote Hirschman, who died in 2012. “When it [fracasomanía] prevails, hopeful developments either will be not perceived at all or will be considered exceptional and purely temporary. In these circumstances, they will not be taken advantage of as elements on which to build.” Hirschman wanted to build, and he was especially interested in what regular people build, without permits, when no one is looking.

This weekend, I finished Jeremy Adelman’s formidable biography “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton University Press). It has my enthusiastic endorsement as one of those books that got thicker after reading because I dog-eared so many pages.

There was Hirschman’s work on development economics in South America, where he was a tireless champion of local thinkers against patronizing outside experts; his wrestling-together of traditional economics with political science; his journalistic eye for how real people defy top-down plans and abstract predictions; his literary humanism that drew from Machiavelli, Adam Smith, Montaigne and Kierkegaard, which fertilized a lifelong skepticism of official dogmas. (“The real criticism of the reformer is not that he is ineffective but that he might just be effective and that he may thereby deprive the oppressed from achieving victory on their own terms.”)

A heretic against universal ideologies and totalizing theories like Milton Friedman’s Chicago school of economics, what Hirschman did believe in was “the right to a nonprojected future as one of the truly inalienable rights of every person and nation; and to set the stage for conceptions of change to which the inventiveness of history and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors.”

Hirschman was fond of paradoxes, ironies or reversals of orthodoxy. I could blog off the Hirschman corpus for months. But today I’ll dwell on Hirschman’s thinking on development economics: how weak industries can become strong, or at least how they zig when life zags.

The kind of media we get is structured by the societies and political systems we have. Hirschman observed that economic stagnation breeds political action: from entropy comes motion. That transition from passive to active political energy is exactly what’s happening with the declining news sector today, which is devoting more energies and resources advocating for reforms, subsidies and similar transfers of public resources to support journalistic production with growing, if still tentative, success.

You may think: Danger! News should stay separate and independent from politics! Which is normatively true, of course, and always ought to be in the journalistic sense. The U.S. already has probably the most privatized and market-driven media market in the democratic world (and has been suffering for it accordingly).

But if you put on your Hirschman hat and start looking into details and following slender threads, you’ll see the hidden hand of the intended and unintended policymaker decisions that have been shaping our media industry for decades. Most of these interventions are so indirect or hidden in plain sight as to be practically invisible, especially relative to direct investments like the recently defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Consider the spectrum space partitioned off for exclusive use by broadcast licensees; the public legal notices that still support many newspapers; the generous tax breaks for philanthropists funding a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news sector that is the envy of much of the world; discounted postage for periodicals; the exemption of digital media from tariffs; the corporate tax deductibility of advertising and office subscription expenses that subtly favor commercial news outlets that draw on B2B revenue. All in addition to, of course, the protections of the First Amendment and favorable rulings like Times v. Sullivan, which acts as de facto subsidies by diminishing the economic risk of litigation. And there will always be litigation.

Yet most of these overt or subtle frameworks that support news media production come from 20th century policy frameworks. The 21st century regulatory equivalents have been more unfavorable as lawmakers have preferred stimulating growth for the U.S. tech sector (now powering the nation’s economy) over supporting the diminishing returns of the country’s mature and now-declining media sector.

Consider, now, the toothlessness of contemporary antitrust doctrine in incentivizing a hyperscaler economy, which has allowed Google to monopolize with impunity the advertising and search markets at the expense of news providers; the immensely valuable legal immunities Big Tech platforms get under Section 230, which forces liability-conscious news outlets (only partially shielded in comparison by a merely elevated burden of proof under Times v. Sullivan) to compete on an uneven playing field with a mindless ocean of defamation; and a copyright orthodoxy of fair use that, while essential for journalists’ reporting, has expanded into a justification for wholesale AI plunder and replacement of the journalist’s labor on the open web.

Of course, for the journalists working on hyperscaler platforms, there’s no copyright dispute to have whatsoever; any right to revenue-sharing was probably signed away long ago in the hyperscaler’s unbargainable terms of service. The platform journalist is the internet’s Uber driver, and there is no union to bargain with the algorithmic dispatcher.

It could be argued, and has been, that this regulatory array is the best possible outcome for consumers, for free expression and for the frictionless distribution of content. It would not, and couldn’t, be argued that this regulatory array is the best outcome for inducing an industry that produces original journalism to produce more of it instead of less. Diminishing returns being what they are, the math will say many journalists need to leave the field to do something, anything else, if only for their own welfare. The overall availability and quality of original news falls; consumers wander away from a deteriorating product; society is impoverished by dwindling sources and transmission of accurate information; technological innovations keep multiplying the ease of producing and distributing inaccurate information for the survivors to compete against. This is journalism’s development trap.

While my tendency is to loudly complain (Hirschman calls this “voice”), Hirschman might prefer to look at the unintended consequences of these embedded regulatory decisions that have disadvantaged news production and see what good might have come of it. Well, one of those unintended consequences has been the development of a hardscrabble generation of independent journalists and publishers, struggling with the identical revenue and audience problems as their forebears in an identically unforgiving marketplace, but with a renewed sense of social mission for a new generation. Of course, it would also be a classic Hirschman connection between ostensibly opposed forces to observe that the ranks of the independents are filled with veterans who got their reps in and cut their teeth in corporate media (and are now often supported by the household income from a partner’s corporate job). But such are the subtle paradoxes that shape unofficial change. The thing about talent is that it doesn’t sit still for long, it wants to do something.

The stagnation of economic conditions in the news industry has also led to renewed political energy to recreate economic conditions that allow for growth again. It’s only logical, according to one of Hirschman’s landmark social science essays, “Political Economics and Possibilism”:

It has often been noted that an industrialist, for example, has the option of spending most of his time and energy improving the efficiency of his production and sales organization or on lobbying in the nation’s capital for special tariff protection or other legislation favoring his firm and industry. Disregarding the adverse value judgment that attaches in this example to political action, we may bring this sort of option into contact with the tendency of economic growth to run into decreasing returns when it proceeds within an unchanging institutional framework. … Once [producers] notice that the marginal productivity of economic action is diminishing in comparison to the prospective marginal productivity of political action, there will be a tendency on their part to substitute political for economic action.

Bolding mine.

Hirschman observed that these efforts at political regeneration are not likely to recreate the kind of sector that existed before, noting that efforts of “system maintenance” to “maintain or restore a social organization or way of living that is threatened or weakened have yielded unintended innovational change in modern societies.” In fact, “history could be viewed as the process of men in general, and the ruling classes in particular, continually outsmarting themselves in their efforts to reproduce and maintain the existing order.”

We could not possibly know what the media sector will look like in 10 years, as rapid changes in technology, consumption, culture and politics inevitably make a joke of all our long-term plans. The present already belongs to the improvisers. It seems to me that the news sector has some kind of future, hopefully even a bright one. Hirschman might call this future the “nonprojected” kind.

In life it is better to be lucky than good, they say. (Though once you get old, you may wonder whether it’s better to be young than lucky. That is a subject for another newsletter.)

Today we address the young and unlucky.

This graduation season you stand at the doorstep of a new industrial revolution, they say. Is it a good thing this revolution is coming? Doesn’t matter: This revolution is unavoidable, they say. Artificial intelligence is unavoidably coming at you! We hope we properly prepared you — please stop booing the commencement speaker!

So are you ready for the AI revolution, college graduate? You know some things your elders don’t. Older Americans think students use AI for learning, while younger Americans say it’s better for avoiding working.1 Students who don’t use AI think AI use is making their classmates dumber.2 AI is another gender-divider: College women are likelier than the men to notice the cognitive tradeoffs.3 But overall, the more young people use AI, the more they seem to hate it,4 and practically everyone on campus is worried AI will hurt their careers.5 At minimum it seems to hurt everybody’s sense of other people’s honesty. Deloitte data says “80% of leaders, managers, and workers are concerned their co-workers and teams are using AI to appear more productive than they are.”6 It’s not clear if there will be a job waiting for you, let alone a good one.

Well, it’s all very worrisome and confusing. You may wonder who your role models ought to be. If you’re an arts or humanities student aiming for those highest-heights — the path of glory that doesn’t end with becoming insanely rich — you might have noticed the leaders of your society depreciating everything you’re passionate about. You’ll have to find your own path up the rockface.

If you are young and ready to go, ready for life, ready to become yourself, you already know one thing: Pessimism is not very attractive. Pessimism might help you clearly perceive the mess you’re in, but pessimism is a shitty tool for digging out of it. You’ve got things to do, a world to change! …If the world will let you change it.

Let’s talk about this last option, the pragmatic mentality for the young person moving through the dark times. It starts by looking for other people.

Although I’m far too skeptical a personality to believe in it for myself, practicing radical optimism sometimes works absurdly well. But only for a lucky few. Back in the heart of the Great Recession in what I thought were my vagabond days, after I collected an English degree and before I collected a career, I had a friend who traveled and lived abroad constantly, mostly in Central America. She did it with minimal expenses and minimal income, mostly from contract photography. She improvised. She couch-surfed. She seemed to trust strangers completely. She counted on somebody helpful to materialize whenever she was in a jam.

It worked! My friend had (and, more importantly, survived) many great adventures.

My friend attributed her persistent success to willpower completely. She refused to let a negative thought enter her head. She believed negativity created its own gravity, attracting bad luck, especially in airports and at borders. Her optimism had a fanatical dimension that ignored local conditions. Sometimes local conditions are a lot more ignorable than you think. Mostly, the lesson was that people are friendly and helpful if give them chances to be friendly and helpful, especially if it feels like fun. My friend was fun and made everything feel like an adventure.

I can’t endorse the sometimes magical properties of charisma and overconfidence (which cause more problems than they solve when they appear via celebrity politicians). For those of us who are born skeptics, there’s a difference between staying fully open to the world and believing in its inevitable benevolence. I am also, like most people, not THAT fun, so strangers are usually not going to feel randomly and benevolently fun while around me.

But there’s wisdom in remaining open to the mysteries of luck, even in unlucky times. I do believe in the sometimes magical power left by the residues of chance encounters, that little bit of paint that’s swapped when cars bump fenders.

I think, for example, about Pierre Louis Alexandre. Alexandre was likely born into slavery in 19th century French Guiana and escaped to freedom in Stockholm, where he worked as a stevedore on the docks and, when it got too cold in the Swedish winters, sat for portraits for the local art students. One of those students was Karin Bergöö, who would soon have to abandon her aspirations as a painter when she got married.78 The portrait she produced, of an artist and a subject each outside the mainstream, was a student masterwork. Bergöö’s humane portrait of Alexandre survived the prejudices of its time to take up residence in our own. That kind of power could belong to any one of you. No one expects it; no one controls it.

The thing about luck is that you don’t get to pick which kind you get, the same way you can’t pick which time you get live in. One of my personal heroes is the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who eked out one of the best lives possible from one of the unluckiest times ever. He was a young Jewish German trying to find his way during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. Many of his classmates became Nazis. His leftist friends couldn’t agree on how to fight back. Society was incapable of confronting the crisis; the political system gave in to gangsterism and terror. Hitler’s Germany would decide there was no place for enemies like the young Hirschman. Having a future meant creating one that didn’t exist yet. Hirschman did so brilliantly, with accomplices he’d encountered almost totally by chance.

The multilingual Hirschman hopped from country to country in Europe, looking for his future while also smuggling leftist correspondence across fascist borders in false-front luggage. He joined an antifascist brigade in the Spanish Civil War, then wisely beat a retreat before the Stalinist treachery and defeat set in. Amid the seas of refugees meeting rising tides of anti-immigrant reaction, Hirschman read voraciously and sought out unorthodox thinkers who put honesty and humanism before dogma. He decided to study economics and, seeking out unofficial sources of data, became one of the first economists to describe how fascist economies work (bullying trading partners and colonies to fund a protectionist war machine that can’t pay for itself without higher prices for its own citizens or more domination of everyone else’s).

When Germany started the Second World War, Hirschman joined the French army to fight against his homeland, then fled to Vichy-controlled Marseilles after the French almost immediately surrendered. Here is where the Hirschman story becomes legend. He meets a young American journalist at the Marseilles train station named Varian Fry who had come to France to smuggle out as many thinkers and artists as possible. Hirschman would become his fixer, and the result of this chance collaboration, known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, changed the intellectual and cultural history of the world. From Jeremy Adelman’s book “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman”:

The list of the saved reads like a who's who: Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (the serial wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel), Heinrich Mann, Walter Mehring... it goes on. In all, over 2,000 refugees got out of France through the Emergency Rescue Committee's network. … [Fry] depended on the friendly but mysterious young translator for his underground experiences, facility with money, command of languages, and affection for breaking and bending rules. “He came carefully prepackaged, wrapped in false papers in which he was inordinately proud,” remembered one of his fellow rescuers. … “There’s such a thing as being too en règle [in compliance],” [Hirschman] told Fry. “It’s like a criminal who has too many alibis.”

Right before the doors to fascist Europe shut completely, Hirschman smuggled himself across the Spanish border with little except a false Lithuanian identity and a copy of Montaigne’s “Essays” in his sack. He was off to America, where he would become an unusually perceptive economist. He had been an outsider everywhere he went, which had taught him to see what others couldn’t.

One of Hirschman’s classic books, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,” was about when people fight and when they quit. It was a subject he knew well. The book was dedicated to one of those chance influences on his life, his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni, an Italian antifascist thinker who was murdered by a Nazi gang in 1944, “who taught me about small ideas and how they may grow.” Being open to the world as it actually was, Hirschman became a lucky student of unlucky times.

AI will boost productivity for us all and help us think — they say. Of course, anything with those powers just makes it easier to work alone. The important part of you, young graduate, the part of you that’s still coming, is bound up with the humans you haven’t met yet. Sometimes these creative collisions are with voices from the past, like Bergöö’s unlikely collaboration with Alexandre; or the inspiration Hirschman drew from the Montaigne essays while fleeing the Nazi death machine. Or maybe it’s like my old friend making adventures of her mundane encounters with whoever she ran into, including me. But it’s people who matter. J.M. Coetzee, in a majestic passage from his novel “Foe,” suggests luck is other people, and they tend to arrive in our lives when we let our guards down:

In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?

There’s one voice that’s completely safe for you to ignore, however: Change never comes from the speaker’s podium at commencement. Anybody up there is already talking about the past.

If there were a dictator of the internet who intentionally set out to destroy your ability to get accurate information, the result would look a lot like what’s already on your screen.

But why?

I mentioned in this newsletter a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been studying economics to find more rigorous frameworks to describe why “creative destruction” has been better at destroying than recreating the news industry. The decline of original news by traditional media has not nearly been offset by the rise of newer media, mostly to the detriment of our democratic societies. The loss of local media in particular is associated with greater loneliness, lower awareness of public officials, and more corruption. It’s like an invisible tax levied on our communities that we pay civically, cognitively and sometimes even literally, in the form of higher local bond prices due to more wasteful government spending. Increasingly, this invisible tax is being silently levied by Big Tech.

These economic tools are helping me round out the story I have to tell about why things go wrong and how they could be made better.

(Alas, the post where I talked about re-learning calculus led at least a dozen of my readers to instantly unsubscribe. My managerial economics textbook indicates that if I want this newsletter to grow and not shrink, a marginal analysis would show I should write about something else. Unfortunately my English and journalism degrees are still in charge of my writing and, like the Green Goblin mask in “Spider-Man,” keep whispering that I should follow my muse.)

Over the last couple of weeks, I went on a detour to bone up on the subfield of behavioral economics, starting with a couple of its seminal books, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” (the 2021 “final” edition). Kahneman and Thaler won Nobel prizes in Economics for their psychological work, which demonstrated that the story told about human nature in mainstream neoclassical economics is basically false.

A basic premise of modern behavioral economics would go like this: People aren’t omnipotent utility-maximizers who always buy the best product obtainable at the best cost. People are people, and our brains make us perceive or do weird stuff that is not always aligned with statistical reality or our own best interests. (I always eat too much candy even though I know it’s bad for me, and I have crystal-clear self-awareness about this even at the precise moment I reach for the Hot Tamales at CVS.) But “irrational” is not a good description for predictable behavior. What’s truly irrational is not seeing it coming. A lot of the stuff we do can be explained by the quite ordinary cognitive shortcuts we take when coping with complex environments: such as the mostly terrible way we use the internet, which is mostly terribly using us.

This type of story about the psychological fragility of the news consumer will not be new to the veteran of media theory. We’ve been onto this game for more than a century, since Walter Lippmann’s 1922 “Public Opinion.” The book was a devastating portrait of the limitations of human psychology in comprehending the complexity of modern society, which readers like John Dewey correctly understood to be an indictment of a foundational mythology of self-government. Lippmann thought actually-existing modern democracy needed paternalistic experts to function properly. Dewey thought trust needed to remain with the little guy. (Nicholas Carr recently wrote an excellent account of this debate here.)

The future of news in the 20th century belonged to Walter Lippmann’s democratic paternalism. The winner-take-all nature of advertising markets, the artificial scarcity of broadcast spectrum space, and the forbidding industrial moats associated with the costs of news production and distribution, gave rise to the era of 20th century mass media, which still anchors our perception of what “media” is today. Huge newsrooms, huge audiences and huge profits concentrated control in hands of a small number of experts and businesspeople over what the public read, saw and heard.

Press criticism in the mass media era was important and interesting to read, because the experience of news consumption was a common one that could be studied, analyzed, criticized. If someone was harming society, you knew their name and what they were doing, which meant they were easy to blame — and even shameable. The mass media and its weaknesses (a deference to power, its bias toward affluent audiences, its of-the-times bigotry, its fondness for inflammatory but statistically insignificant crime stories) were legible and, by being legible, were confrontable.

The centralization of media production thus also concentrated power in the hands of journalists, who developed a strong craft mentality with anticommercial (or economically “irrational”) norms that lead to things like joining a union or a self-governed membership organization with independent codes of journalistic ethics, like the Society of Professional Journalists or Investigative Reporters and Editors. It wasn’t just that journalists had a romantic guild mentality about the importance of pursuing truth: It was that the centralization of industrial power gave journalists the means to exert a Galbrathian countervailing influence on their employers. Media owners might refer to this internal conflict as an “agency problem,” which is a fancy term for complaining about authoritarian workplaces that aren’t fully totalitarian.

Much of what people liked about 20th century mass media — mostly accurate public-interest news, delivered by skilled craftspeople on the front page and the top of the hour, where it was harder to ignore — was a shotgun marriage of journalistic norms with economic opportunity. Many of these norms remain in place today, perhaps even in defiance of low expectations. Most of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were commercial media organizations managing fiduciary duties to pursue profit with newsrooms that leveraged complex divisions of labor to pursue labor-intensive and probably loss-leading news projects that, to my eye, look a little lighter on AI wizardry in 2026 than industry innovator rhetoric would prefer to see. This year’s honorees even includes great newspaper villain Alden Global Capital, which won one Pulitzer Prize this year and was finalist for another.

A centennial update of Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” for democratic media in 2026 would probably come to the same conclusion about the limits of human cognition under modern society, whose complexity is increasing at a logarithmic pace. The new part would be the displacement of the paternalistic expert class that Lippmann thought would be needed to manage this complexity.

The needs of your average media consumer, wherever imperfectly met by big news outlets, are now confronted with an embarrassment of options that seek to fill every marketplace desire imaginable, thanks to technological innovations driving content production and distribution costs to zero.

The dollar cost of encountering content has also fallen toward zero thanks to ad-supported platforms and massively subsidized AI agents. But the mental “decision costs” of finding accurate information have been driven skyward for consumers wandering a swamp of mostly terrible choices. The top-of-the-hour paternalism of 20th century mass media has been traded in for the 21st century paternalism of slop-slinging algorithms indifferent to the accuracy of the product or the compensation of journalists whose work feeds the entire ecosystem, usually without credit. What was once legible about media consumption has become increasingly illegible, depreciating our old tools of analysis and confrontation.

In one of those tremendous ironies provided everywhere by capitalism, I most frequently see the old criticism of mass media profit-seeking online when someone at an alternative platform is practicing some good-ol’-fashioned product differentiation. “You’ll never see THIS story in the legacy media!” Often you can, but shit is hard to find these days, and the energy required to believe a media stereotype (stereotypes frequently being true) is vastly lower than paying the cognitive tax of looking elsewhere for a longer/slower/duller version of content that’s already right in front of you.

Kahneman describes this as a cognitive fight between System 1, our brain’s automatic system, and System 2, our reflective system. And System 2 is very lazy. Algorithmically delivered media is perfectly turned to the biases of your System 1, and why not? Like a true scientist, the platform has been carefully gathering data to better predict what you’ll actually do next. It’s the experts and the advocates who wish that citizens had a surplus of civic impulses that, sometimes, we don’t. Whatever else you can say about it as a form of government, democracy is a lot of work.

The mass media era is fully and completely dead, and people have recently stopped using terms like “mainstream media.” Now there’s a bewildering eddy of bigger media and littler media and no Habermasian “public sphere” whatsoever. Bari Weiss’ right-wing makeover of CBS News is apparently more interesting to read about than to watch: The network’s dwindling audiences are probably switching to the nation’s now-number-one streaming channel, YouTube.

When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they’re consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask AI: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me. I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I’m probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: News is not something a lot of people are actively seeking out. “News finds you nowadays,” a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.

We are all part of the counterpublic now. And a counterpublic tends to distrust whoever’s in charge. There’s a counterpublic occupying the White House as we speak, and it’s notable for the time it spends looking for someone else to blame for what’s going on.

I work on things like news subsides to support the supply side of news production. But in environments of overwhelming choice (like ours for digital media), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call for “libertarian paternalism” to help overwhelmed people make better consumer decisions. This repulsive term has the quality of being honest in that intentionally combines two unlikable words to describe a solution to the conundrum of how you guide flawed humans toward outcomes they might be happier with without depriving them of free choice.

Thaler and Sunstein’s preferred tool of libertarian paternalism is the “nudge” — intentional little features of “choice architecture” (how you structure people’s decisions) that gently guide people toward better outcomes. One of the most powerful nudges is a default, which is actually a major feature of traditional media, which would give prominent places to stories on the front page or in the newscast not because it might necessarily be the most engaging story of the day, but because it might be the most civically important. Our internet has mostly abandoned the principle of nudging people at important news.

Let’s take artificial intelligence’s structural hostility to journalism. A recent study by Aengus Bridgman and Taylor Owen of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Canada showed that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok had been scraping Canadian news outlets (including paywalled stories — plunder!!), because the contents of those outlets’ work would appear in the AI bots’ responses. This news content was appearing unattributed. However, the bots would usually list attribution after being prompted — meaning that the data was in the AI model, it just wasn’t offering it up without extra user exertion. And users usually don’t like extra exertion. This is bad design that only harms news providers and consumers, especially given AI’s well known weakness of providing inaccurate, made-up outputs in addition to just ripping off news outlets and undermining their revenue models, which are based in some form or another on aggregating audience attention. The rapacious and uncompensated AI scraping of the open web is having the perverse effect of incentivizing more high-quality journalism to get gated behind paywalls where bots can get more easily blocked, ultimately driving up the costs of quality journalism to everyone on a social level.

Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as “defaults” or provide subtle “nudges” on content that prompt users to donate or subscribe to the news outlets providing high quality news videos on platforms like Instagram, which don’t pay for themselves. (I am worried about the rise of the “too-good Instagram news video” — I’m glad news outlets are becoming fluent in visual media, but I don’t know if they’ve gotten fluent in getting revenue from it.) Integration with donation or subscription tools could be made practically frictionless. Or hey, maybe sharing a better cut of advertising revenue. Doing so would, if anything, provide even stronger incentive for news outlets to keep providing high-quality visual content to platforms like Instagram at no actual cost to Instagram itself, which might make people feel better about Instagram (which is currently getting sued for creating an overly addictive product, mostly through evil nudges). Mostly, however, the platforms seem to find this a hassle or too controversial, if they even care about media at all: you’re probably just not innovating hard enough. Two things that are true is that more and more people are relying on creator economy journalists to provide them information, and that many of those creator economy journalists are doing it while going broke.

Google itself, the granddaddy of search, was once the greatest “nudger” of all toward media via its powerful “News” tab and other search features, which was its one redeeming feature in exchange for having illegally monopolized both the search and digital advertising marketplaces. But Google’s growing reliance on AI summaries for search seems to be contributing, at least in part, to a decline in the rivers of referral traffic it once provided to news outlets. New research of the impact of AI on news consumption via search indicates that it’s the smallest outlets (who benefit most from search discoverability) seeming to suffer the worst:

You probably couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried (and some people seem to have tried). There are lots of things that have gone wrong for the news media in the 21st century, but the feature they have in common is the destruction of incentives to produce accurate information. Addressing these problems doesn’t require one fix but many — not just for the news outlets and journalists on the supply side, but to help out the exhausted, burned out, confused consumers on the demand side, who are getting drowned in content sludge.

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

As an elder millennial, a formative moral experience at college in the 2000s was when I decided social psychology was basically evil.

The evil was less about the science of social psychology itself (the Milgram electric-shock / Stanford prison experiments didn’t help!) than what the results suggested: that people are unthinking meat sacks who can be prodded, primed, anchored and nudged into doing what the experimenter wants. The findings were worse than believable, they were practical. Every successful social psych experiment was a instruction manual for how to reduce someone else’s free will. Knowledge = power [derogatory].

Amid all this, reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” landed on my conscience with biblical weight. Consider the notion that evil could be banal; that you could create evil in the world through unthinkingness; that your unthinkingness creates conditions for holocaust; that for unthinkingness, Arendt thinks you should hang. You must think or else people could die. You must think, or a brilliant writer’s stylish book about your lethal emptiness will live on the curricula forever.

It all hits pretty hard when you’re a 20-year-old English major, confused but basically in love with yourself, wanting to be a good person and also a good writer like Arendt, while struggling against the evidence that you’re just a stimuli-driven meat sack who would totally get irradiated by the Hitler particles if tested under laboratory conditions. Message received. If I wanted to believe humans have free will, I had to actually try to use it.

Of course, two decades further into adulthood today, now closer in age to Hannah Arendt when she wrote “Eichmann in Jerusalem” than to myself when I first read it, the benefit of experience has been learning when human beings are nudgeable but not shoveable, seducible yet somehow maddeningly resistant to persuasion. The science suggests a little bit of mind-control is real. Yet reality keeps manufacturing insane outcomes no one could possibly be in charge of (DONALD JOHN TRUMP IS PRESIDENT AGAIN).

The worst meatsackification of human free will has predictably happened online, the only laboratory environment where conditions can be completely controlled, tested, surveilled and reproduced at practically zero cost. Logging on anywhere these days is like punching in for another unpaid shift at the nudge factory. (No, your AI doesn’t actually think you have great ideas, it’s just saying that so you keep buying tokens from Sam Altman who really really really needs the revenue.) The social scientist, like the kind employed by Big Tech companies, knows that humans are controlled very quickly; it’s disobedience that takes a bit longer. Resistance requires friction, an inconvenient force that will shape and enforce new norms. The users and workers of the internet need a union.

It’s less the immediate conditions of life online than the underlying premises of our whole predicament that need renegotiating. Monopolies can be broken up and ill-gotten wealth taxed back from the extractors, but John Maynard Keynes was probably right when he said that it’ll be the underlying ideas that could be the hardest to untrench. While revisiting Keynes’ passage from “The General Theory of Employment” to find his famous quip about “practical men” unwittingly being “the slaves of some defunct economist,” it was Keynes’ less-quoted part lower down, about the young getting stuck in their ways, that now catches my attention (bolding mine):

…The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Now that millennials are reaching middle age and finally finally rising toward our time of political hegemony, I wonder which dogmas we’ll drag into power with us and refuse to update until we’re dead. The crisis is here, but despite every data point screaming that I need to be saying all this stuff on a short-form video somewhere (especially to reach people younger than me), I know I’ll be stuck with the literary mode as the “serious,” “important” form of expression. I guess it’s my form of disobedience. To cling to the primacy of the word is to reject completely the modern methodology of persuasion. To work in paragraphs is to stand on a older tradition from when giants strode the earth, like Arendt and Keynes and the rest. Writing like this, to no one in particular, isn’t science but attempted necromancy. Just some guy trying to raise the dead.

Half a century ago, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins was comparing cultural influence to genetic transmission as an emergent form of biological replication:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain, individual men the world over.

But if you don’t like the propagation, how do you stop it? We’re living through some experimental trials by one of the world’s most powerful people, eager to iterate a new form of cultural eugenics for the rest of us.

Almost half a century after the coinage, in 2022, the tech billionaire Elon Musk tweeted at Richard Dawkins about the need to stop a nefariously successful kind of meme, progressive liberalism. “The woke mind virus is penetrating the firewalls of some of the world’s smartest meat computers at a prodigious rate!” Musk barked at Dawkins. Musk had just embarked on a historic effort to delete this “meme” from the human mainframe, first by revamping Twitter and later via the Trump II administration’s job-slashing DOGE.

In their critical new book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff define “Muskism” as an ominous new kind of operating procedure for governments and companies.

Where “Fordism” was once the term describing Henry Ford’s mastery of mass production to create a society of mass consumers, Elon Musk’s project narrows the beneficiaries but broadens the scope. Muskism is an admixture of Silicon Valley strategies — world-eating market monopolization, achieved through bureaucracy-slimming “Agile” project management — coded onto something like apartheid South Africa’s fortress racism, which Musk was raised under. Just add robots and rockets to the old-timey white-nationalist rhetoric.

In a series of arresting passages, “Muskism” describes a pattern of dehumanization running through Musk’s career, a signal increasingly drowning out other noise:

If the state was just a database, then inefficiency came from bad data: undocumented foreigners, ghost employees, even “vampires” collecting Social Security. Like the mind viruses that threatened the cybernetic collective, these were bugs in the codebase, irregularities to be traced, quarantined, and purged. … His approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data — whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff, or illegitimate people — could simply be deleted. …

In a theory often cited by Musk, Nick Bostrom speculates that we may be living in a simulation running on a mainframe in the future. Further, many of the people around us may not be human beings but computer programs: what Bostrom calls “shadow-people,” convincing imitations that lack interiority. …

Shadow people have been a bright line through Musk’s career. At PayPal, they were fraudsters with false identities; at Twitter, first bots, then the far-fetched notion of “ghost employees” — the belief that many of the people on the payroll were not actually real humans. Musk also expressed this idea through the concept of the NPC. Biden was “an NPC with a limited dialogue tree”; the press a “hivemind” or “drone collective” of “NPC media puppets.” He shared the meme of a head being opened to swap out a chip reading “Tesla good” for one reading “Tesla bad.” The caption: “New program for NPCs.” “Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their head,” he commented. “Most humans have very limited firewalls,” he elaborated elsewhere, “so are easily programmed.”

Democracy decentralizes power; Muskism recentralizes it by liquidating the bureaucratic class, which had emerged to manage democracy’s increasingly complex companies and societies. Executive strategies like zero-based budgeting — where every line item is proposed to be eliminated, thus forcing it to justify its survival — “rarely succeeds in cutting costs” as much as reconcentrating power in the budgeter’s hands, Slobodian and Tarnoff note. “Efficiency became the alibi for centralization.” And once you fully control a platform, you’re better positioned to control and edit its inputs. The rest of us are democracy’s inputs.

In one of “Muskism"’s other most insightful passages, Slobodian and Tarnoff cite Musk as an exploiter of the sociologist' Paolo Gerbaudo’s concept of “the digital party,” one of the great modern paradoxes of politics and technology:

In the 2000s and 2010s, a handful of new political parties emerged that promised to use digital tools to give voters a direct voice in the selection of candidates and policies. From Germany’s Pirate Party to Italy’s Five Star Movement, these newscomers offered a particular vision of how the participatory qualities of the internet could unleash a new kind of participatory politics. In Gerbaudo’s account, however, the parties actually became autocracies, where a “superbase” followed a “hyperleader” who spoke on its behalf. Without the formalized structures of representative democracy, one figure took outsized power. In an echo of the internet’s evolution, decentralization cashed out as monopoly.

Musk’s X capitalized on this seemingly paradoxical dynamic. His version of the town square would be open to everyone but would be designed in such a way as to empower the one person standing on a soapbox in the center: himself.

It’s not a bad thing to want to influence people. To live actively in a democracy, to want to govern in order to fix problems, requires influencing others. But what characterizes a eugenics mindset is a refusal to take other people as a given, plus a desire to reshape their terms of engagement (without reshaping your own), without consent and without negotiation. It really does boil down to whether you see other people as non-player characters, as Musk does.

Well, the authoritarian is right to fear the woke mind virus. A liberal education, the arts, dialogue, are all forms of cultural replication, as the former rulers of Elon’s homeland knew very well. “In white-ruled South Africa, the government refuses to permit TV on the ground that it would corrupt both the white minority and nonwhite majority,” TIME Magazine reported in 1964. “Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd has more or less put TV in a category with atom bombs and poison gas. ‘They are modern things, but that does not mean they are desirable. The government has to watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical.’” The difference between Verwoerd and Musk is that the prime minister hadn’t thought to — or couldn’t afford to — own the broadcast station, pick the shows, and make the TV sets tunable to one channel. To propagate itself in the future, domination would have to evolve.

Either due to an insatiable thirst for knowledge, or a wounding intellectual inferiority complex that gets me out of bed most mornings, I’ve been teaching myself microeconomics. I bought a $130 copy of William F. Samuelson and Stephen G. Marks’ 10th edition “Managerial Economics” textbook, and most nights after work, I walk to the coffee shop, order a green tea, and start studying the Necronomicon.

One of the first things I discovered during the textbook’s checkpoint quizzes, which demanded I calculate some marginal revenue or marginal profit or their related tangents, is that I needed to relearn differential calculus before I could proceed to the mastery of microeconomics. OK, fine. I rolled up my sleeves. Then, while relearning some differential calculus, I learned I needed to reteach myself elementary algebra. While reteaching myself elementary algebra, I discovered I forgot how to do long division.

Once upon a time on the plains of rural Missouri, it’s true, I attended high school and thought I had acquitted myself well. But all these years later, facing down management economics and its world-conquering profit curves and price elasticities, I wondered if I had ever really mastered the fundamentals of symbolic logic at all. This felt like a strange thought for an adult professional who is comfortable reading and writing contracts and legislation.

Any writer, lawyer or lawmaker knows what it means to live within the logic of words, which are just symbols made up of letters; how to navigate the near-infinitely referential relationship of words to other words; the triumph of creating a covalent bond between the right words and reality. Anyone who has parsed a public figure’s nondenial-denial knows how even common words can be made to behave like variables, functioning as concrete abstractions just like X and Y that change meanings depending on an unrevealed context. To be a journalist is to solve for the unknowns, or at least to identify them and clearly state the problem.

But while I work logically with words all the time, I had let my algebraic knowledge rust under a tarp in the barn. Maybe not a wise maintenance schedule to keep these days. We’re in a postliterate society, which has depreciated the relevance of accurate words while awarding trillions of dollars to the formal logicians of the hard sciences. My aha moment came once I remastered enough calculus to calculate a firm’s marginal and maximum profit and saw, with math, how decreasing production (laying off workers) can optimally increase profits and maximize the value of the firm. I experienced one of those world-opening glimpses of fluency that comes while learning a new tongue: Oh so this is what’s really going on. Business rules the planet, and marginal economics is the language of the courtiers in the imperial court.

Of course, the weakness of formal logic is in its very power: Sweeping away irrelevancies to establish rigorous relationships between differing forces. By doing this, the questions determine the answers. But it also means you can only solve for what you see, and it’s what you don’t see coming that can really fuck you up.

Systems are made by humans, and humans are filled with irrational weirdnesses and passions and emotional damage that can’t help but interrupt the flows of logic. At the same time I’ve been touring the land of the shape-rotators, I started reading about Sigmund Freud after tech lord Marc Andreessen recently weirdly accused Freud of inventing introspection, with Andreessen bragging about having “zero, as little as possible” levels of introspection: It just gets in the way of building more Walmarts.

To me, psychotherapy seems like a pseudoscience (I read “Oedipus Rex” last weekend and do not think it has anything to say about the arc of my personal development, no this is not denial). Yet I must yield that psychotherapy, with its focus on the real griminess of the human psyche, with its belief that our tics and irrelevancies betray some deeper story about us, had the forced-flatness of our technopreneur class diagnosed from the very beginning. “Engineers, they’re not convinced we have an interior,” German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, coiner of the “identity crisis,” told American sociologist Sherry Turkle. “It’s not necessary for their purposes.”

My econ textbook will explain that Andreessen is a business genius, but its marginal equations can’t solve for the mystery of his obvious misanthropy. It’s Freud the essayist who writes that “happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the libido.” Humans are equations that don’t really solve, though we multiply. Literature is our science for explaining how it feels to not make sense.

Where be your populism now?

In Francis Fukuyama’s widely misunderstood but prescient “The End of History and the Last Man,” published in 1992, liberal democracy stood alone as the politics of the future. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, there was no plausible competitor for an internationally exportable ideology of more perfect governance. Radical local experiments would continue under regional pariahs like North Korea, Cuba or Iran. But even a major power like China was marketizing and headed toward membership in the World Trade Organization, a capitalist brother among brothers.

This new internationalist world of open governments, balancing ambitions of liberty and equality, resembled Hegel’s dream of the perfect freedom: citizenship under a free and rational state, heralding the end of human “History” as a philosophical progression. There were no more viable dreams of alternative world systems, other total options. Maybe humanity had woken up.

And yet. Fukuyama’s warning in 1992, borrowed from Nietzsche, was that something in human nature tended toward dissatisfaction, even under regimes of peace, prosperity and civil liberties. Someday liberal democracy itself could be seen again as the enemy of human satisfaction. But by who? Fukuyama predicted liberal democracy’s most dangerous challenger would be an inchoate but revitalized right-wing nationalist movement, a return to tribalism in the global village. Fukuyama was right.

The past two decades has indeed seen the rise of another transnational ideology vying to compete with liberal democracy, most perfectly embodied and aggressively exported by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party.

This paradoxically elite-led, global movement toward nationalist nativism — sometimes called “populism,” and which Orbán himself called “illiberal” democracy — tended to come to power through alliances with an increasingly resentful disempowered working class, for whom liberal democrats could not plausibly offer the heroic narratives and political power once promised by socialism.

Thanks to liberal capitalism’s miraculous ability to transport jobs, goods and capital across borders, unions were crushed, factory work exported, and the material foundations for working-class power were traded in for the racist consolations of blaming immigrants for problems caused by international capital flows. Investment capital gravitationally dragged toward Global South countries with lower wage standards and even lower rates of unionization, returning home in the form of increasingly untaxed capital income for elites, rather than wages or social welfare programs for postindustrial workers pushed toward lower-margin service sector jobs. Civic life hollowed out. Mass electoral participation declined either out of boredom or a sense of pointlessness.

These were ripe conditions for populist conflict entrepreneurs who could reconfigure the old class conflict along educational (and increasingly gender) lines. Liberals and their increasingly university-educated families, perceived by the right as the biggest domestic winners of this new global order alongside immigrants, were useful political punching bags. So was the “liberal” media. Told in any language, this message could travel anywhere the conditions of “end of History” liberalism had taken hold, which was basically everywhere. It even inspired some political tourism.

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” Orbán told American Republicans in 2022, when the Conservative Political Action Conference made a notable choice to visit Budapest. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.” This was part of Viktor’s secret sauce and his story of more than a decade of increasingly illiberal domination: Allow allies to buy up and merge the independent media, turn domestic institutions into partisan puppets, consolidate power wherever possible into a dense mass of control concentrated around the leader. Thus Orbán had miraculously turned back the clock on the left’s indomitable narrative of global progress. Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the U.S. presidency, and most stunningly his 2024 re-election, seemed to ratify the Orbán agenda as an alternative future.

Yet if there’s anything 2026 has demonstrated, it’s that nationalist nativists are no better equipped to resolve the contradictions of modern consumer societies than the liberal democrats they wanted to replace. In a world of capital dominance, capitalist discipline will eventually come for us all, like they just did for Orbán, as Foreign Affairs recently detailed:

The economic foundation began to shake in December 2022, when the EU froze more than half of Hungary’s allocated funds over alleged violations of the rule of law. At the same time, the slow global recovery from the pandemic and the government’s anticompetitive policies pushed the economy into stagnation, and inflation surged into double digits. This strained the regime’s network of dependencies: as the budget tightened, low-level members lost access to resources as Orban channeled funds upward. In 2025, [Orban ally Lorinc] Meszaros’s fortune grew by approximately $1.5 billion; Hungary’s GDP increased by less than half that amount.

By the same mechanism that strongmen remove the checks on their power, they remove the guardrails against the political and economic crises that would be their own downfall. One of the basic tenets of Fukuyama Theory, as I would call it, is that autocracy makes you brittle, blind and ultimately vulnerable to democracy’s return: The strongman creates a skill issue for himself. When people yell at you about their problems, electoral democracy’s survival instinct is to fix the problems, not to stop the yelling.

Yet the story about Orbán up until now was that he had found some radical new path, a master of fracturing his opposition and erecting a permanent base of populist power, based on plebiscite and a kind of mind-control apparatus via party-controlled media. But the overwhelming plebiscitary victory by Peter Magyar’s opposition Tisza Party suggests, via a massive surge in turnout, that we’ve been getting the Orbán story wrong. His ideological successor Trump, too, is mired with ever-lower approval ratings and has wandered into a war with Iran that the U.S., remarkably, does not seem to be winning. Perhaps we blew the whistle too early on calling liberal democracy the End of History. But a smarter projection of our next 30 years will need to explain why Orbán now belongs to the past more than the future.