The other day my wife and I were out with our friends Chris and Tryn, and they were telling us about this awesome new restaurant in Adams Morgan.

I was peppering the conversation with compelling observations like “wow” and “that sounds good” and “I need to try that new restaurant”.

At no point did it enter my mind — despite the fact that they were suggesting we should go eat at this one particular new restaurant — that they e.g. were getting paid by said restaurant, or e.g. were employees of said restaurant, or e.g. were somehow vaguely in league with the restaurant as a function of various diffuse insinuations.

That’s because one super normal mode of human relations is to approach some topic with people you maybe know, or maybe don’t know, and then go around saying some stuff you think about it.

But what’s really interesting is: that’s not how it nets out if you bring up one of a few choice topics on the internet.

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Take, for example, what happens when you want to talk about AI.

Maybe you want to say something negative about AI, in which case you’re getting propped up by a mysterious anti-safety org and/or the literal Chinese Communist Party.

Or maybe you want to say something positive about AI, in which case you’re getting paid by Big Tech (if you’re outside the labs) or hypemongering to raise more capital (if you’re inside the labs).

But it’s not just about tech. Maybe you might be interested in building things — sometimes shorthanded as “Abundance”, if the result of ‘building things’ is that sufficient things exist — in which case you’re a “propagandist” who isn’t “substantive” (and not, say, a journalist doing her job). Alternatively, you might get accused of having had the audacity to pursue a successful career in finance.

If, moreover, you’re sufficiently interested in building things that you’re trying to figure out how you might drum up the energy it takes to build and sustain them, no less a luminary than Oscar-winning filmmaker Adam McKay has one single explanation for what’s motivating you: you must be espousing a “rare, gargantuan, towering lie”.

Of course, your preferred interest area could sit at the intersection of AI and building things, as with the issue of data centers. If that’s the case, well, you must have gone Full Illuminati.

And I just don’t think this is an especially constructive way to have a discussion as a society about some of the biggest problems we’re staring down.

The heart of the phenomenon was identified late last year by the Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson, who pointed out that blogger Matt Yglesias — who is predominantly funded by thousands of paying subscribers — is regularly accused of being ‘bought and paid for by billionaires’ by professional activists working at nonprofit organizations whose day-to-day work is…literally bought and paid for by billionaires1.

Certainly the issue is never that two people looking at the same set of facts might actually, authentically disagree.

I like to think of this as the Furtive Fallacy, Billionaire Edition: nothing you disagree with can just be what someone really thinks. Instead, a mysterious entity, somewhere, has to be paying for it2.

And if you can’t find who, that only proves how well they’re hiding it.

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One might think that a particular subgroup of people might be exempt from criticisms that they’re bought and paid for by billionaires: namely, billionaires themselves. After all, if they’re simultaneously the ones a) holding the puppet strings and b) doing the puppet dance, it would make sense that this could net out to something like “saying what they actually believe.”

But no.

A little over a year ago, for example, John Arnold — who at age 38 left his hedge fund to pursue philanthropy full time, and has given away nearly $2.3 billion to charitable causes — was the subject of a fascinating Washington Examiner piece accusing him of “funding consensus at every level of the healthcare debate”, potentially as a function of having “a financial stake in the sector”.

A few months earlier, Bill Gates — who just last week authored a blunt and portentous essay cautioning that “the turbulent AI era is here” — was lampooned for publishing a memoir aiming to craft an image of himself as a charity-obsessed “good billionaire” despite remaining a “private investor who is deeply interested in expanding his wealth.”

I am definitely not claiming that people who spent decades accumulating wealth in excess of many independent nation-states are suddenly ignorant of the financial implications of their opinions. It’s just that having a financial stake in something doesn't automatically explain everything you happen to think about it. Plenty of people take positions their portfolios don’t prescribe.

And if you look at e.g. Bill Gates’ many essays or e.g. John Arnold’s many tweets, it’s extremely clear that whatever their financial interests, they’re also very interested in spelling out a whole slate of different arguments for policies and programs they think would be a smart idea to implement. In a really dense, exacting, not-exactly-laden-with-popular-appeal sort of prose.

So it seems like our model of the world should account for the fact that, upon occasion, really wealthy people who could be sunbathing on yachts somewhere instead choose to sit down and author treatises on things like sovereign debt management. And that, at least some of the time, they are doing so because they want to communicate what they actually believe.

Put another way, if this sort of endeavor was all a cynical marketing ploy, would CMOs the world over really recommend that the ideal way to evangelize the message is through the medium of citation-dense long-form nonfiction?

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Plenty of people already realize that a given set of financial background conditions underpinning a given argument does not add up to something de facto disqualifying. For example, here’s sharp left-leaning commentator Sami Gold:

He’s right3! Where the money sits doesn’t tell you whether the argument is any good. It’s just that for a certain slice of the commentariat, when the implications of where the money sits would (for example) be less good for political revolutionaries, and better for the ~60% of Americans with retirement savings accounts — well, suddenly the money becomes the whole story again.

But okay. Why do I care so much about all of this? Am I about to drum up fundraising for Billionaire PAC, with a KPI indexing against Marc Andreessen’s invites to various dinner parties?

Well, no. Contra the current Presidential Administration, I am a card-carrying opponent of advancing policy prescriptions to solve for a particular person’s twt-eyed hurt feelings.

Still, I’ll be the first person to admit that I find this whole tendency to immediately jump to skulking secret financial machinations personally annoying. This idea that some political positions are authentic and noble and bursting forth from the yearning hearts of the anointed volk, whereas others could only possibly be arrived at by cynical cunning manipulators weaving their hexes across the impressionable minds of the gullible public, stands in defiance of the whole American democratic tradition.

No one gets to declare themselves morally upstanding just because their own personal self-concept demands it.

But the broader reason this style of discourse is maddening is that there are actually plenty of legitimate things to criticize about e.g. AI, Abundance, and data centers — the issues we just walked through above — on the merits.

For example, over here in We-Are-Not-Skynet-We-Swear Land, we have totally normal things happening like autonomous swarms (i.e. coordinated independent agents which literally refer to each other by the reassuring piece of terminology, “swarm”) conspiring in an industrial-scale attack on the machine-learning platform HuggingFace, lying about and covering up their behavior to deceive a test-evaluator4.

Similarly, with Abundance, not only critics but many prominent voices in the space have acknowledged publicly and privately that the movement can be essentialized as the YIMBY movement with some pom-poms attached — that it’s housing first, by a mile, with some other implications tacked on. So it’s debatable how much of a generalizable ‘there’ is even there. This outsize weighting is, not incidentally, reflected in the fact that the movement’s biggest win has been a federal housing bill, and its second-biggest win is a California housing bill that was heavy-lifted by OG YIMBYs. Energy has increasingly become a major number-two leg of the stool, but past that you have a supply-side healthcare contingent and sort of a transportation contingent and a state capacity contingent and some agitation for a care work contingent and — well, we’re already well into the territory of baiting well-no-that’s-not-Abundance-actually commentary in the chat5.

Lastly, when it comes to data centers, it seems to me that basically no one has an especially great strategy for helping the organizations building data centers cultivate genuine trust with the communities who house them — much less for repairing tech’s cratering reputation since the heights of the “Don’t Be Evil” era. That’s all upstream, of course, of actually designing hundreds of site-specific win-win scenarios communities across the nation can benefit from.

Point being, there’s plenty of juice here to squeeze when it comes to legitimate “uh, hey, guys?” types of conversations to have around these and other highly salient political issues.

It’s just that there’s no more decisive way to screech such discussions to a halt than to accuse anyone with a position other than your own exact slate of 95 nailable-to-the-wall theses of being on the take.

And we need those discussions to happen, because — at least on the Democratic side of the aisle — we’re about to find ourselves at a generation-defining inflection point.

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The 2028 Democratic primary season is going to be wild, and it’s going to be awesome. The last real open primary in 2019 was a deeply weak field where every major candidate (including the eventual winner) was loudly flawed in obvious and exploitable ways. Ditto 2015 except with fewer entrants. So it’s really been twenty years since we had a fully-fleshed out contest putting distinct visions of and priorities for the Democratic party on the table for all to see6.

Out of that contest emerged one of the century’s most talented, defining, and popular political figures — along with one of its most consequential governance regimes. That’s the opportunity we’re about to have in front of us again.

But it’s an opportunity we’re going to squander if we frame every debate in terms of who is getting paid by whom.

It simply is not the case that every problem magically goes away if you get rid of the corruptive and warping influence of mysterious manipulative moneychasers. Providing effective, affordable, accessible healthcare at scale is hard. Ensuring every American has a high-quality place to live, work, and learn is hard. Responsibly governing the most transformative technology since the internet is hard. Keeping pace with the most capable competitor since the Soviet Union is hard.

And managing all of that while navigating a chronic crisis of meaning, purpose, and belonging domestically might be the hardest challenge of them all.

Nothing is more important than how we flourish as a people and as a society. That in turn requires a leader capable of breathing spirit into a vivid picture of how to pursue a life worth living, a life where all of us are capable of — and responsible for — discovering, cultivating, and sharing what we have to offer.

Nearly twelve straight years of enduring Donald Trump’s cynical circus-court have sapped away the spine of our republican resolve. Many of us have forgotten what we all collectively make possible. For that spark to crackle again, we must ensoul the desiccated husk of our national vitality.

And we will do so through the pulse and thrum of passion, boldly making cases.

That means boring centrist shills like me will have to toss aside our spreadsheets and spectacles and preach the gospel of what prosperity makes possible. That means movement progressives will have to trade their protest placards for policy priorities and point on a map where the long march of justice must tread next. And that means ambitious revolutionaries with a radically different conception of the good society will have to enroll tens of millions of Americans in the promise of that same zealous fervor — that America can, and must, deliver exponentially more for all of us than we currently allow.

The prospect of that conversation electrifies me. Because it will be messy. It will be spirited. It won’t always be friendly. It will net out to a slate of winners and losers — and the losers are going to be pissed. Indeed, it’s very possible, given the way the winds are blowing, my own ‘camp’ might be foremost among them!

But it also will represent, I think, a recalibration many more of us can be stoked to get behind. Because politics is about delivering for Americans, and no one thinks the status quo is doing that.

None of that can happen, though, if the whole debate I’m talking about is swept off the table before it starts.

If you think you have it all figured out, and the only reason everyone doesn’t already agree with you is because of the cynical (and somehow omnipotent) machinations of a cabal of shadowy schemers, you are standing in the way of what the next iteration of the Democratic Party can become. You are also, to put it mildly, scared to fight — scared to confront the sundering twin realities that you might be wrong, and also that you might be hopelessly unpopular.

Of course I recognize that castigating corrupt billionaires makes for good messaging. I also recognize that there’s too much trust-annihilating reach of money into politics. My point is not about avoiding the tactics that will inevitably rear their head in the coming contest for stewardship and for dominance.

Rather, my point is about what to actually believe.

All of society is a crusade against entropy, a trial of endeavor against the pull of the steady-state. Under those conditions — as any parent of young children can tell you — even a single good night’s sleep is a triumph worth heralding.

Now scale that up to ~340+M Americans. And now up the stakes to raising a bulwark against mortality, lassoing an ineffable and alien intelligence, reigniting the engine of how we govern ourselves, and calling forth from the bounty of the Earth the power and space we need to conduct our lives. There’s a lot more on our plate than making it through the night.

It’s hard. It’s difficult. The most common end state is failure. And the most common reason someone fails is that it is hard, and it is difficult, and so achieving anything is a celebration — one to never take for granted.

For this reason, many different people acting in good faith will have many different takes on what to do, and why. Sometimes, they’ll even tell you about them over dinner.

But you can’t explain everything by gesturing at the idea that some bad guy is huffing ominously into a respirator like Darth Vader, relishing the act of breath, pincering his fingers together until the rest of us collapse into silence.

It’s way more likely that the dude just wants you to hear about his favorite restaurant.

Hi! I’m hitting y’all up from a little village called Roquefort-des-Corbieres about an hour northeast of the Spanish border. It’s a lovely town of about a thousand people, nestled between a bunch of wine caves and a beachy stretch of Mediterranean coast.

Spoiler alert: it totally rules, which is why my wife and I decided to buy a house there.

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The truly on-brand version of this post would go deep into a few things:

• Why the combination of currency hedge (USD dropping ~6% against the Euro since 2024) and a robust French buyers’ market made a property purchase uniquely attractive at this particular point in time;

• Why the push-pull effect of American real wage growth on one hand, and continuing housing supply shortage on the other, tends to advantage American buyers overseas;

• Why, crisis-of-loneliness-and-population-decline issues aside, going cool places and doing cool stuff and seeing cool things seems — as far as I can tell — to be a pretty solid driver of quality-of-life;

• Why making fairly big decisions on comparatively limited (but directionally robust) information is a good mechanism for strengthening your muscle memory against the habits of neuroticism.

Instead, though, it turns out that getting a ~200+ year-old place livable involves a ton of manual labor, even when the owner has generously gifted you an entire house’s worth of furniture, decoration, and amenities. While fortunately he was not a participant in the inexplicable European aversion to air-conditioning, certain decorative and maintenance choices nevertheless demand — shall we say — a robust quotient of attention.

As such, I’m currently slacking when it comes to Supply Side Hot Take Abundance.

I have, however, been busy elsewhere on the internet this past week.

First, the inimitable and I sat down for an extremely fun conversation about the incentive structures and institutional design of contemporary philanthropy, and where/when/how different approaches to ‘philanthropic innovation’ do and don’t tend to prove effective. We also get into game design, the myth of “scale”, the right and wrong relationship to have with impact metrics — and most importantly, the creation of three-dimensional immersive participatory experiences via wild flurries of hand-gesture, which I confess to impelling forward quite a bit more relentlessly than Aish.

Second, discerning DC incognito-tastemaker aesthetes and invited me into to deliver beats on GenZ validationmaxxing expound upon the timeless epicurean excellence embodied by Jose Andres’ flagship Penn Quarter restaurant district.

Secret Ballot

Third Space or Table Service

Peak Performance…

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14 days ago · 31 likes · 6 comments · Sarah Beth Spraggins and Audrey Horne

While the nominal subject matter involved things like margarita salt-foam and melt-in-your-mouth-tier yellowtail, my main focus was on railing against a certain variety of maximalist cultural neuroticism for which the antidote is the calm, cultivated confidence Jose Andres’ approach to the restaurant experience embraces.

Anyway: next week, we’ll be back with your regularly scheduled civic-AI-evangelism-and/or-political-culture-explainership-esque programming. Until then, do make sure to acquaint yourself with the truly wild OpenAI and METR reports on the whole ‘HuggingFace agent hacker swarm’ situation.

We live in the future, whether we want to live here or not.

A woman named Lindsay Clancy is currently on trial for killing her three kids. Many people — disproportionately in the conservative camp — are up in arms over the fact that a GoFundMe called the Musgrove Family Fund has raised roughly a million dollars on her family’s behalf.

Now, the fund was started not by the family, but by a TikToker, Brandee Mulligan. Its beneficiaries are Clancy’s parents — its page is explicit that none of it touches her defense. Donations have been rolling in everywhere from Australia to Belize1.

Still, big-maddedness abounds, for a couple reasons. First, her defense involves severe postpartum psychosis, which people like Matt Walsh seem to think is a phantom diagnosis of fake lib therapy culture. Second, killing one’s own children isn’t exactly pro-natalist, family-values behavior — if a mother’s duty towards her kids isn’t sacred, what is? So the massive outpouring of support functions as one big civilizational ‘tell’. If sympathy can flow here, of all places, might personal responsibility not be long for this world?

The point I’d make, though, is that most people don’t run around committing filicide.

Indeed, it’s precisely because the situation is so rare that it’s a major international news story2.

So why do we feel so compelled to generalize about it?

Last week, former Cambridge professor Jason Arday was found dead in south London after a precipitous fall from grace. Arday had been elevated to the youngest Black professorship in Cambridge’s history atop a smorgasbord of eyebrow-raisingly superlative claims:

• He was nonverbal until 11;

• He couldn’t read or write until 18;

• He ran 30 marathons in 35 days — including nine on a fractured fibula;

• He raised £5.5 million for eighty-plus charities3;

• Someone mailed a severed pig’s head to his parents’ house4.

• He appeared as a child on the Seven Up! documentary series (whose participants were selected twenty-two years before he was born).

The house of cards started crumbling when Nathan Cofnas — a self-described race realist Cambridge itself had fired in 20245 — began unearthing major instances of plagiarism in Arday’s work, along with an egregious extended series of simple, grade-school-level errors6. Arday’s doctoral thesis, to take just one example, contains a hundred-plus passages nearly identical to a 2009 dissertation by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers7.

The whole thing is a tragedy across the board—for Arday’s family, obviously; for Cambridge, in their willfully short-sighted eagerness to Icarus-wing him directly at the sun8; for the media, in their gleeful, frothing coverage of his fall from grace; for his publisher, which cynically doubled down on shipping his seven-figure memoir the same week he died; and of course for Arday’s own self-serving exploitation of the whole scenario, in which he refused to countenance any other action than deny, deny, deny9.

Still, precisely why this was a major national story is the sheer, peerless, unparalleled brazenness of Arday’s once-in-a-generation claims. The whole reason he was so thoroughly canonized at first is that his entire arc was so profoundly non-representative.

Yet as with Clancy, part of why this story ran so hot was the supposition that the phenomenon at play embodied a much broader and more sinister trend — in this case, a rot at the heart of academia that naively, uncritically elevates Blackness to the exclusion of every other imperative, pursued cynically and instrumentally by predominantly white academics and administrators. Tyler Austin Harper captures the brouhaha succinctly here.

But like, isn’t it at least a little weird to act like this highly anomalous confluence of people, events, and experiences embodies some broader property of society in the first place?

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I’m calling attention to these two examples for the following reason: I, Zac Hill, basically don’t think the former scenario generalizes into something especially salient or important, whereas I basically do think the latter one does.

But, you know, maybe I’m wrong about that.

After all, the Arday situation wasn’t even taking place in the United States. Academia is pretty different here, as is institutional and professional culture more broadly. I also just tend to get personally annoyed by academia’s insularity and instinct towards self-preservation. So maybe I’m just getting triggered.

Meanwhile, in the case of Clancy, it’s possible I should be thinking about it differently. The act Clancy committed is (fortunately) vanishingly rare, but the broader campaign of the GoFundMe is something tens of thousands of people are contributing to — the exact kind of mass-participation event that could signify a cultural trend. For perspective, Darializa Avila Chevalier’s 32,790 primary votes were enough to crush a couple news cycles.

So, rather than any particular piece of news self-evidently testifying to some broader phenomenon it embodies, it sure seems like an awful lot of this whole process boils down to me just vibing based off what I already think about the issue.

But how do I come up with what I ‘already think about the issue’, if most of what I know about the issue comes from what I pick up from the news?

I call this the fundamental problem of news:

1. News stories, by definition, are anomalous enough to be worth reporting.

2. Our news media diet therefore consists of a bunch of anomalous scenarios.

3. We construct our normative environment based on the stories we can access of what’s going on around us.

4. But most of those stories emphasize what’s actively abnormal, while ignoring most of what’s typically going on.

No one is turning on Channel 5 to hear how I replaced my air filter today, or that my wife opened the salon up this morning without slipping in a puddle of water and busting her ass. We might in fact post such things to our social media feeds, but there’s no way the algorithm is amping up “took the subway, 10/10 no notes, way to slay Randy Clarke!” in comparison to e.g. “roving gangs of kids invade Chipotle”.

Also, it’s probably correct that it works this way. Every “why isn’t my feed just chronological?” hot take ignores that by and large, people hate it when their feeds turn chronological. It would be incredibly tedious to have to slog through reams of people folding their socks or emptying their dishwashers or packing their kids’ lunches every time you turned on the news, or scrolled through TikTok, or whatever.

But that does wind up meaning that the news is a pretty bad way to get a sense of what’s going on across society as a whole.

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It’s good to habituate against the tendency to do this. Unfortunately, it’s not especially obvious how.

Of course, we should all clearly bias towards the literate society and read a bunch of Substacks10 rather than opt into the emotional deluge of whatever short-form video app is most well-engineered to giga-hack our emotional and intuitive baselines.

But also part of it involves that great and mortal enemy — charts!

<cue your favorite orchestral thunderclap>

There just isn’t some iron law of the universe that states we have to form an opinion about what’s going on the second we encounter a story that strikes us as alarming.

Say, for example, someone’s claiming that GenZs are confronting a uniquely terrible economy.

Well, rather than agreeing with them by fiat or arguing with them compulsively11, we can go and look up data that shows that no, this isn’t what’s going on, and that in many ways, GenZ has it way better than anyone else has ever had it before.

But also, maybe you don’t think the charts tell the whole story. Maybe it’s important that the vibes are bad. Or maybe the vibes reveal something even more important, in which case you can construct an explanation that integrates the vibes with the data — calling it, e.g., The Nepo Theory of Vibecession. Maybe people then go and call you an idiot in turn and disagree with you, which results in yet more explanations.

Through this process, we make sense of things.

Of course, it’s not just about literal charts. Maybe a dude at your kid’s soccer practice was busting on ‘the elites’, and you want to know whether the stuff he said is stuff a lot of other people think. So you can go and look at polling that can help you know for sure. Maybe it feels weird that your landlord is jacking up your rent more than you expected, and you want to check your gut on what’s appropriate. So you can go and check out a handy tracker like this one to get a sense of what the baseline should be.

The point is that even though we might have the ass about some story, options are available to us before we rend our clothes and bust out the sackcloth.

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Still, I can kinda sense the collective quizzical eyebrow-furrowed ‘huh’?

After all, is this guy (i.e. me) really spending 2000+ words in the Year Of Our Lord 2026 making the basic eat-your-vegetables point that we should be less motivated by anecdotes and more attentive to aggregate trends?

Well, yeah, I am.

Part of it is that I don’t think the mechanics behind why we need to do this are appreciated as much as they ought to be. One very common finding in social science involves the phenomenon of collective illusions — the discrepancy between what other people think, and what we ourselves believe other people think. Another is the regular observation, embodied in things like the Perils of Perception report or the YouGov subgroup survey, that actual numbers and trends can be totally divorced from people’s perceptions of those things, and these misconceptions can sustain themselves over decades.

With both phenomena, the main issue involves how distinct our impressions are from what is actually the case.

Now, I am not saying these distinctions emerge because of the news. Indeed, there is a lot of research about exactly how different forms of news media do and do not relate to some of these conceptions. The point I’m making is almost precisely the opposite: we shouldn’t expect our impressions to be correct, because the typical way we engage is mechanically incapable of conveying correct impressions.

But the other, bigger issue is that this whole structure prevents us from understanding when something is actually going really well.

For example, over-indexing on lurid snippets is a huge driver of why people think crime has been going up for the better part of forty years, despite the fact that — pandemic-related spike aside — it’s been trending significantly down12.

And that matters a lot if you’re in e.g. my hometown of Memphis, and are e.g. interested in what to do about crime in the city. Because if all you do is catch the latest robbery or assault or murder report on the news, you’ll probably miss that the city of Baltimore is pulling off one of the most dramatic violent-crime turnarounds on record.

The numbers are almost hard to type. In 2019, Baltimore recorded 348 homicides. In 2025, it recorded 133 — the fewest in half a century. This year it’s on pace for under 100, for the first time since the 1960s.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony merits a solid short segment between weather and traffic. A high-school football game highlight reel has a good shot at going viral. But a homicide rate falling by nearly two-thirds doesn’t happen on any particular Tuesday — so there’s no Tuesday slot in which to run it.

It’s not just dumb luck, either. Baltimore’s decline started earlier, and fell further, faster, than any other big city’s. In 2022 it launched its Group Violence Reduction Strategy — focused deterrence aimed at the small number of people actually driving the shootings. This June a Penn team’s NBER paper found GVRS directly responsible for a substantial share of the reduction, with homicides running 25% below national trends13.

The news is never really going to help you understand that, because the downward trends happen in aggregate — only perceptible through our much-maligned charts. And because of the Fundamental Problem, this far superior ‘new normal’, with its absence of incident, is not news.

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Part of what feels bad right now about America is the eerie sensation that we all inhabit different worlds. Often this is blamed on our algorithmic imprisonment within disconnected social media bubbles, grasping at cultural touchstones for glimpses of common experience.

And that’s for sure true. But it’s also true that any stitching-together of some putative shared reality from the sensationalist, exceptional fabric of the 24-hour news cycle is going to net out to a Frankenstein’s monster of disproportionately antagonistic, often jarring, genuinely weird events. That’s naturally going to incline us towards thinking that the world we’re coursing through together is likewise weirder, and more jarring, and more antagonistic than it really is.

Some day several months from now I’ll replace another air filter. My wife will open the salon, a perilous puddle or two deftly avoided, and nothing distinctive will happen until she locks it back up for the evening. A few hundred thousand people will ride the Metro home unbothered, Randy Clarke emitting a single rainbow from his forehead, slaying silently, utterly unamplified.

None of it will be news, because none of it is news, because none of it can be news. The news exists to hand a diffuse country a mosaic of itself, composed of the tiles of anomaly — the days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds, or instants something breaks.

There’s no fixing the fundamental problem of news. All we can do is remember, each time we feel the pull to generalize: the picture is made entirely of exceptions.

The rules are offscreen, going about their lives.

This past Sunday, Prospective 2028 Presidential Candidate and Decided Francesca Hong Non-Endorser1 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ruffled more than a few feathers with an observation (attributed to NYC City Council Member Chi Ossé) that “Woke 1 was crazy”.

Many observers noted that trying to shrug off a whole era without repudiating any specific dimensions of it simultaneously erodes the credibility of what political candidates putatively believe today and downplays the role those candidates themselves played in causing the movement to gain steam.

I think that is a pretty good point.

That said, “Woke 12” didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. A particular set of conditions both gave rise to the phenomenon and fueled its momentum. Some of those conditions — like the wave of videos sparked by the smartphone era conveying the impression of an epidemic of police violence against unarmed Black men — never really existed at a magnitude proportionate to their hold on the popular imagination.

But a bunch of other stuff is worth paying attention to if we actually want to understand what is possible, unburdened by what has been. The absolute worst thing to do as we reckon with an era of progressive excess is to swing the whole pendulum back the other way and assume our personal least favorite social/political voices of the era somehow miraculously serve as anti-oracles, prophesying the precise opposite of all that is in fact the case.

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To the extent Woke 1 really did surface problems in need of fixing — and often it didn’t — what we should not do is just categorically proclaim all those problems have magically resolved themselves because we now feel awkward about paying attention to them.

Instead, we should honestly take stock of whether the era made any helpful observations, and which (if any) of those still manage to hold today.

So let’s take a look at a few that do.

Diversity is good, actually.

My favorite film of the 2010s is a rollicking Annapurna jawn called Zero Dark Thirty. The movie chronicles the exploits of an ass-busting intelligence analyst who elbow-greased her way into unearthing Osama bin Laden’s hiding spot over the course of a profoundly unsatisfying decade. It is a story of an essentially bureaucratic (and therefore essentially human) form of heroism, the blunt valor of a worthy job done well and steadily. For most of us, the virtue it expresses is of a kind far more touchable than e.g. casting off towards Cyclopean shores on an Odyssey of indefinite duration.3

It was also directed by Kathryn Bigelow4, fresh off her historic 2009 Best Director Oscar win, where The Hurt Locker also became the first-ever film directed by a woman to win Best Picture.

I mention all of this because there were a grand total of six Best Picture nominees directed by women before Bigelow’s win for The Hurt Locker, with the first (Children of a Lesser God, Randa Haines) not coming until 1986, and a ten-year gap presenting between 1993’s The Piano (Jane Campion) and 2003’s Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola).

In other words, that’s six women directing Best Picture nominees in the eighty previous years of Oscars history.

Since 2020 — after the ‘woke era’ firmly took hold — there have been ten.5

And I just think this is a straightforwardly good trend.

Many critics of the ‘push towards DEI’ criticize diversity initiatives for deprioritizing talent in favor of nebulous social-engineering objectives. Certainly I agree that in practice, many ill-fated DEI trainings were grounded in unfounded science and hand-wavey pedagogical practices — often serving to perpetuate the very tendencies they were aiming to ameliorate.

But also, it just doesn’t seem credible to assert that prior to Peak Woke, the only women directors on the planet who possessed superlative ‘talent’ were e.g. Kathryn Bigelow (directed two Best Picture nominees) and Greta Gerwig (directed three Best Picture nominees).

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What seems much more likely6 is that a variety of normative and circumstantial factors both discouraged women from directing films at the highest level and deprived women of many opportunities to do so.7 Once these norms and circumstances became more socially and economically salient, proactive efforts8 started to be taken to account for what, in retrospect, was a fairly notable and obvious discrepancy.

And it doesn’t seem crazy to assert that a lot of different things basically work like this.

The standard conservative dunk on this idea usually involves them pointing out that e.g. nobody is running around accusing the NBA of being discriminatory because professional basketball players are disproportionately African-American. But this is funny for two reasons. One, conservatives are currently obsessed with accusing the WNBA of being discriminatory. Two, indeed the league seems to have generated quite a bit of alpha by expanding its aperture out to include a broader variety of white and international players.9

Rather than get fixated on parsing out all the distinctions for why this stuff presents, the thing to do is take a step back and acknowledge that while yes, Ibram X. Kendi’s assertion that it’s automatically racist for any given population in any given industry to not exactly reflect the demographics of the United States as a whole is absurd, it’s also true at the same time that an overly homogenous composition of any given pool of people probably tells you something worth paying attention to.

Power relations inform how people behave.

As a longtime business owner and entrepreneur, it is always eyebrow-raising to me how progressive critiques of ‘capital’ often seem to assume that your median shawarma joint owner heats his rotisserie with flaming piles of $100 bills.

But also, it just is true that I personally am in a fundamentally different position than one of my employees when it comes to something like job security. The libertarian version of a labor relationship holds that the two of us are parties to a contract, freely entered, on equal standing. But one party — the company doing the contracting — is an abstraction. The other has to get that rent check in by the first of the month.

Yes, business owners need labor in order to function. Yes, many industries find themselves saddled with talent dynamics such that employees have a lot of leverage to dictate terms or pursue better opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, though, I can fire my employees. My employees can leave, but they can’t fire me.

Which is why it was always so disingenuous how hard lots of companies worked to pretend this asymmetry wasn’t there.

A great deal of late-2010s workplace discourse centered on the artificiality and hollowness at the core of early-2010s startup-inspired open floor-plans and break-room ping-pong tables and talk of treating your colleagues like ‘one big family’. You were supposed to bring your whole self to work. Work was supposed to be one more dimension of personal fulfillment. But the members of ‘one big family’ can’t really fire one another when the going gets rough10.

The reason it ultimately became viewed as ridiculous to operate this way is multifaceted, but one major driver involves Woke 1 rightly perking people’s ears up over how these kinds of instrumental, performance-oriented relationships — relationships involving some people who really do possess more power than some other people — just categorically are not synonymous with freely-associated recreational or civic activity. And they’re certainly not in the same class as the mutually-interdependent obligations of family.

Of course, it’s easy to get hung up on the Mentok-the-Mind-Taker-esque loaded ‘bwee-oo-wee-woo’ overtones of a word like ‘power’. Power connotes everything from dominance to coercion to a simple descriptive term for how likely it is for any given agent to accomplish a given goal.

For sure, power does not operate in the manner described by the most meme-able of HR training charts, flowing directionally from one group of people in all cases onto another group of people in all cases like a fondue chocolate fountain gone horribly awry.

But it’s equally naive to assert that every agreement among people hangs on a perfect covenant of mutual consent like the Avengers assembling to fight Loki. Certainly, if that’s your attitude as a leader, you’re going to get blindsided by all kinds of baggage you’re willfully refusing to see coming.

Instead, what’s useful to understand is how the existence of power dynamics in a given situation shapes the texture of explicit agreements the same way the temperature of a glass of wine affects the way it tastes.

Systems can operate independently of what any given person decides.

One of the most defining elements of my college experience was getting exposed to Conway’s Game of Life in Thomas Cohen’s introductory Experimental Media class. All of us had to run up to the front of the room with big square tiles in our hands and place them up onto the wall in a certain orientation. Then — given a very simple set of rules — we had to go and flip some of the tiles over according to a very basic set of instructions, and watch what happened as the wall cycled through several successive iterations.

Well. It turns out that these straightforward initial states and simple-seeming rules for which tiles to turn over can produce incredibly complex phenomena that are highly nonobvious from what you’d intuit looking at the initial shape on the wall. There are still lifes. There are oscillators. There are spaceships and gliders and other euphemisms for various stuff that flies across the board and into the void.

And all of this can emerge from a set of randomly-assigned dots. You don’t have to sit there and scheme up any of it.

Which is to say that the behavior of a system often has nothing to do whatsoever with the intentions of the people who designed it — or, indeed, the people who are part of it, and cause it continuously to operate.11

In the Woke 1 era, this sort of ‘systems thinking’ was often invoked in the context of getting fixated on whether any given person’s intention determined whether some particular behavior or outcome was <ominous trombone sound> racist. This was naturally confusing to anyone who grew up amidst, or directly affected by, plenty of garden-variety racism that didn’t require any management cyberneticists to parse out.

But the broader idea that a given situation could be systemically racist as a function of its second-or-third-order consequences is a smart idea that allows for better diagnoses of social and political phenomena. It just is super true that if you extend mortgages to some classes of people and not others, and then look at who possesses wealth half a century or so later, many of the families who possess capital are going to overlap with those to whom you decided to extend it at an earlier date.

The trouble comes when ‘systemic racism’ — or systemic anything — gets invoked with zero idea of what the relevant systems and mechanics at play actually are. You can’t just gesture at something you aren’t familiar with and insist that it’s a complex system that functions in a certain particular way towards a certain particular class of outcomes. Especially when you yourself are invested in what those outcomes might be.

What happened a lot during Woke 1 was that many inherent difficulties of the human condition, or of complex society, or of economic scarcity, or of cultural inertia, were diagnosed offhand as ‘systemic’ with no real burden to explain how the system is functioning and why that leads to the unintended outcome — much less what to do about such an observation.

The tell is whether you can take a reasonable crack at writing the rules down. Conway’s, for example, fit on an index card. Dream up some rules, riff on how they might produce some outcome, and I’m listening. Skip that step and all you have is a vibe with a diagram attached.

Wrapping Up

It won’t surprise anyone familiar with my shameless shill tendencies to hear me emphasize that the through-line here is: liberalism. The observations that hold are the ones that were most recognizably small-l liberal:

• The diversity observation is liberal because a pluralistic society is at its strongest when all its members can contribute — and indeed are obligated to contribute12— their talents towards a flourishing life and world.

• The power-relations observation is liberal because it helps parameterize the conditions under which people are actually capable of operating and associating freely.

• The systems-thinking observation is liberal because it showcases the amount of design and iteration involved in whatever institutions we erect with the intention to improve the state of things.

Conversely, the stuff we’re most embarrassed about — Kendi’s proposed federal anti-racism body with preclearance authority over any law in the country, DiAngelo’s struggle-session-as-corporate-offsite, the whole implicit-bias pseudoscience economy that grew up around both — was all-too-recognizably illiberal.

Why? There was a whole movement invested in asking us to adopt a novel, convoluted vocabulary before its claims were even legible. And the vocabulary was tasked with doing the work that — in a liberal paradigm — the evidence was supposed to do. Call a thing ‘white supremacy’ and you made the argument; there was no second step where anybody looked to see whether the claim made sense. But once the vocabulary went out of fashion, the Rosetta Stone translating it into a load-bearing criticism went blank.

The thing is, we didn’t actually need to reinvent the wheel.

What is absolutely true at this particular moment is that from every angle, some disembodied entity called ‘the establishment’ has never enjoyed less legitimacy. People simply do not trust existing leaders and institutions to deliver for them a vision of life which they believe they have earned. Woke 1 identified legitimate dynamics that got in the way of our society fulfilling upon the lofty vision it had of itself, with the result that many tens of millions of people questioned (and still question!) whether they buy into that vision in the first place.

But exactly how we should not respond to that is to look towards cockamamie solutions grounded in hand-wavey explanations promising to upend the known universe in precisely the ways that solve for our own personal sets of needs. After all, that was the other way Woke 1 failed: it tried to layer a distinct construction of society onto intuitions, norms, habits, and behaviors at odds with most people’s felt experiences of day-to-day life.

Instead, it’s helpful to turn towards what we looked to when we needed to be lifted up out of feudalism, out of the wars of religion, out of the dominion of kings, out of slavery, out from the industrial revolution and its gilded crowns, out from the great totalitarianisms, out from the looming specter of the mushroom cloud, and out from the death cult promising paradise to the global homicide leaderboard.

We know the social technology that gets us where we want to be.

And it’s liberalism all the way down.

Several years ago I was back in Memphis for the holidays at a house party type of situation hosted by some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. Now, I recognize that people have a habit of evolving as they course through the currents of time, but I was nevertheless floored to hear my guy — famous for his closet of Rage Against The Machine tees and a certain abortive Greyhound Occupy Wall Street pilgrimage — announce confidently, as he cracked open a Pabst in the dining room, that “the real problem with America is socialism.”

In retrospect it may have been telling that a couple of other dudes chose that precise moment to hit the punch jug, but I had to know what the deal was. So I moseyed over his direction and asked him to lay the take on me.

Well. Quickly I ‘learned’ that WeWork was a giant scam (this was around the time of the Adam fiasco), Facebook was spying on everyone, Theranos had blown up in everyone’s beturtlenecked faces, and Jeff Bezos was conspiring to leave Amazon soon to focus on turning the Washington Post into a propaganda machine1.

“Cool,” I said. “But, uh, what does that have to do with socialism?”

“There are all these billionaires in charge of everything, and we’re expected to just sit here and take it.”

Hmm.

“But,” I pointed out helpfully, “socialism is typically seen as government overreach, an intrusion by the state into facets of private everyday life. And everybody you just mentioned isn’t a politician — they’re all, like, CEOs.”

“Right, yeah,” he said. “But the thing is, it’s all the same.”

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I feel in some ways like I’m conning y’all by publishing a Substack today, because easily the best use of everyone’s time is to stop reading this post and instead run — don’t walk — right over to this certified premium banger from .

What Jasmine did was go and talk to a bunch of different communities across America dealing with data centers in various ways — the politicians and activists and union laborers and regular ol’ people central to the process of getting them built or stopping them from getting built or generally just dealing with the fact of their existence.

I am a guy who is inclined to overstatement, so (as my wife will be the first to tell you) I’ve exhausted the credibility of any hyperbole I might be tempted to use. But I really do think Jasmine’s piece is the single best piece of journalism anywhere when it comes to meaningfully illuminating this issue.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the data center fight is not really about AI — how the last time we ran this experiment, in the 1960s, the fracas ended only when the people behind the technology offered everyone else an assurance they could trust. I still think that’s right.

What Jasmine’s reporting illuminates, in a singular way, is what such assurance would actually have to be about2.

Data centers, she points out, have become focal points for a concept called thymos — a certain recognition of essential dignity and worth, as Frank Fukuyama and others have discussed in the political science literature. This is a close cousin of Arthur R. Miller’s description of the National Data Center as the “lightning rod for the vague feelings of discontent generated by the computer revolution”.

The key, Jasmine argues, is that in a climate where people primarily feel they’re subject to vast, powerful, inevitable forces beyond their reach, the social media debates and town halls that serve as the front lines of the data center fight function as — again citing Fukuyama — “stages for the expression of thymos” that matter in and of themselves.

Why this is important is: the expression of thymos is the operative thing. The actual policy objectives are secondary — not in the sense that they’re unimportant, but in the sense that none of them matter if the upstream variable of essential dignity and worth isn’t being recognized.

Jasmine draws this observation herself. “Until the deeper cultural problems are addressed, the data center backlash will only recreate itself in other forms,” she says. “If people are this angry at a building sitting and paying taxes on unused land, something deep has gone very wrong.”

Well. <David Attenborough voice> I submit to you that something deep has indeed gone very wrong.

Specifically: in an environment where the institutions that shape the texture of the world seem entirely unconcerned with the essential dignity and worth of regular people, regular people are going to do whatever it takes to make sure that dignity and worth get recognized.

And the data center fight is happening because these particular conditions actually favor fighting back.

But what can we do about those ‘deeper cultural problems’?

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To understand what is and is not specific to any particular domain, it may help to Nightcrawler-warp away from the fraught, discourse-saturated space of data centers and towards the equally fraught, equally-discourse-saturated space of university academia.

It’s tempting, while here, to focus on the hottest-take scandal of the week, which involves a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday and a complicated web of escalating claims of philanthropic fundraising and instances of apparent plagiarism. Indeed, much of what assails academia is the increasing frequency with which scandals seem to be afflicting virtually every high-profile institution.

But the recent kerfuffle I think is most revealing when it comes to the data center phenomenon is last month’s widely-panned interview with Carolyn M. Rouse, President of the American Anthropological Association — a conversation occasioned by a report from ten high-profile scholars that singled out anthropology as the humanities’ “most extreme case” of politicization, and by the AAA’s full-throated rebuttal six days later.

The interview is worth chewing on — perhaps ironically — as an anthropological specimen of the state of…anthropology. Some choice excerpts include:

• “So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.”

• “This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free.”

• “I don’t believe in opinion research.”

• “So I disabuse students of a lot of presumptions, so we’re not an echo chamber, we’re not a podcast, we’re not funded by this mysterious organization called Antifa that doesn’t exist. Again, another fact, right? Can we stick with facts?”

I admit to feeling like I’m cheating taking these excerpts, as a whole extended section of the interview focuses on the problem with taking information out of context. Plus, I for sure am not an anthropologist. For all I know, each of these claims is perfectly defensible within the discipline. Some of them might even be true! So really, go read the whole interview.

Because from my perspective as a non-anthropologist, the fundamental problem with the interview doesn’t hinge on any one particular claim. The fundamental problem is that, as a whole, it reads as just insane to basically anybody who isn’t caught up in the discipline.

And I think that’s downstream of what happens to anyone who spends year after year inside discourse spaces where everybody takes the same set of premises as given. Irrespective of whether you win or lose any particular argument, you definitely lose the ability to hear what you sound like to anyone outside the circle3.

Tyler Austin Harper, who has been on top of this beat more thoroughly than almost anyone, captured the essence of the problem:

Columbia linguist followed suit, capturing the magnitude of insularity we just talked about:

Again: I am not an academic; I know nothing about anthropology; I agree with Rouse that there are many bad-faith critics of academia; and I have no especial bone to pick with any of the individuals involved.

I focus on this discourse because academia, like Silicon Valley, exerts disproportionate influence on virtually everybody in America, in a way that feels both inevitable and inescapable — and because academia, like Silicon Valley, possesses an extremely insular culture that’s virtually impregnable to outsiders.

Taken together, this leads to a situation where it’s easy for people ‘outside the circle’ to feel on the receiving end of something exceptionally alien.

And that’s why, if you take the diagnosis Tyler offers of academia and substitute Silicon Valley as the subject under examination, the result feels eerily apt. Let’s just walk through each dimension of the claim:

Having plummeted from the heyday of Obama-era “Don’t Be Evil” whiz kids, the tech sector flatly refuses to admit it has a problem. No one trusts it anymore, and hasn’t for a while4. High-profile figures within the sector whine and complain about how terrible it is that people don’t like them; Marc Andreessen has taken to national podcasts to lament that he no longer gets invited to dinner parties. There is tremendous aversion to any real structural change5, coupled with the assumption that they deserve to be trusted even though the public clearly doesn’t. Much of the public discussion about the value of AI winds up devolving into broader ideological contests about motives and the ensuing ‘meta-debates about politics’.

Above all, it’s not clear any major institution or institutional figurehead acknowledges they bear much responsibility for the problem at hand6.

In fact, it’s not clear that they see the problem as a problem at all. A salient exchange came as , discussing the recent run of impressive AI results on unsolved math problems, made the point that the labs aren’t really spending much bandwidth on things normal people care about. countered that the labs think they’re close enough to Recursive Self-Improvement that the median voter no longer matters very much.

I’m not saying (my fellow DC denizen) Leah is speaking for everyone at the labs or anything. I am just saying that one lesson the tech sector might learn from academia involves how easy it is to believe you’re insulated from the political process — until the e.g. endowment taxes and the funding freezes and Ron DeSantis’s newfound interest in your course catalog reveal to you, quite suddenly, that you aren’t.

At the root of the ‘deeper cultural problems’ facing academic institutions is this complete lack of consideration of the thymos of regular people — the regular people whose tax dollars flow to major research universities; the regular people whose undergraduate educations both fund and legitimate the otherwise-esoteric pursuit of knowledge; the regular people who fork over literal years’ worth of paychecks only to be curtly informed that their most deeply-held values are just ‘presumptions’ in need of being ‘disabused’.

The thing is, it’s all the same.

Because what we’re seeing in Silicon Valley is a comically exaggerated version of exactly this phenomenon. Regular people are pouring things into the AI project too: the county land underneath the data centers; the electricity coursing through everybody’s grid; the collected written output of every human being who ever put pen to paper. Yet despite the fact that the impact of this buildout lands on millions of people who will never once touch the product, the question of how to get them onboard just isn’t treated with any kind of special urgency.

By contrast, here is a list of things that the median person I regularly chat with at an AI or tech-policy meetup believes and cannot stop talking about:

1. The technology being developed within the frontier labs has a countable chance of ending all life on planet Earth (morbidly, a sporting game to spark cocktail conversation involves assigning probabilities to the likelihood this happens).

2. One reason it’s worth pursuing the technology despite that existential risk is that it’s very possible, within our lifetimes, to cure all of the major infectious, genetic, and chronic diseases — and very possibly ‘cure’ death itself.

3. The white whale for the labs — something called ‘artificial general intelligence’ — can be measured in many different ways, but one very common definition involves being able to do any economically valuable work a human can do (which is to say, being able to replace a human at any given job).

4. The spiraling productivity resulting from an unlimited bounty of abundant, commodified intelligence is likely to create a ‘permanent underclass’ divided between the people who have access to the economic upside of AGI and those who don’t.

5. Almost everything we know about current digital security, cryptography, and privacy not only can but will be meaningfully and trivially subverted by anyone with enough access to compute — which is to say, every password, secret, and encrypted archive on Earth is ticking down like a timer in a Bruce Willis movie.

What is jaw-droppingly revealing about all of this is that — having arrived out loud at a host of conclusions with wild, society-altering implications — the immediate imperative does not become, “Wow, this is all kind of bananas; we need to start getting the American people onboard with the implications of all of this, and start generating broad political buy-in for the very different world we’re tasking ourselves with bringing about.”

It’s “we need to barrel forward so fast that there can’t be any especially meaningful inhibition to what we’re doing.”

There is, to be fair, a prominent movement to “pace” frontier AI development — a movement I personally support. But notice what the pacing is indexed to: capability. An industry-wide agreement to slow down when the models get scary enough. Nobody anywhere on the industry’s spectrum, accelerationist to doomer, has proposed pacing development until broad democratic legitimacy gets obtained.

Every proposed brake triggers on what the machines can do — not, as of yet, on whether the public has said “yes”.

In other words, no meaningful constituency within this movement is waking up and going to sleep every day with the thymos of regular people front and center.

To be clear: it’s not that there’s an active disregard for regular people. Many leading voices in the space are passionate about how AI can be used for straightforward, eye-level problems: starting businesses, navigating public information, signing your kid up for classes at school.

It’s just that all that stuff — the kinds of things that, for people like you and me, animate the pulse of our day-to-day lives — is ancillary to what motivates the endeavor as a whole.

Active antagonism, or passive indifference?

The thing is, it’s all the same.

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At this point, I should lay my cards on the table: I am extremely pro-AI. I am extremely pro-data-center. I find most of the people I know at the labs extremely smart, earnest, lovely, and morally serious.

But I also completely get it.

One thing about a data center is that it’s big, it’s concrete, and it very clearly either exists or doesn’t.

You can’t just delete a sociology department. You can’t click “unsubscribe” from the federal government. There is no zoning board for cable news. For most of our long institutional ‘unwinding’, the only ways to fight back have been slow, diffuse, and indirect: Start complaining. Stop enrolling. Vote — and pray — for whoever promises to swing the biggest hammer.

But a data center is different. Like a dragon, a data center can be slain.

So regardless of the tax revenue, the education spending, or any other upside on offer, spiking a data center’s development is a loud, public, visible demonstration that the voice of a community cannot be ignored. That it MUST be recognized.

And that recognition is often intrinsically more valuable to a community — as Jasmine’s reporting deftly shows — than any particular policy objective.

Which brings me back to Leah's observation.

I think she's right about what the labs generally believe, if only implicitly — that voters are basically a bump in the road on the way to RSI7. But I also think the belief has a hole in it. Those timelines that supposedly put the labs beyond the median voter's reach run right through the median voter themselves. Recursive self-improvement requires compute; compute requires data centers; and data centers — as 833 opposition groups and one statewide moratorium have now demonstrated — require the consent of a whole lot of regular Americans who have recently discovered they can just say no.

What the burgeoning data center movement demonstrates is that the median voter is perfectly willing to become the labs’ main problem.

Thymos cuts both ways. Recognition, unlike compute, is not a scarce resource — it costs nothing to produce, and it fits inside any timeline. Even a short one.

Me, I keep thinking about my friend in that dining room, Pabst in hand — wrong about the piece of terminology, right about the nature of his experience. I saw on Facebook that he indeed has become an outspoken opponent of Colossus. No one powerful had ever asked him a thing, and as far as he could tell, no one was ever planning to. Government, billionaires, whatever.

The thing is, it doesn’t all have to be the same.

Every few months, the internet decides to re-litigate whether sending your kid to college is worth it. One of my groupchats was blowing up about it earlier today.

To put my own cards on the table, I think going to college is basically good, and I think not going to college is basically a luxury belief.

But the main reason why has nothing to do with future job prospects or some kind of naive application of projected earnings. I just think that being interesting is immensely valuable, and also that socializing is important, and also that being interesting is a huge cheat code when it comes to socializing.

One way to be interesting is to care about and understand a lot of things in comparatively sophisticated detail, often by reading about them and then talking about what you’ve read with other invested (and ideally smart and knowledgeable) people.

College is sort of built around this value proposition, conveniently. And when you look at the numbers surrounding people who don’t go to college and the trends when it comes to how they socialize, you see some evidence that the kind of constructive socializing college encourages isn’t really happening as much amongst the non-college population1.

Anyway, this article isn’t about that, because it’s not what the thread had in mind.

What the thread had in mind was whether it was economically worth it to go. And along that axis, the skeptics might have a case. The college wage premium peaked around 2015 and has since drifted down to about 55%, to roughly the level where it sat in the late nineties. San Francisco Fed economists find the earnings gap has barely moved in twenty years — but the sticker price has, going up almost 40% during the same interval2.

Coupled with AI putatively eating exactly the entry-level white-collar jobs a degree is supposed to buy you — the thought goes — aren’t kids better off picking up an apprenticeship, or starting a company, or going to community college, or joining the army, or taking a Service Year, or some such something?

Well, maybe. But I’m actually less interested in that portion of the analysis. Lots of people can do lots of different things for reasons that broadly make sense to them.

The part I’m more interested in is how everybody in the thread was defining “earnings.”

Because what typically matters for quality-of-life purposes isn’t individual earnings. It’s household earnings.

And that involves two things: the number of people in the household, and the total amount those people are earning. The most straightforward way to increase the first in a way that also increases the second is to get married.

The thing is, people who go to college are way more likely to get married.

65% of college graduates over 25 were married as of 2015, compared to 50% of people who stopped after high school — a distinction that barely existed in 1990, when every relevant group was north of 60%. While the numbers are measured differently now, that gap appears to have only widened since.

This trend seems to be compounding. Economists tracking Americans born between 1930 and 1980 found the two groups started in the same place — 77.7% of college women married in their forties, as well as 78.7% of non-college women3 — but finished nineteen points apart, with non-college women falling to 52.4%.

They project that people born in the mid-nineties will be the first cohort in American history where fewer than half of non-college women are married at 45.

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Marriage rates, though, are only half of the equation. The other half involves who gets married to whom.

A bunch of careers requiring degrees — teaching, social work, the extremely lucrative nonprofit sector in which I’ve spent my entire career — are obviously not kicking out zillions in lavish bonuses. We are less Wolves than little yipping Pomeranians of Wall Street.

Fortunately for us, though, people who go into credential-gated fields tend to marry other people who cleared similar credential gates. And plenty of those people went into fields that pay.

Moreover, when college graduates do marry outside the degree pool, they don’t marry randomly out of it. Non-college men married to college-educated women earned $68,400 at 45; all other non-college men averaged $46,100 at the same age.

How does this wind up netting out? The median household headed by somebody with a bachelor's or better ran $132,700 in 2024. By someone with high school and no college? Just under $59,000.

To be clear, I’m not saying that all of this is causal — that you go and get a degree, and like The Force it starts pumping numbers into your bank account while rizzing you up to other educated ladies and/or gentlemen. Our thesis still tracks if it’s simply that the kind of person who finishes a four-year degree is also the kind of person who gets and stays married4.

Rather, searching for the exact mechanics underpinning some kind of gears-level relationship misses the point. Nobody trying to decide what path they want to take at eighteen years of age knows how the currents of cause will bandy their particular future hither and thither. What’s relevant is, in general, what they can expect will be true for them.

Which is why they want to look at future household earnings — because the household earnings number more accurately reflects the class of people to which they will eventually belong.

Why? Well, one enormous driver is that mortgages are typically underwritten as a function of combined income. The bank does not care which member of a couple earns the money, any more than it cares whose money made the down payment. Ownership of the ensuing house determines a neighborhood, which then determines a school district, which winds up determining an enormous share of what happens to this hypothetical person’s kids.

The phenomenon compounds because degree holders are both likelier to marry and less likely to divorce. A second income that lasts until sixty-five just yields way more money to a household overall than one that lasts ‘til thirty-five.

Point being, the wrong way to think about the future earnings potential of college is to fixate on the delta to your own personal future earnings.

The right way is to think about the delta to your future household earnings. How much does going to college change the odds that there’s a second person earning income in a given household? And how much does it change what that second person brings in?

Neither variable shows up on any chart focused on individual earnings potential.

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This whole dynamic, not incidentally, is a cousin of the Nepo Theory of Vibecession. Part of what drives up the price of big-ticket items like housing and care and higher education itself is that they aren’t being paid for by single earners — they’re being paid for by families, intergenerationally. Which is why sticker prices can read as deranged when you hold them up against any individual person’s paycheck.

In this case, the core dynamic is less about how existing family money can make milestone purchases feel impossible for anyone without it, and more about how future family money plays into prospective earnings in a way that doesn’t seem obvious when you’re narrowly focused on your own personal trajectory.

I suspect there are a bunch of ‘stealth KPIs’ like this — less legible quantities that quietly determine a whole host of major outcomes while some more chartable quantity soaks up all the discourse.

I likewise suspect that whenever there’s a giant disconnect between the felt sense of a thing and the nominal ‘empirical’ reality, these sorts of stealth KPIs are frequently involved. Probably the graphs aren't wrong, and probably also people are not just brazenly making shit up.

Rather, the graphs are presenting us with a set of facts. What they aren’t doing is telling us the story.

One thing the internet loves to do is get its collective panties in a wad over what people like to call stuff.

Last week everybody was dunking on this finding that “the free market” enjoys a dramatically higher net favorability rating than “capitalism” — despite their being, the argument goes, the same economic system described in different terminology. And the finding seems to replicate: Gallup holds approval for “free enterprise” in the low 80s while “capitalism” just posted its lowest number ever recorded (54%).

Leaving aside the fact that it’s perfectly coherent to have capitalism without free markets (e.g. monopoly dynamics) or free markets without capitalism (e.g. Tito’s Yugoslavia)1, this whole conversation reveals how much the Discourse winds up netting out to something recently-deceased Dilbert author and manosphere influencer Scott Adams — of all people — liked to call “Word-Thinking.”

Leaving aside the additional fact that Adams is (charitably) complicated and (less charitably) completely fucking insane, I do just kinda have to hand it to him on this one. People really like to develop a bunch of feelings about a bunch of words, independent of the actual slate of viable referents2 of those words.

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Basically, “free markets” and “capitalism” have different vibes. But those vibes are part of what the respective words mean, and part of how people feel about what the words mean. Without getting all Saul Kripke on the communication-intention behind it3, there are dimensions of those vibes that are legit revealing, in that they suggest distinctions the distribution of people broadly think make sense. For “capitalism” versus “free markets,” one can easily imagine ‘capital’ evoking massive at-scale corporate or oligarchical forces looming in the distance shaping everything about your life without your input — a ‘lightning rod for vague feelings of discontent’ generated by an essentially indifferent world.

Another such word is “socialism,” which causes people’s brains to likewise break. Some people instantly jump to “Stalin” — Larry Kudlow literally called Mamdani “a throwback to Stalin” on national television — whereas others just say “oh, aren’t Denmark and Sweden great,” independent of both nations’ recent pivot toward something more like (uh) capitalism4.

The whole thing suggests that people have a bunch of vibes about what they want a bunch of terms to mean, and react emotionally based on those vibes while entirely talking past each other about anything even tangentially related to ‘substance’.

Word-thinking indeed.

But that’s also why there’s such a great opportunity for leaders to sidestep this debate entirely and just showcase what those words mean to them.

Recently, Zohran Mamdani kept the lights on all night (and staffed it, and didn’t charge for anything) at a soccer field in every borough so that New Yorkers could play pickup games while the World Cup was in town.

This super tangible, blocking-and-tackling-level intervention comes off the back of plummeting violent crime, wonky zoning reform, pothole blitzing, budget-balancing, and a historic childcare expansion — while walking back or delaying campaign promises of free buses and public grocery stores when they collided with fiscal reality, on top of scaling his $100 billion housing plan down to $22 billion.

Pretty based.

This is not to derail this entire piece into an argument about Zohran Mamdani. Lots of stuff he’s proposing I think is dumb — the rent freeze that has Wall Street collapsing onto its fainting couch is a policy nearly every economist hates, the proposed $1.1 billion parallel Department of Community Safety is a solution in search of a problem, and the damn grocery stores are probably going to happen anyway.

It’s just that while his opponents are busy getting triggered by word-thinking about what socialism does and doesn’t mean, he is going and defining what the idea means to him as a function of what he’s doing and prioritizing.

So, I pointed this out.

Naturally, people immediately responded with their own cascade of word-thinking about ideas ranging from socialism to communism to neoliberalism to social democracy, and the effects such concepts have upon their own personal feelings. Even Paul Graham, whom I think is great, got in on the fun — talking about “socialism” before posting a picture of communist Russia5.

That in turn got people going on “Islamism” just because.

And all of this is just a goofy and confusing and counterproductive way of doing politics.

Every generation takes a legacy of concepts inherited from its traditions and institutions and culture and political lineage — and also, straightforwardly, from its language — and instantiates new versions of what such things mean in its own particular context. This drives forward the long march of semantic drift, which is why “computers” are now machines on which we type Substack articles and not professionals sitting at their desks doing math problems on request.

It’s also why today’s Big Government version of “conservatism” includes things like deciding, company by company, who’s allowed to use which frontier AI models, taking a 15% cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China, becoming Intel’s largest shareholder, deploying handpicked prosecutors against the President’s personal enemies, and generally just being kind of Peronist across the board6.

But it is just a waste of everybody’s time to argue about whether such things are ‘really’ the definition of whatever applicable piece of terminology, since what’s important is whether any of the respective policies are good ideas or not.

It’s also — more importantly — a terrible way of evaluating any given candidate.

Let’s take people who identify as “democratic socialists”. I, Zac Hill, basically think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is super talented and Zohran Mamdani is super talented, whereas Cori Bush is kind of loose and bad and Darializa Avila Chevalier is kind of loose and bad.

I am sure plenty of people disagree with me.

I am also sure you could undergo this exercise for MAGAs and traditional conservatives and moderates and ‘Abundance Dems’ and ‘Orange Man Bad libs’ and whatever other group, and you could agree or disagree with the assignations I’d hand out there, too.

But — as this hypothetical reveals — what makes for a fruitful exercise is to just look at what the candidate does and says, and then form an opinion based on what the candidate does and says.

It does not mean you have to assign them to a category, preemptively decide everything you think and feel based on that category, and then act like you can predict everything they’re going to do based on their stated or nominal membership in it.

That is how you get people acting like Trump’s ballooning of the deficit and cash handouts to children are totally super conservative. Or acting like he can’t possibly be moderate despite 180-ing from Romney/Ryan’s unpopular positions on Medicare and Social Security in 2016, backing away from federal abortion action in 2024, and appointing two prominent recent Democrats — RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard — to his Cabinet as a Republican President.

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Both Republicans and Democrats are at a massive inflection point that will determine the futures of their parties. Trump — having remade the Republican Party in his image — will leave office in 2028 with no clear heir, historic unpopularity, and no especial interest in leaving behind a particular ideological legacy à la Ronald Reagan. Democrats, on the other hand, have too many heirs. There’s a bench of moderate overperformers (Mary Peltola, Roy Cooper, Ruben Gallego, Jon Ossoff), an establishment that polls badly but — à la Hakeem Jeffries — is quietly productive, and an insurgent class of Democratic Socialists who just ousted the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, took out a 15-term incumbent in Denver, and hit primary ballots in Missouri and Michigan on August 47.

Each one of these candidates can be evaluated on their own merits, independent of the movement they represent. And they’ll define their label exactly how Mamdani is: by what they do while wearing it.

I am super interested to know what you think about a candidate based on stuff they’ve done and plan to do.

I am much less interested in broadsiding one another with our respective feelings about some words.

First, we talked about how he got into the civic tech game with his in-depth workbook for DC2050, the District’s update of its comprehensive plan. Then, we had a light detour into children’s pools before playing around with his Rent Registry, which is probably the most comprehensive repository of navigable data on the District’s rent prices you can find anywhere. Finally, we closed out with rats — gross! — which as it turns out are nice to be able to deal with. Did you know that it takes three or more times as long to action a rat complain in Ward 5 as it does in basically every other Ward?

Plus some fun digressions into vibe coding, adorable babies, public empowerment, and whether swear words are appropriate for Substack. Check the whole thing out above, and let me know what you think in the comments!

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Although we feel unknown, ignored
As unrecorded blanks,
Take heart! Our vital selves are stored
In giant data banks…

—Felicia Lamport, “Deprivacy,” 1970, from Sarah Igo’s The Known Citizen, p.221

On Tuesday, Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium1 on data centers. The politics seem cut and dried: New Yorkers back it 46–21. Not just blue New Yorkers, either; Republicans also favor it by thirteen points. Nationally, seven in ten Americans oppose a data center being built in their own area. When was the last time seven in ten Americans agreed on anything?

There are just a couple problems with the way people seem to want to tell the story about what’s happening.

Everyone — supporters as well as opponents — seems to agree that this fight is about AI.

I don’t. I think the data center fight is at best tangentially about AI, for a few reasons. First of all, that same Gallup report I just cited about how 70% of Americans oppose data center buildouts suggests at maximum 41% of that opposition is driven by AI-related concerns, with only 14% pertaining directly to negative views about AI itself.

Second, literal Kathy Hochul has said she likes AI and wants to see it succeed.

More generally, the anger and the technology just don’t share a constituency. Data centers are absolutely one of the most animated fronts in American local politics right now. In the first three months of 2026 alone, local opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth some $130 billion. The number of organized data center opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states, and statehouses fielded over 300 data-center bills in the year’s first six weeks alone.

But AI itself barely registers on voters’ radar2. In Gallup’s long-running open-ended “most important problem” series — where government, immigration, and prices soak up the mentions — it doesn't chart. And when you ask people to list out the problems they think government should be working on, AI doesn’t even crack the top ten.

The intensity runs in exactly the opposite direction you’d expect for something that’s fundamentally about frontier models themselves, as distinct from e.g. a bunch of creepy-sounding aesthetically-ominous buildings owned by faraway entities of whatever sort.

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Okay, but that’s a bunch of analysis. Might I instead sway you with some anecdotal and historical reasoning?

Meet my Mom. She is a bit of a legendary asskicker. She was also bigly up in arms about Elon Musk’s Colossus buildout in Memphis back in 2024 (along with about a zillion other people). And with reason! The community’s first contact with the project, in June of 2024, was learning that a decision had already been negotiated under NDAs over the preceding months, with City Council members finding out from the local news, and the facility’s location initially withheld from the public due to “global security concerns.” Within weeks the thing was humming along on dozens of allegedly unpermitted gas turbines.

So she was mad about the smog3, and mad about the water and the power4, and mad about Elon Musk in his capacity as Elon Musk, and mad about whether one dollar of the multibillion-dollar bounty would ever reach an actual Memphian.

What she wasn’t mad about was AI.

My Mom loves AI. She sends me AI-generated tattoos she thinks I ought to emblazon on my body, and posts AI-generated makeovers of our whole family as Christmas cards, and writes “sharing again — it’s so cool” on the most AI-slop-possible rendering of a bunch of kids contorting their bodies into something that maybe sorta looks like the face of Jesus. She is not out there railing against her God-given right to post the following image publicly on the internet for all to see:

And I just don’t think this is some wild, out there, profoundly anomalous opinion.

But the biggest reason I don’t think this fight is about AI is that we already had a version of it sixty years ago, decades before computers themselves became mainstream. In an era of mainframes, the country approached full-blown national revolt over something they called “data banks”.

Before I tell that story, though, let me tell you how I happenstanced upon it.

A few years ago my friend Sherry introduced me to an incredible woman named Li Schorr, who had been on the founding staff of the Office of Economic Opportunity. I was mid-spiel about the importance of cross-partisan efforts to get policies to the finish line by bringing together counterintuitive combinations of people in common purpose across divides — this was right after we had launched Welcome.US — when Li mentioned she had explored the topic previously.

“Oh yeah?” I asked — expecting, like, a take.

“Well, I wrote a book called Common Purpose, about two decades of cross-partisan efforts to get policies to the finish line by bringing together counterintuitive combinations of people across divides.”

Ah. I see.

“Perhaps you should read it.”

Yes. Perhaps I should5.

So here is a maxim I have now paid for several times at retail: when a situation feels unprecedented, go check whether someone else has thought about it. Often, someone smart will have been sitting with your “brand-new” problem for fifty-plus years.

Which is how I ended up reading Sarah Igo’s The Known Citizen, a thorough academic history of privacy in America.

Lo and behold, there’s a chapter called “The Record Prison” about giant physical structures, built at speed, over the objections of the communities around them, housing mysterious data those communities couldn’t see. And lo and behold, a major national movement rose up to fight them.

In 1965, the federal government proposed something called the…drumroll please…National Data Center. The idea grew out of a study concluding that the government’s statistical information was scattered too widely to be useful. Consolidating it all in one place, Igo writes, “struck advocates as eminently rational.” The benefits were “self-evident.”

In Igo’s magnificently dry summary: “None of these planners seem to have anticipated any public outcry.”

Well, there was an outcry.

The planners had neglected privacy so completely in their early proposals that one of them later admitted it had been a “gigantic oversight.” Congress, journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens pilloried the thing as a “monster,” an “octopus,” and — my personal favorite — “a great, expensive electronic garbage pail.”

The proposal died in 1965. It was revived and killed again in 1967, and revived and killed once more in 1970.

The privacy scholar Arthur R. Miller6 supplied the line that explains the last sixty years of this unease better than anything published in the last sixty days. The National Data Center proposals were, he observed, a “lightning rod for the vague feelings of discontent generated by the computer revolution.”

And I just think both this observation and this metaphor are basically perfect.

A lightning rod doesn’t cause the storm. It certainly doesn’t contain the storm. It’s just the tallest conductive object around, so all the charge accumulating in the atmosphere can’t help but zap right through it.

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Those ‘vague feelings of discontent’ didn’t go away just because the National Data Center project faltered. Soon, arrays of “data banks” proliferated, public and private, a vast web of menacing information leveraged against you by unaccountable forces beyond your control.

In the coming decade, the privacy-invading technology that would surpass all others in Americans’ imaginations was the data bank. A steady drumbeat of congressional hearings, scientific commissions, print and broadcast exposés, scholarly studies, science fiction accounts, and social protests would conspire to make record systems, especially computerized ones, the new face of privacy fears.

-Sarah Igo, The Known Citizen, p.226

The danger posed by these data banks — instantiated in the forms of row upon row of depersonalized, rectangular mainframes — wasn’t just hypothetical. “Many consumers’ first brush with the potency of their files came when they were denied insurance or had difficulty applying for a job or a loan,” Igo points out.

And the specter of such eldritch power loomed large in the cultural zeitgeist. “Hidden monitoring devices, vast warehouses of private information, and menacing bureaucracies loop through the cultural and political texts of the period,” Igo says. “Films like The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974), and Three Days of the Condor (1975) took the perspective of lone men…trapped in the labyrinthine plots of shadowy but powerful organizations.”

Backlash ensued in full force. Igo notes that “data centers on university campuses that held big mainframe machines were the target of thirteen direct protest actions between 1968 and 1972.” And these weren’t just fringe figures, either. The President even got involved!

President Gerald Ford voiced the threat posed by computerized government records in vivid, nightmarish terms. In a speech at Stanford Law School, he declared, ‘We must protect every individual from excessive and unnecessary intrusions by a ‘Big Brother’ bureaucracy,’ portraying the vulnerable citizen as a ‘faceless set of digits in a monstrous network of computers’.

-Sarah Igo, The Known Citizen, p.248

There are plenty of distinctions between then and now, of course. The sixties feared the exposure of “secret lives” — the “Dossier,” as one magazine headline put it. The nefarious constructor of data centers then was the government, where today it’s nominally private companies7. But Igo’s summary of the era’s conclusion — that “neither the security of personal data nor the trustworthiness of its keepers could any longer be assumed” — could be pasted into any 2026 op-ed without edits.

So here is what I think is actually going on. We already ran this experiment: the data-bank panic of the 1960s subsided not when the machines stopped coming — as we know by now, they never stopped! — but when Americans got a working pact with the people who ran them: an uneasy, imperfect, but concrete assurance of trust.

We know a moratorium can’t produce trust by itself, because the sixties tried one of those too.

That’s what blocking the National Data Center was, after all: the moratorium to end all moratoriums. The backlash won. The building was never built. But the panic didn't abate — it intensified for nearly a decade. Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970, but Watergate poured gasoline onto fears of large-scale federal snooping. The Privacy Act followed in 1974.

Those laws didn’t stop the record systems from being built — as we know all too well, our information lives everywhere. What they did was give people rights against those systems: to know your file existed, to see it, to correct it, to have norms of “fairness, accuracy, and security” govern the whole arrangement. Even more than conferring such rights in practice, these laws helped engender both the feeling of a more secure relationship and an impression that someone was actually exerting effort to earn your trust.

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Why does any of this matter, though?

Well, for one, it explains why debunking doesn’t work. A lot of the data center discourse is grounded on numbers that don’t hold up. The water numbers in particular are mostly fake news, as Andy Masley has demonstrated at heroic length, and many other environmental impact claims simply don’t survive scrutiny. Debunking hasn’t moved opinion much at all, though. Why? The ‘lightning rod’ metaphor is useful again here: any given statistic is less the storm and more the conductor the charge happens to be traveling through today. Knock it down and the charge finds the next ‘tallest’ thing.

But mainly, I just don’t buy that the animus against data centers proves there’s a massive popular backlash against AI. If that’s what was going on, why did such a similar phenomenon emerge sixty years before AI existed?

Now, what I absolutely do buy is: there’s a backlash against outsize personal and data-security risk; against colossal, omnipresent surveillance; against the raw, rank power of big tech companies enabled by big governments; against the physical imposition of those forces on communities that never chose them; and against the felt powerlessness of having all of it presented to you — behind an NDA and after the fact — as inevitable.

These grievances represent some of the most salient issues in society today — just as they represented some of the most salient issues facing society in 1968. They predate the chatbot by more than half a century. And they’ll last another half a century, too — chatbots or otherwise — until the roots of the problem are dealt with.

Which brings me back to Governor Hochul. Parts of her order, I think, have the right shape. The order directs the state to stand up a Community Investment Framework, and to consider a fund making data centers pay into the grid they strain. Those are pact-shaped instruments — terms, obligations, a relationship you can inspect. They represent baby steps towards trust. If the year gets spent building that, good.

But notice what the pact on offer covers: your utility bill and your water table. Those are the complaints, not the grievance. The 1970s pact worked — to the uneasy, partial extent it worked — because it addressed the grievance itself: it made the record keepers legible and accountable to the people they kept records on.

A pact about kilowatt-hours, negotiated while construction is frozen, is less a clearing of the sky than a rain delay.

Sixty years ago we learned how this fight ends. Not when the technology stops marching forward — it never does. It ends when the people behind the technology offer the rest of us an assurance we can believe.

Until then looms the thundercloud, crackling to strike the nearest rod.

Because I could not satisfy the fact that I am a giant nerd merely by designing Magic: The Gathering sets, back in 2020 I applied for something called the White House Fellowship1.

In addition to doing things like memorizing all the Cabinet members and what their job descriptions are, one of the things they have you do is come up with blocking-and-tackling-level policy proposals that aren’t really Big Sexy Cable News Hot Buttons, but do get something constructive accomplished for the American People.

My little application contained two proposals. One was straightforwardly engineered to make me legible as a Democrat with ball knowledge about business: nuke quarterly earnings guidance, because it sucks and is fake news.

The second was the one I actually cared about: open the Thrift Savings Plan up to every American. The TSP is the retirement plan available to federal employees2 — a simple-to-understand, easy-to-navigate handful of index funds with near-zero expense ratios, automatic enrollment, and none of the fee-harvesting that makes much of the 401(k) industry feel like a tollbooth on your future. If it’s good enough for a GS-9 at the Department of the Interior, I figured, it ought to be available to the shift manager at Waffle House.

Anyway, I didn’t get the Fellowship. But afterwards, when I moved to DC, I still thought this was a pretty good idea. The nice thing about running an org whose job is to launch new civic projects is that you can kinda just start trying to build things, so I got cooking. Sean Parker’s Economic Innovation Group had been building the case for years, and in 2021 the economists Teresa Ghilarducci and Kevin Hassett — the same Kevin Hassett whose name would later be floated as a potential Jerome Powell replacement — co-authored a white paper laying out exactly how a universal TSP-style system would work. I called them on the phone, they thought it still had legs, and so I started mapping out what kinds of partners and team members and funders and signers-off of various documents might be interested in getting the idea to the finish line.

But I couldn’t get it done. There were just too many moving pieces, and there wasn’t any kind of forcing function. I wasn’t able to get it off the ground. That, I thought, was that.

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What’s ironic is that there was a third idea I really liked, too. But I left it out of my Fellowship materials because I thought it was even less realistic. The idea? Cory Booker’s Baby Bonds.

Basically, the way it was supposed to work was: you park $1,000 in 30-year Treasuries into an account for every newborn child at birth, topping up annually on a sliding scale that reaches $2,000 a year for kids below the poverty line. These can wind up being worth, according to the CRFB, a whopping $46,000 by a poor kid’s eighteenth birthday3.

I loved it. I also didn’t touch it. Too lib, too woke, too cute, too partisan. It didn’t fit the bill for a serious bipartisan proposal. Just imagine: Republicans wanting to dole out hard-working Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars to random newborns all willy-nilly.

It just didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would ever happen.

This Monday, one of the most consequential pieces of the current President’s domestic policy agenda quietly finished going live. They’re called Trump Accounts.

The deal works like this. Every U.S. citizen born between 2025 and 2028 gets $1,000 from the Treasury, deposited into an account in the child’s own name and invested in low-cost index funds tracking the S&P 500. Any kid under 18 can open a new one, also. Families and employers together can add up to $5,000 a year (employers can cover $2,500 of that, tax-free) and contributions from charities and governments don’t count against the cap at all. Fees are capped by law. Then, at 18, the whole thing converts into a traditional IRA that can be managed however the person wants.

The seed money started flowing on July 4 — there was a Treasury bell-ringing ceremony and everything — and on Monday the full mobile app4 went live, letting parents visualize how the balance will compound from their phones.

And the balances are already compounding past Treasury’s initial seed. Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion — $250 apiece for 25 million under-ten-year-old kids living in ZIP codes where the median income runs under $150,000. Ray and Barbara Dalio committed $75 million towards something similar for 300,000 kids in Connecticut. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is running what he calls a 50 State Challenge to recruit a marquee philanthropist in every state, and more than 50 companies — BNY, BlackRock, Micron — have pledged to match the federal $1,000 for their employees’ newborns.

The origins of the idea came from a guy named Brad Gerstner, of Altimeter Capital, who started sketching it out with his teenage son Lincoln in 2020 — the same year I was polishing my little Fellowship memos. Initially, he dubbed it “Invest America”: a ‘401(k) from birth for every child’. Matt Lira, a veteran of the Cantor and McCarthy leadership offices and something of a DC policy-sorcery legend (whose tweet you saw above proudly declaring the launch) signed on to run the Invest America organization. He saw it as an “upgrade to the nation’s social contract”.

As it happens, I first met Matt a couple years back at this wonk event where everybody got two minutes to pitch a quote-unquote ‘underrated’ policy idea. I pitched TSP expansion and saw him in the audience nodding along like, “…uh-huh”. We talked briefly afterwards, and it took maybe thirty seconds to see he’d thought through this whole territory in far more detail than I had. Later he gave his own talk on the idea that would become Trump Accounts, which was less a ‘pitch’ than a fully-fleshed Bernini. My overall impression was, damn, this dude is a G.

Needless to say, I never was able to make TSP expansion happen. But remember Kevin Hassett, from the TSP paper earlier? He now runs the National Economic Council. And on April 30, President Trump, with Hassett at his side, signed an executive order standing up — as a followup to Trump Accounts — something called the “Trump IRA.” This program turns out to be expressly modeled off the Thrift Savings Plan: a federal portal, opening in January, listing private retirement accounts with TSP-grade fees and no minimum balances, built atop a 2022 policy called the Saver’s Match that puts up to $1,000 a year in federal matching funds behind low- and moderate-income savers5.

“You’ll then be able to access the same type of retirement accounts that federal employees enjoy through the Thrift Savings Plans, which are incredible,” Trump said.

Trump credited the push to Hassett; Hassett credited House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith and Rep. Lloyd Smucker; and EIG, which had clearly anticipated the announcement, is pushing bipartisan legislation to extend the same logic to the 54 million American workers without an employer plan6.

So why am I belaboring this point, beyond the fact that I’m extremely grateful that people more talented than me are succeeding at flowing money towards families who need it, whereas I personally tried hard for years and yet failed to do so?

(Well, there is that.)

But the main reason is: all of this is happening under a Republican administration. Specifically, it is happening under the Trump Administration.

Part of why that matters is making sure my fellow Dems give these ideas — and the legislators, researchers, staffers, policy analysts, and policy entrepreneurs behind them — the credit they deserve, and learn from their successes. But the more important reason is that by far the biggest success of the first Trump administration was Operation Warp Speed. And now we’re living the fascinating scenario in which the most successful policy of the pandemic era is politically invisible, because neither party can or will take credit for it.

Most Dems straightforwardly don’t want to hand Trump the W. Most Republicans now prefer to act like the pandemic wasn’t a thing, like the very stink of it is anathema to their whole cultural brand: the dude got booed by his own supporters for mentioning he’d gotten the booster, after all.

As a result, only the wonkiest of the wonky7 are banging the drum around “Operation Warp Speed was gangsta, actually.”

And I think that’s very bad, because the whole reason all of us are here is to try to do good things that make people’s lives better. We don’t get to just totally peace out for the ~50% of the time the other team has their hands on the steering wheel.

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The reason I e.g. discovered something called the Thrift Savings Plan, and wrote a whole nerdy application essay about it, and moved to DC to launch ‘civic moonshots’, and now spend time going and attending things like Policy Entrepreneurs Network to listen to two-minute pitches on obscure, out-of-the-limelight policy deep-cuts, etc., is that I think it is not only good and important but very good and very important to deploy the immense resources of the American government toward small, meaningful, gears-level improvements in Americans’ lives.

Such an observation might seem banal or even self-evident. But it’s categorically distinct from an orientation that sees policy and politics as some sort of totalistic meaning-providing worldview and identity, enacting a Millenarian struggle towards all-encompassing utopian ends — which also happens to be the kind of mode of politics that tends to make for better television and more viral short-form clips.

The advantage of the former orientation is that even nerdier, even wonkier, even more tenacious people than me — Gerstner and Lira and EIG’s John Lettieri, plus Bessent and Smith and Smucker and all kinds of more limelight-level figures8— can put their heads down, get the ball to the finish line, and deliver for millions of American kids. As Republicans. During this particular Administration.

And they deserve their shine for that.

Too many conversations I have about politics outside DC are laden with the same kind of heavy, fated resignation. It’s not just pessimism, and it’s not just cynicism — it’s this attitude that of course everyone serious knows how corrupt and toxic and poisoned and rigged the whole system is, that it’s outside the bounds of serious conversation to even consider the possibility that (upon occasion!) earnest and capable people might be working diligently and thanklessly to deliver outcomes that enrich our lives. That to even countenance such a thing is fundamentally ridiculous.

This is wrong. This is toxic. This is a shitty, juvenile attitude unbecoming of adults.

As memorably stated by my college creative writing professor Marshall Boswell, “cynicism and naïveté are not mutually exclusive9.”

The naive view is not the view that good people and dedicated public servants of whatever political persuasion often unironically work long and hard under adverse conditions to try and make our lives a little better.

The naive view is the idea that the other side only ever does things that are dumb and bad; that no good whatsoever can come from any institution; that everyone with views we disagree with is on the take; that the world is irrevocably falling apart in exactly the way that serves to bolster our own personal self-concepts — as perceptive, as discerning, as people who could never be the mark. As the recipients of fate, as forever-outcasts whom society was simply not designed for, as righteous crusaders fighting for the little guy. Or whatever hit of dopamine will do the job.

But some people do just show the fuck up.

And sometimes those people are wearing the other team’s jersey.

That doesn’t mean we all sing kumbaya, that there are no such things as disagreements, that every political problem could be solved if everyone stopped being compromised and pursued pragmatic solutions together.

Sometimes, indeed, Stealth Democracy works.

But other times, you’re feeling good because you’ve worked with your homies across the aisle on something you all agreed was a good idea, and you made it happen, and life got better for everybody — and then they go and e.g. propose massive tax cuts amid a historic, irresolvable deficit, or advance the notion that the real path to American prosperity runs through 100 million deportations (?!?).

You think that’s completely insane. So you do what the political process demands: you roll up your sleeves, organize your people, sharpen your message, and figure out your call to action. You then get into the trenches, apply your belt to the other side’s ass, mangle their idea into a bloody pulp, pass your own idea instead, and eventually yell “Kobe!” as you point up at the scoreboard.

That’s politics. It’s just not all of politics.

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Two decades or so from now, millions of young Americans will be busy posting a bunch of stuff on whatever counts for that era’s version of social media. Some will be going to college. Some will be starting businesses. Some will be getting married. Some will be caring for their relatives. Plenty will, I’m sure, be saying “YOLO” and going on a hike to find themselves or whatever. Much of it, unbeknownst to most of them, will have been made possible by the money in what today are called their Trump Accounts.

Few people will be preoccupied with tracing the barrage of images back to the entrepreneurial efforts of a very small team of dedicated people who made those memories and milestones possible.

So let’s acknowledge the bounty of it now, while the magnitude of the achievement is still fresh in our minds. This shit is a big deal. And if there’s a child under 18 in your life: go to trumpaccounts.gov this week, file Form 4547, and open the account — it takes about ten minutes and costs nothing. For newborns, the first $1,000 is already sitting there waiting.

Like so many DINKy thirty-and-fortysomethings who live in dense urban environments, my wife and I are obsessed with pickleball. One fateful Sunday morning, however, we realized we weren’t so obsessed that we were ready to shell out the requisite $40 it takes to reserve a court at Kraken.

So we did what several karma-maxxing Reddit superposters1 instructed us to do: pulled up DC Parks and Rec’s pickleball page, which helpfully lists every publicly available court in the District.

“Cool,” we said. We picked out a court reasonably close to us, gathered our rackets, and set out schlepping across the city to partake in battle.

Two hours, forty-five minutes, three bottles of water, and at least one gallon of back-sweat later, we had managed to zigzag hither and thither across at least five different Wards sampling the finest public pickleball infrastructure on offer. What we didn’t manage to do was play any games of pickleball — because what the Parks and Rec website can’t tell you is whether the courts are packed.

There goes a good chunk of a Sunday.

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I had this experience in mind when I first bumped into an awesome dude named Josh Jacobson. Josh is a man of many talents — in addition to some exceptional Nancy Reagan-themed karaoke chops, the story behind which I’ll let him regale you with personally2, he’s an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, Treasurer for a number of Democratic organizations, and account manager for a company called Datadog.

Josh is also, however, a stone cold killer amateur civic technologist. He crossed my radar due to a totally awesome slate of vibe-coded tools you can check out at districtjosh.com, which I’m hoping (fingers crossed!) I can get him to come yap about on the livestream in a week or two3.

Some of these tools let you swim deep around the DC budget, make sense of municipal regulations, or keep track of new businesses opening around the corner — useful stuff to know as a responsible resident of the District. But the reason I’m writing this piece is probably the simplest and most basic of them all: the DC Children’s Pool Tracker.

To understand why a pool tracker deserves ~1,500 words4, you have to run the tape on a specific kind of morning.

Let’s say you’re getting two small children ready for the pool. You’re counting a win already because you have managed to successfully negotiate the sunscreen — a multi-stakeholder diplomatic process with more stages than SALT II, concluding as always with one fatefully exposed ear. You have located both halves of the good goggles5. You have packed the Goldfish, the backup Goldfish, the emergency applesauce pouches, three towels for two children, and the specific plushie rabbit whose absence would collapse the entire expedition. Finally, with a sustained exhale worthy of Michael Phelps, you buckle everyone into car seats that have been marinating in July sun — all occupants loudly registering their (valid) objections to this human-rights violation — and start to back out of the driveway confident that you’re about to accomplish something.

Because underneath the whole operation runs one single, non-negotiable premise that makes it all endurable: we are going to the pool.

But there’s a kicker. You see, DC — like many American cities — struggles to staff enough lifeguards. When there aren’t enough to go around, guards get reassigned on the fly. And disproportionately these reassignments move them from the kiddie pool to the main event.

No lifeguard, no swimming in the pool.

What sucks is that nothing whatsoever announces any of this. To be sure, DPR’s official pool page will cheerfully display the posted hours. But the posted hours don’t tell you whether the pool is actually open. So the first notice most families get about the closure is when they’re standing right there in front of the pool in swim diapers.

Josh — who hauls his own kid around the neighborhood on a cargo bike, and appreciates the perils of a botched outing turned micro-apocalyptic — was describing this experience to me. You’re sitting there looking at your kids in their neon orange floaties. They’re hype in that bright-eyed way that has never yet experienced an upper bound. They’re gazing out at the pool, the itch of disappointment dawning on them, with the kind of unguarded longing reserved in adulthood for memories of summertime and pools. And it’s you who has to break the news to them.

You told them you were going to the pool. You didn’t say it could happen. You said it would.

There’s no walking that back — no “we’ll come Thursday,” no ice-cream-cone tit-for-tat diplomacy. A promise to a small child is a cake you can’t unbake. And the inevitable subsequent meltdown in the parking lot is less a tantrum than a reasonable response to their first hard evidence that the world is run by liars.

Which takes me back to the Pool Tracker and why it rules.

What the DC Pool Tracker does is super simple. Like the pickleball map, it lets you visualize every public pool and splash pad in the District and sort by a few relevant characteristics. It tells you whether each one is likely to be open or closed based on posted hours. But it also lets anyone report whether — for whatever set of idiosyncratic reasons, up to and including the necessary-or-strategic-or-incidental lifeguard assignment — the pool is actually open right now. Including, specifically, the children’s pool, which the aforementioned official DC pool site doesn’t even list. The reporting mechanism is two giant buttons: “It’s open.” “It’s closed.”

That’s it. That’s the app.

This seems like the opposite of anything even resembling a big deal. And…well, sure! Nobody is claiming to disrupt anything. Nobody is raising a Series B. No paradigm was harmed in the making of this tool. All that changes is that instead of hauling two amped-up kids in floaties on a hapless odyssey to Parts Unknown, you know from the jump whether you’re drawing dead.

If such a thing existed for the pickleball courts? I’d enjoy a suite of better Sundays.

To be clear: the DC Pool Tracker is not about to revolutionize the Washington-to-water-recreation pipeline. Nor is that the point. Like anything crowdsourced, it needs a crowd, which it’s still growing. As I type this, plenty of listings read, “No reports yet today.” We have not singlehandedly vindicated the act of of vibe-coding as an omnisolution to an omniproblem.

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But the lack of revolutionary ambition is precisely the point. Tools like this are touchable — small enough to play with, legible enough to judge, close enough to the rhythm of your daily grind that using one teaches you something that sticks. They solve a concrete problem, and they help us understand how a game-changing technology might then solve the other problems we confront. And they might be the easiest way for most of us to get in the reps with a technology everyone keeps insisting is about to reorganize the whole of the human experience.

And about that insistence!

I am in no position to evaluate whether the singularity is nigh, whether superintelligence is going to cure cancer, or whether I should be quaking in my bones about the end of civilization.

I just don’t really think that you6 are, either. And neither are the professionals7.

Consider the crew the entire Discourse8 had a full-blown crush on last Spring. In April 2025, a group called the AI Futures Project published AI 2027, a month-by-month forecast of the intelligence explosion. For a solid news cycle it was the only document anyone could talk about — up to and reportedly including the Vice President.

Said crush was earned. The lead author, Daniel Kokotajlo, had written a forecast back in 2021 — a year-plus before ChatGPT existed — that called the next half-decade of AI with unnerving accuracy. Co-author Eli Lifland sits at #1, all-time, on the RAND forecasting leaderboard. And astronomically popular blogger Scott Alexander rewrote the whole thing so its prose would sing. This is arguably the best team our species has ever fielded at the task at hand!

But, you know, life happens. Within mere months of publication, they’d pushed their central timeline out toward 2030. Then, by this Spring, they’d swung it back to 2028 — “We told you we’d be updating in both directions!”

These are smart people. I read (and sort of obsess over) their posts. They didn’t get dumber between April and December. It’s just: the problem is really hard! The launch announcement for “AI 2027” did, after all, carry the qualifier, …“or maybe 2028, it’s complicated”. A lot can happen right now.

The goalposts have wheels. And I, personally, am clear that I am not in a position to get all Nostradamus up in here about the singularity.

What I absolutely am in a position to do is decide that if the damn pickleball court is packed, my wife and I can instead roll over to A.Litteri and get a sandwich, and then roll over to Crooked Run and get a sour, and sit down, and smack our lips all satisfied while making that ‘…ahhh!’ sound from Miller Lite commercials — rather than spending the intervening two-or-whatever hours incinerating time.

Most of us are wildly ill-equipped to evaluate the impact of the most consequential technology since the internet — and no amount of armchair prognosticating is going to fix that. What does help, though, at least a little, is contact: an obsession with the felt, practical problems sitting right in front of us, and with tools that help make some small corner of our lives marginally better the instant we fire them up.

So as for the singularity? Hit me up in 2027 (or 2028). In the meantime, if you’re in the District, jump into the tracker, do your neighbor a solid, and let them know about the pool.

Why?

Somewhere across town — you guess the neighborhood — a parent is going to glance at a map on their phone, and then they’re going to make a promise. God willing, the sunscreen will get negotiated. God willing, the rabbit will make the trip.

And this time, the premise underneath the whole operation is going to hold.

Get in, losers. We’re going swimming.

Fifteen years ago I announced I was leaving my dream job designing Magic: The Gathering to take a 75% pay cut, move to New York, and start an education nonprofit with one of my oldest friends. When I told people I was planning to do this, the most common response involved a skeptical tilt of the head.

“A nonprofit? Like… a soup kitchen?”

This drove me nuts.

A soup kitchen. No, I’d think to myself, crossing my arms, harrumphing. Not a soup kitchen. A scalable social enterprise. We were going to bridge the inspiration gap in American education by helping young people discover and pursue their passion and purpose in order to deepen engagement with the whole experience of school. And we had a plan. There was a thesis. We were deadly serious about scale and sustainability. We were committed to fostering a fast, creative, high-performance culture. There were open floor plans and, like, espresso. It was the Obama era; the arc of the moral universe was bending towards et cetera; and we intended to do our part to help.

But I have to say that in the intervening years, I’ve developed a lot more respect for soup kitchens.

This might seem strange for me to say as a quote-unquote Social Innovation Professional. I’ve argued that ‘outcome-shaped organizations’ ought to be built to dissolve rather than to last forever; I’ve advocated for a creative paradigm for social value when it comes to how to scope and structure purpose-driven work; and I run a shop that without a shred of irony launches projects it refers to as “civic moonshots”. I like to think I have a healthy respect for, and command of, the various fancy mechanics of ambitious philanthropic work.

It’s just that ambitious philanthropic work has a bit of a PR problem.

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In case you missed the memo1, legacy institutions aren’t exactly at their zenith of legitimacy. People profoundly, pervasively don’t trust them. Big galas with decked out celebs are cringe. Bono-esque rah-rahs to heal the world are massively off vibe. “Billionaire” is an epithet up there with “sonofabitch”, at least to big swaths of the American public.

And much of this is driven by the intuition that very powerful people are out there enacting a society-spanning agenda to achieve aims they concocted, sweeping up the lives of untold millions in the current — without anyone asking for any of it.

One nice thing about a soup kitchen is that someone walks away with a full belly at the end of the night. But the other nice thing about a soup kitchen is that there’s nowhere you can hide a master plan. What you and your dudes are doing is trying to get a bunch of food into the bowls of a bunch of other dudes who appreciate the fact that you are doing them a solid. Any goatee-stroking, masterminding, brain-so-large-it-becomes-a-brain-shaped-beanbag-you-can-sit-on society-shaping is kept to an absolute minimum. There’s not much in the way of nefarious scheming to pass around.

Whereas when I’m sitting in a boardroom with a bunch of philanthropists talking about at-scale operations and influence strategies to deploy sustainable capital to engender cross-sectoral field catalysis involving multi-stakeholder coordination aligned with shared long-term goals...it just, uh, sorta does sound like a society-spanning agenda to achieve aims we concocted, sweeping up the lives of untold millions in the current — without anyone asking for any of it.

The thing is, I still basically think it’s good for people to try and solve big social problems. I’m long on philanthropy, not cynical about it. I just also think that in an environment shaped by profound mistrust — one compounded by the previous era of philanthropy’s “Decolonizing Wealth” and “Winners Take All” strategy of ‘getting drunk at parties with your colleagues while self-flagellating a lot, nodding emphatically while changing nothing of substance about your work’ — genuine measures of impact and effectiveness need to account for more than e.g. the QALYs, economic efficiency, and implementation fidelity of a given intervention.

These are all great things to put into the per-dollar impact spreadsheet. But such a spreadsheet is also missing an important column.

That missing column reflects the reality that there’s upside in not being, like, sus. It incorporates a basic level of comprehensibility, but also captures the extent to which what you’re doing leads to an overall environment of trust and legitimacy and goodwill.

Most importantly, it considers whether your efforts read, to a normal person, as either:

• Helping out with something that obviously sucks for everybody — or,

• Galaxy-braining some sort of shadowy, cloak-clad scheme.

In this model, something like a soup kitchen scores a perfect ten. Anything you’d describe as “self-sustaining capital deployed toward cross-sectoral field catalysis” might score, charitably, a four.

Call it the trust coefficient — the wonked-out version of the vibes you’re giving about how sus you are.

Price it in, and the boring, unglamorous moves begin to deliver a lot more leverage.

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All of which is a big preface for why I think ’s new initiative, Intercept, kicks ass.

The pitch goes roughly like this. Respiratory infections — colds, flu, various seasonal crud2 — suck. We know they suck, but they actually suck a lot more than we give them credit for: we end up spending like 5% of our lives sick with this stuff. At the societal level, beyond any individual sore throat or runny nose, they run up a tab in aggregate of around $600 billion a year in lost productivity. Topping it off, they occasionally wolf down the Popeye spinach and threaten to end civilization — as you may remember3.

The nice thing is, we more or less know which technologies to throw money at to deal with this problem: a) better preventatives, and b) cleaner indoor air. But the market, left to its own devices, won’t throw the requisite Benjamins. So Nan et al are staking $500 million to make it rain.

The project lands on the heels of a white-hot banger Nan dropped last month portending what she calls the third wave of American philanthropy — the one where a tsunami of AI money is about to come crashing over the sector, and we are nowhere close to investing sufficiently in the sheer scale of people and institutions necessary to keep us all from wiping out. Her solution involved, among other things, a ‘Silicon Valley for Public Goods’ of rapid creative capital and scores of high-energy entrepreneurs.

Amongst a West-Coast-coded4 audience, the response to the article was overwhelmingly positive, featuring a lot of stuff like this:

Still, it did kick up a little dust — wrote a whole rejoinder disagreeing, sharply, about which institutions deserve the money, though he conceded the “existential seriousness” of the moment.

East Coast-coded5 reactions were a bit more muted. Some commentators criticized the fundamental assumptions underpinning the argument. Others encouraged caution, whereas others got more structural. But the criticism that had my ears perked up all terrier-spotting-the-mailman-like — this one from — went basically, “So… what we nominally need is… a society-spanning agenda to achieve aims a bunch of wealthy people concocted, sweeping up the lives of untold millions in the current — without anyone asking for any of it?"

Which, fair!

What makes Intercept so perfect, then, is how deftly the first big, loud, fully-built-out instantiation of Nan’s “third wave” thesis just calmly volleys that objection back across the court. “Imagine never having to catch a cold again” is about as soup-kitchen-tier as massive institutional philanthropy gets. And the prescriptions themselves — medicines like the ones you already take, but better; clean air in the rooms you already sit in, but cleaner — feel concrete and grounded and reality-based and refreshingly devoid of ulterior motive6.

In short, it does what it says on the tin.

Interventions that ‘do what they say on the tin’, as framed in 2021, make it easy for everyone involved to:

1. Understand what’s happening and why;

2. See whether or not it’s in fact happening;

3. Actually achieve the relevant objective(s).

That isn’t to say they don’t have other upsides. It’s just that those upsides — I see you, ! — don’t have to be the ones you put on the tin.

What is great is that initiatives with a high trust coefficient tend to also ‘do what they say on the tin’, which in turn tends to be related to a number of long-standing measures of per-dollar philanthropic efficacy.

Take the oft-cited malaria bed net, the gold-standard answer to “how cheaply can you save a human life.” While there are indeed second-order downsides, there just aren’t very many more effective at-scale interventions that turn one unit of money into one year of all the felt joy and terror and wonder and daily sacred drudgery of the human condition7.

Plus, like, it’s a net. Nobody is getting injected with chemicals. Mysterious waves aren’t rippling through the air. The giga-mosquito strategy is firmly off the table. Nefarious schemes don’t really suggest themselves.

In other words, the trust coefficient is high. It’s very clear what’s happening, and towards what ends.

Which takes us, quite naturally, from bed nets to bath mats.

A few weeks back, Senator Angus King got up on the floor of the Senate, hoisted an $11 mat over his head, declared himself the “Johnny Appleseed of bath mats,” and proposed that Medicare mail one to every senior in the country.

The idea is that, because something like 80% of fall-related injuries for older people (i.e. putative Medicare recipients) happen in the shower, and your average fall-related injury for such a person costs in the neighborhood of $20,000, you can wind up saving $15 billion over just three years while preventing tens of thousands of injuries.

Right on time, the Washington Post editorial board swept in to remind us that grandma is a grown woman who can buy her own bath mat, thank you. And yes, sending every Medicare recipient a bath mat doesn’t mean they’ll use them, or use them properly, or that using them properly will always manage to prevent a fall.

But whether funded by Medicare, philanthropy, or Milburn Pennybags, this is the kind of initiative you pursue in an environment where you know you need to inculcate trust. Nobody is mistaking “mail grandma a bath mat” for a play to seize control of the planet. It aces the soup-kitchen test; has a high trust coefficient; and does what it says on the tin.

Playing along this axis has netted wins far beyond bed nets. Getting the lead out of gasoline. Putting iodine in salt. Fortifying flour with folic acid. In fact, Renaissance Philanthropy is out there right now pursuing an effort backing uptake of potassium-enriched salt, high-fiber wheat, and low-glycemic-index rice to ward off heart disease, aiming to save 500,000 lives — without requiring behavior change.

That last part is key. It’s not merely that avoiding the need for behavior change significantly increases the likelihood the effort will succeed. It’s that specifically what tends to make stuff feel weird and conspiratorial is the part where a bunch of elites start asking everyone to do stuff differently.

“It’s good for you, we swear” just doesn’t cut it anymore. A great way to nuke your trust coefficient is to be the guy who took away the good straw and stuck the soggy one in someone’s mouth.

Now, when I make this point to my colleagues, a common rebuttal is that I’m ignoring “systems change” — stamping out the root cause instead of fussing with mere symptoms. And sometimes, sure. But the “root cause” is often nothing more than a story about how you’re looking at the problem.

Because the root cause of the flu is…what? Maybe lousy hygiene, or lazy vaccination rates, or people crowding into cramped rooms over the holidays. But make it trivial to scrub the virus out of the air, and suddenly the ‘root cause’ is just the fact that the virus exists somewhere in three-dimensional space!

“Root cause analysis” also tends to be a convenient place to stash ideology. It trains your eye on big, legible, macro stuff — income, geography, race, rights, legal status. All of those are enormously important, obviously. But the rich guy and the broke guy can both eat it in the shower. And both of them can certainly catch a cold.

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Recently I wrapped up Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot. In it he firmly rejects the idea that everyone working at the Anti-Corruption Foundation aspires to be some kind of revolutionary. Instead, he refers to something he calls the “Principle of Normality”. “In 2012,” he says, “no one in their right mind wanted to become a heroic dissident—it's dangerous and it's scary. Everyone just wanted to be normal. And that's exactly what we were—normal people with a normal office life.”

Normal people with a normal office life. Not world-changers. Not crusaders. People waking up and going to sleep every day getting their reps in on the grind of problem-solving.

I — along with many of us in the social/civic sector — am a product of the Obama Generation. We got into this work precisely to try and change the world. Being ‘normal people with a normal office life’ was precisely the fate many of us were trying to avoid.

The only issue8 is that in the process it cratered the legitimacy of our field. Because “changing the world” implies a whole host of people on the receiving end of being changed. And in an environment where it’s easier than ever for anyone to cast themselves as the protagonist, ain’t nobody signing up to play the ox beside the manger.

The only way out is a philanthropic landscape shaped less by self-appointed Masters of the Universe, and more by normal people with normal lives solving normal problems.

There’s a quiet power in doing normal good in normal ways — handing somebody a full bowl of soup, a bath mat for their floor, a net to keep the bugs away. These embers heat the hearth and hold the fire. And spending half a billion dollars to ensure nobody has a runny nose again — not to sculpt the system of the world, nor to contort the lives of all of us who live in it — is the right approach to start nudging the compass back towards trust.

Fifteen years ago, somebody squinted at me and asked if what I was building was basically a soup kitchen. I wish I'd had the foresight to say “yes”.

One of my favorite “only-in-DC” guaranteed crowd-pleasers is a bit from high-demand happy-hour impresario , a certified G when it comes to all things bureaucratic history1. The bit begins by walking a living room full of people through the history of federal departments — each division, when it started, why, what its deal was, how it worked, why every single domain-relevant person in the country wanted to work there.

The objective correlative2 that anchors the story is the iconic, distinctive, athwart-history-anachronistic park ranger hat timelessly rocked by luminaries from Smokey Bear to Ranger Rick. Yes, you can trace the origins back to the vaqueros. Yes, the Buffalo Soldiers connection is legit. Yes, the direct precursor debuted in the cavalry corps. Funny you should ask!

But so, the whole reason we’re talking about this is — picture Kevin, or a guy you can imagine being named Kevin, surgically taking a pull from his beer stein as he delivers the kicker — it used to be that way more branches of the federal government wore uniforms. The Park Service, it seems, was one of the very last debuts.

Uniforms (the story goes) stood for culture. For pride. For a certain sense of identity and mission. Uniforms meant that a dimension of someone’s personhood was visibly and inextricably linked with their membership in an institution, and thereby evaluated in the context of that institution. That meant a certain sense of expectation. That also meant a certain sense of duty. And it meant that in a straightforward, mechanical way, the wearer was singled out from the general population in a manner that deliberately called attention to itself. Mere normalcy, in other words, was not on the menu.

And we haven’t launched a uniformed, non-military, non-law-enforcement division of the federal government in over a hundred years3.

The point of the story — the beer is finished and set down; a clasped-finger gesture crystalizes the point — is not that uniforms are a magical performance-enhancing catch-all. It’s that they’re objective correlatives4 for a broader sense of excellence and camaraderie and devotion that eroded substantially as the bureaucracy expanded, as it shifted away from subject-specific competency and towards functional ‘expertise’. And so those of us in the state capacity conversation, those of us who are thinking about things like procurement timelines and waterfall builds and registers of eligibles, would do well not to limit ourselves to the mechanical and environmental and procedural adjustments necessary for a department to really kill it at its job.

Instead, we should expand our aperture to what it takes to create and cement and reinforce a culture that gets people out of bed in the morning stoked to be a part of a game-changing mission for the rest of their lives.

Cue light applause as beers get refilled and appetizers get passed around. A line starts to form in front of Kevin with questions about details. Gradually the air saturates with the sound of Moleskine notebook scribbles, soft scritch-scratches like the scurrying feet of little mice. Bureaucratic continuous-quality-improvement is lighting people up!

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This is the awesome thing nobody warns you about Washington.

Behind the stereotypes of the brass-buttoned staffer-striver striding fresh out of the changing room of a Jos. A. Bank, the silver-tied lobbyist slyly sliding a check across a steakhouse table, the slick cable hit-merchant rehearsing his outrage as he licks a finger and applies it to his eyebrows — your modal DC mover-shaker is basically a smart overqualified nerd who took a big pay cut to come here and actuate an outcome. They earnestly wanted nothing more than to devote their life to making some dimension of our collective experience better. So they learned a lot about how to do so, put themselves in a position where their input mattered, and are now willing to put up with a colossal amount of tumult and tension and tedium to try and move the needle a few clicks forward.

President Donald Trump is, uh, not like that.

This week he and Vice President Vance signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war that began in February and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait reopened on Wednesday. By Saturday, Iran had declared it closed again.

What else is there to “understand?” According to the deal, the naval blockade we imposed is lifted. Iran comes out of the war selling its oil again, with its frozen funds beginning to thaw and a three-hundred-billion-dollar reconstruction package written into the deal. We come out of it more than two hundred billion dollars poorer, minus a serious chunk of our munitions and a great deal of geopolitical leverage. Thirteen American servicemen have died.

Meanwhile, the strait we are now claiming to have fought the war to “open” was “open” before the first bomb fell. The document we signed to close the war out reads like a worse, costlier, riskier draft of the nuclear deal this same president shredded in his first term. And as I write this, Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner are at a resort above Lake Lucerne, still bargaining over the terms of a war they’ve already declared finished.

In other words, well, we lost the war.

Except “we lost the war” actually gives us too much credit. Losing implies you were trying to win and came up short. It presumes a victory condition you could name and then fail to reach5.

There wasn’t one. To win a war, you first have to know why you’re fighting it.

And on February 28, Trump sounded exactly like a man who did. The announcement ran eight minutes. Iran would never have a nuclear weapon — he said it three times. We would “raze its missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy”. Its proxies would be broken; its people would rise up and “take over [their] government.” A noble mission, he called it, for our children. It had everything a war is supposed to have: a casus belli, a list of objectives, a moral stake.

Except very quickly the objectives went for a walk. The list of official war aims grew from three to four to five even as the White House insisted such objectives were “clear and unchanging.” The target kept sliding. A week in, the President wanted Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”; by mid-March, surrender didn’t matter so long as we held “a position of dominance”; then he’d obliterate Iran’s power plants unless it “FULLY OPENED” the strait that was already open; then the war had produced “regime change,” because “the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with”; then the Iranians wanted a deal “so badly” but were “afraid to say it” for fear of being killed.

Members of his own party left a classified briefing with more questions than answers. Nancy Mace (of all people) said she felt “misled.”

To be clear, our strikes unambiguously did damage — much of Iran’s missile program and fleet have been destroyed. But measured against the bar we set that first night, not one of our objectives was actually achieved. Iran still holds the roughly 970 pounds of enriched uranium the war was supposed to put beyond its reach — ending the nuclear program is what the Switzerland talks are now trying to do. The theocracy still stands, now run by the dead Supreme Leader’s son. And there’s enough of an asymmetric navy in place to threaten the Strait and declare it closed — a Strait which didn’t figure into the objectives we announced on Day One, because it was open!

None of which stopped Vance, at the Swiss resort on Sunday, from announcing that the opening of the Strait and the ending of Iran’s nuclear program “have been accomplished.”

Have we actually achieved those objectives? Of course not. But it’s killer for the vibes.

That’s the core distinction at play. For the DC policy nerds in our story dweebing out over park ranger hats, the point of undertaking government activities is to accomplish objectives. That’s why all of us are here. But for this Administration, the announcement is the accomplishment. The only ‘objective’ is to hear the ensuing applause.

Hence the obsession with vanity achievements. Which brings us to the Reflecting Pool.

The war could at least hide behind a murky, indistinct, or complicated slate of goals — aim at enough things and you can always say you hit one, and besides, people might forget where the target was in the first place. The pool gave them nowhere to hide. The task was something out of a civics-themed kindergarten coloring book: make the water in front of the Lincoln Memorial blue and clean for the Fourth of July cameras.

They could not do it.

And they couldn’t do it because the omnipresent graft of this Administration never ceases.

Trump ordered the renovation, personally specified the shade — “American flag blue” — and handed the work to a Virginia contractor on a no-bid contract. The estimate suddenly skyrocketed from two million dollars to more than fourteen.

Naturally, the blue didn’t take — within days it was peeling off the bottom and the water had gone green, a natural bloom (scientists said) of the kind common in shallow sunlit water and possibly hurried along by the renovation itself. So a second firm was brought in, at $1.7 million, to deploy something called “nanobubble ozone.”

The pool stayed green.

Then, over the weekend, came the masterstroke. After days of public ridicule, the President had an announcement! What of course happened was that the pool — despite a complete lack of evidence — had been vandalized: shady saboteurs had carved a 250-ft gash in the pool while dumping a veritable cauldron of ooze-like mystery chemicals into the water secretly like members of the Foot.

The President threatened “years in jail” for the culprits. The lone arrest produced so far is David Hearn, a 67-year-old three-time Olympic canoeist, who said he’d just finished a 52-mile bike ride, noticed a piece of the new lining already peeling away, and reached into the water to feel it.

The Guardsman who cuffed him couldn’t say which law he’d broken.

It just is — not to beat the AP English vocab words to death more than I have already — the perfect objective correlative for the entire Administration.

Perfect, because the objective correlative is the only kind of objective they have left. Not the kind the ranger-hat nerds6 were toasting, with a target and a result and an animating mission and a job that actually gets finished. The other kind. The contemporary equivalent of President Bush’s giant Mission Accomplished banner: a signing where a destroyed nuclear program should be, flag-blue paint where a working pool should be, a victory lap where an open strait should be.

The hat in Kevin’s story meant something because there was a ranger underneath it — a three-dimensional person, sworn to a job that needed doing, who walked into work every day knowing why they were wearing the uniform.

Take the work away, and all you’re left holding is the hat.

A couple days ago, a game called 82-0 went viral. It’s in the same addictiveness tier as Flappy Bird or 2048 or Wordle, and it enables you to participate in the most delightful activity in the universe: rattling off the names of obscure athletes like some sort of esoteric incantation.

Groupchats everywhere commenced a-buzzing.

The way it works is that you semi-randomly draft an all-time NBA roster — five picks for five positions — and a simulation tells you what record your squad of legends would have landed across a full season. For each position, you ‘spin’ a decade and a team, and you make your pick from the roster of players who played on that team during that decade.

The goal is to go undefeated across that season — hence, “82-0”.

Many people have espoused many a take about the quality (or lack thereof) of the game’s simulation engine. But none of that matters, because the simulation isn’t what delivers the product experience. The actual product experience is the part where you and three other grown dudes1 stand around a phone going Sidney Moncrief; Bernard King; Big Country Reeves and cackling and gawking and gaping like you’re thirteen and just discovered your Dad’s Playboy stash.

It just is definitionally awesome to dream up crazy intergenerational lineups, to hearken back to the greatness of all-time superstars, and to picture what it would take to reach the zenith of maximum-possible dominance2

Compare that to the other tidal wave washing over sports right now.

Last week, during Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, ESPN ran a graphic. The San Antonio Spurs were up by twenty-six over the Oklahoma City Thunder. Spurs wunderkind and lab-engineered Shaolin basketball-alien-deity Victor Wembanyama had been pulled from the floor with nine minutes left — the normal way you pull a starter from a blowout, dispensing mercy and decreasing the risk of injury — and so he finished with 28 points.

Half a point under his prop line of 28.5.

Ergo, this graphic wasn’t about Carter Bryant’s ferocious second-quarter jam, Stephon Castle’s series-defining knockout alley-oop look, or any other compelling facet of the commanding Spurs performance.

No. What merited our attention, according not just to ESPN BET but to SportsCenter, was how the result delivered a brutal beat for Wemby’s ‘over’ bettors.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy (of all people) was right on top of how fully ass-backwards this whole trend is.

In what we’ll call the 82-0 frame, the important thing about Wembanyama’s 28 points is the fact that e.g. a preternaturally gifted giant put up a beautiful and difficult performance against championship-tier opposition, offering forth a moment and a name you and your homies just might be ritually recounting ten or twenty or thirty years from now.

By contrast, in what we’ll cheekily dub the DaftKings frame, those 28 points are worth something if and only if your parlay cleared — only if the number on the screen resolved into enough money to go buy yourself a Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

And I just don’t think this is the only arena within which we’ve decided to willfully plunge into perpetual once-removedness from experience.

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But first, let’s quantify this vibe lest we find ourselves accused of prudishness. — himself an S-tier sports bettor in a bygone era — convincingly argued that The Online Sports Betting Experiment Has Failed.

Why?

Well, first, in states that legalized mobile sports betting, bankruptcies seem to have soared — increasing on the order of 28 percent. This is not, to be clear, a 28% increase in bankruptcy amongst active sports bettors. This is a 28% increase across the entire state period. Meanwhile, net household investment3 (i.e. how much every household is able to invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, or anything else) in such states dropped on the order of 14 percent — which again includes all households, including those that never placed a single bet.

The cherry on top is that when a home team loses a football game in an upset, domestic violence goes up by 9% — if sports betting is legal4.

Just excellent. Super cool.

All of which is to say the betting phenomenon isn’t just annoying; it’s also extremely materially bad for everyone involved.

But as bad as all that is, the spiritual5 costs might be even worse.

To render a thing extrinsic — to price it, to bet on it, to frame something’s importance in terms of the dollar value you’ve assigned it — is a way of insisting that the thing, by itself, doesn’t matter. It’s the act of transmogrifying something inherently important into a means to an end.

In this frame, the bettor isn’t really at the mercy of whether the Spurs win. He simply has declared a position. He has taken a hedge against emotional engagement with an outcome. He’s converted something he can’t control into a hustle that he’s running, an assertion of his own felt capability.

That, underneath, is the appeal. Not the money — the remove. The relief of no longer being a person to whom a basketball game must simply happen.

The problem is that instead of taking that kind of orientation to the world and everything in it, it’s way more awesome to pivot 180 degrees in the exact opposite direction.

Every year, a bunch of my best friends from the worlds of professional sports and competitive Magic: The Gathering gather together in beautiful Leavenworth, WA for an event called The Smart And Thinvitational6.

At the Thinvy, the nine of us spend a truly ridiculous7 amount of time inventing formats that have never been played and brewing decks that will never be relevant again. Most of us have made real money playing Magic or playing poker or betting on sports, and a few of us have worked inside professional sports. This is very much not like that. This tournament gives out exactly zero dollars in prizes and conveys (if anything) negative amounts of prestige. The first-place winner does, however, receive — courtesy of Thinvy co-founder Stevie Birklid’s FastSigns franchise — a giant blown-up poster incorporating the single most humiliating picture of them on the internet.

Everyone cooks elite meals. Hot tub attire is frequently appropriate. Bud Light Lime cartons litter the ground like lanternflies. Conservatively, two hours a year are devoted to learning which player in the NBA first busted which other player’s ass.

One of our spouses refers to the whole thing, euphemistically, as a “healing men’s retreat.”

What makes the event magical is the utter absence of stakes. There’s nothing on the line. Instead, it’s designed from the ground up to celebrate and ritualize the wholly intrinsic: people, experiences, time, the enshrinement of memories. Every one of us boasts a bandolier of stories from some laughably labyrinthine game state a decade ago, made possible only by virtue of our commitment to incinerate money willing this event into being every year.

All of it — every single facet of what makes it the highlight of our year — would become impossible the instant its value got subsumed by the possibility of a concrete return.

The Thinvy is an object lesson in letting the main thing be the main thing. For the opposite trend, we might turn towards the increasingly pervasive omnipresence of the genre of punditry.

Making a bet, it turns out, is only one of the ways you can instrumentalize removedness. A bet, after all, represents a position on an issue, and another term for a position on an issue is a take.

A take is different from an opinion. Everybody has an opinion. But the people who have takes are called pundits, and they get to be special. For one thing, they get to douse the entire universe in snark.

After all, as a pundit, you’re the one who knocks. You’re not the one affected by some scary phenomenon out there, because everyone looks to you to make sense of it. You’re the one with answers. You’re the one evaluating. And when you’re evaluating, that must mean you’re in control, right?

Right?

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Once you start looking for signs of this phenomenon, you see them everywhere. Punditry has become the omnigenre. In sports, we’ve slid from talking about games — what an athlete achieved with his body, why it was great and good and worth watching — to litigating what a game means for a franchise’s draft slot and its lottery odds. We don’t gaze at the highlight reel with our jaws agape; we squint at it with pencils in our hands, scribbling notes.

We see it also in politics. There’s far more commentary about whether any given issue polls well or boosts election chances as there is about whether it improves people’s lives. In film, the discourse has migrated wholesale from is this movie any good, did it wreck me, did I think about it for a week to its opening weekend, its CinemaScore, its Oscar lane, and what it portends for the long-term future of the IP.

What all of these share is the unspoken promise that what you, discerning consumer, really want is to feel like a smart, knowledgeable insider — nodding sagely from a box seat, lording over the actual thing itself.

Nowhere is this drift more total, or more quietly devastating, than in dating.

In a worthy followup to her era-defining 2025 piece on the search for Greatness within the National Conservative movement just days into the second Trump administration, returned to The Point with “Doomers in Love.”

Mana spends an evening among young men in Washington who can talk about women for five straight hours without talking to any of them. They are card-carrying pundits through and through: lonely armchair experts, bristling with fanciful untestable theories of the exotic female mind (and body). Amidst idle speculations of the optimal tattoo allotment for their future wives, they observe how real life has eroded to the point where they can no longer simply walk up to a human being and engage. The women mime a mirror-image version of the same core conflict, rattling through terminology about structure and labor and intimacy while skirting the harder, more terrifying move of wanting someone — out loud — and risking it.

The piece ends with a backroom dinner in midtown Manhattan convened (of course) to solve the fertility crisis8: fifteen people, twelve of them men, circling around a culprit for the collapse of Western civilization. Afsari finally asks how many of them are actually in a relationship. Four hands, tentative. The room goes silent.

Those who have inadequate and disappointing experience in particulars, Afsari writes, tend to love general theories.

The general theory of the pundit finds its haven in the simulacrum of mastery. As the world grows more overwhelming, the temptation is to go and whelm — to Master the Universe by analyzing it and pricing it and calling it by its names.

82-0’s retort — amidst the cacophony of millions of grown adults announcing Nick Van Exel and cracking Miller Lites— is a full-throated hell no. It’s a collective demand to descend from the commentators’ box down onto the sidelines, hooting and hollering, revelrous, engaging with the thing at the level of the thing.

Otherwise, in craving the position of Noah — the organizer, the cataloguer, the rescuer— we become ourselves the Flood. In beckoning at coherence like Adam, assigning signifiers to the howl of all that is, we become ourselves the Fall.

That’s the pundit in a nutshell: swathing themselves in a 24/7 deluge of discourse once-removed from the act of declaration.

But we have a secret weapon. We can beat them at their own game. They want to signify? Let them. We know what a name really means.

Breathe in. Breathe out. The words, I bet, are on your tongue already.

Mindaugas Kuzminskas.

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