Will Trump make this red state flip blue?
Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. If that old political adage bears out this year, it would be a hell of a problem for the Republican Party. Recent polling shows the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races…
Red card
A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Trump makes the World Cup even more corrupt…
How the new housing law could open up homeownership for single Black mothers
It’s the largest housing package this century. A bipartisan unicorn. And the first measure in years designed to reach those most often shut out of homeownership, including single moms. By Chabeli Carrazana for The 19th For decades, single mothers have been kept from homeownership by a market that was not designed to deliver them the American Dream. That could all be about to change…
Florida regulators stood by as dozens of sloths died, new records reveal
Internal emails obtained by Inside Climate News show the state of Florida saw no need to stop the unfolding mass deaths of sloths at a planned Orlando tourist attraction. By Katie Surma and Kiley Price for Inside Climate News The first warning reached the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission before a single sloth had arrived in Orlando. On Dec. 9, 2024…
A Little Law Gives Hope That Government Can Suck Less and Make People’s Lives Better
When Sam Levine, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), was eleven, he signed up for a service that would send him ten free CDs in the mail. “I didn’t know it then, but I had just signed up for my first subscription,” Levine said. A few months and a pile of bills later, he was begging his parents to help him cancel the membership he’d unknowingly purchased.
It’s been 28 years since Levine was lured in with the promise of a Cher CD, but the problem of “subscription traps”—subscriptions which are easy to get, but a minefield to cancel—has only gotten worse. At a press conference Friday, Levine joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan to present a municipal-level solution: New York City’s Click To Cancel Rule.
“These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy.”
The idea behind the regulation is simple. A subscription should be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up for. A person should not be required to cancel a gym membership in-person if they got that membership online, or mail in a letter, or spend hours on hold with customer service in order to stop being charged for a service they aren’t using. Click to cancel is not a new idea: Under Joe Biden and Commissioner Khan, the Federal Trade Commission approved a federal click to cancel rule in 2024—only for that rule to be struck down on procedural grounds by the Eighth Circuit Court a year later, after a trade group representing major cable and internet providers sued to block it from going into effect. (Trump’s FTC may revive the rule, which was widely popular with consumers, later this year.)
“At the Federal Trade Commission, we would receive tens of thousands of complaints each year from people who had lost hard-earned money to these predatory schemes,” Khan, a member of Mamdani’s transition team, said at Friday’s press conference. “People wrote to us about spending days trying to cancel a gym membership, about charges that kept appearing months after they’d been canceled…These are not just the tactics of fly-by-night scammers. These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy.” Uber, for instance, is currently being sued by the FTC and a coalition of state Attorneys General for allegedly “misleading customers by trapping them in recurring subscriptions to its Uber One service that were exceedingly difficult to cancel.” Adobe, too, has been accused of using these practices: An Adobe executive, according to court documents unearthed in 2024, called hidden early-termination fees “a bit like heroin” for the company.
Now, under Andrew Ferguson, the FTC is less aggressive about consumer-protection enforcement than it was under Khan. But on the state and city levels, consumers still have advocates. In California, Maryland and Colorado, statewide Click To Cancel rules are in effect. In New York, too, statewide consumer protections are already among the strongest in the country. But when New York City’s rule goes into effect this October, it will be the first municipal law of its kind, Mamdani said. It will add a local enforcement mechanism, DCWP Commissioner Levine said, giving New Yorkers the opportunity to complain directly about subscription traps by calling 311. And it’s expected to collectively save New Yorkers somewhere between $21.5 and $162.5 million per year, according to the Roosevelt Institute.
Friday’s announcement—held, notably, in a gym, in front of a cluster of elliptical machines—is part of a broader crackdown on predatory pricing. New York City is also targeting so-called “junk fees” that raise the final price of everything from apartments to sporting events, requiring companies to advertise final prices including additional charges or fees up-front. “It is estimated that the average family of four loses more than $3,200 per year on junk fees and hidden costs,” Mamdani said at the press conference.
Enforcement will begin October 1, with businesses that don’t provide easy cancellation processes facing civil penalties starting at $525 per violation. For 187 New York City gyms, warning letters were already sent out this past February. New Yorkers will be able to file complaints through the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections, which may then take subscription-trapping companies to court.
Under Trump’s regulation-averse federal government—one that in fact brands itself as having the “most ambitious deregulation agenda in history”—big companies tend to be able to extract value from people and come out on top without repercussions. Unwanted subscription fees, Khan said, “represent an upwards transfer of wealth; often from people who are already living on the financial margins of this city, to people who ultimately looking to buy a private jet or a second yacht.” So it’s nice to see that, at least on the local level, protecting people from predatory corporate tactics might still be possible.
In condemning Platner, GOP ignores the elephant in the White House
Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions. Republicans of all stripes condemned Democrats this week for having once supported now-former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner, saying Democrats should’ve walked away from the candidate after…
The real deep state
A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Tulsi Gabbard’s humiliation is complete…
Department of Justice warns election officials they could be criminally charged over noncitizen voters
Letters sent to a growing and bipartisan group of states threaten criminal liability, but election officials and experts say they look more like pressure than prosecution. By Jessica Huseman for Votebeat The U.S. Department of Justice has sent letters to election officials in several states warning that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly leave noncitizens on…
Party pooper
Donald Trump stumbled into what should have been an easy win by being president on America’s 250th birthday. But he turned it into a cheap, poorly planned exercise in self-aggrandizement—because he’s Donald Trump. From the sparsely attended “Great” American State Fair, to yet another divisive rambling speech for his MAGA minions, Trump’s stewardship of the celebration was a sloppy mess.
How Lindsey Graham, Eager to Serve Trump, Became a Useful Idiot for Putin
Within moments of the early Sunday morning announcement that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had died, there was much obvious commentary about his journey from Trump foe to Trump suck-up. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, when Graham was competing with the onetime reality TV celebrity, he blasted Donald Trump as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He urged voters to tell Trump to “go to hell.” He predicted his party would be “destroyed,” if it nominated Trump.
Yet after Trump won, Graham became a full-fledged Trump lackey. He played golf with his new buddy and relished the access to power he now possessed. After the 2020 election, he joined Trump’s effort to pressure Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to rework the state’s vote count so Trump would prevail. And when Graham won a hard-fought Senate primary last month, he lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”
Graham lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”
One sign of Graham’s descent into the abyss of Trump toadyism is not likely to receive much attention: his acrobatic flip-flop on the Trump-Russia scandal.
After the 2016 election, during which Russia mounted a covert hack-and-leak attack and an extensive clandestine social media operation to cause chaos, hinder the Hillary Clinton campaign, and boost Trump, Graham was one of the Republican legislators who was boiling mad. He proclaimed, “I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price.” Graham even lobbied Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, to lead the Senate’s investigation of the Russian assault. (McConnell opted to hand the probe to the Senate intelligence committee, where it would be less visible to the public.)
In this regard, Graham was at odds with Trump, who had falsely denied Putin had interfered in the 2016 election and who derided the scandal as a “hoax” and not worthy of an investigation, which he repeatedly called a “witch hunt.” Graham also joined with Sen. Marco Rubio to press the Trump administration to impose tough sanctions on Russia—which Trump was not keen on doing.
But eventually Graham got on board with Trump’s Russia denialism. He mounted a side investigation that focused not on Putin’s operation but on the FBI’s investigation of the Russian operation and the Steele dossier, the series of memos produced by a former British intelligence official that contained uncorroborated allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Attacking the FBI probe and the Steele dossier—which was paid for by an opposition research firm retained by a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign—became the Republican’s main tactic to divert attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 campaign and from Trump’s complicity (that is, his false insistence that there had been no Russian intervention).
Shortly before the 2020 election, Graham urged John Ratcliffe, a Trump devotee who was then director of national intelligence, to declassify intelligence that suggested that the Clinton campaign in 2016 had concocted a scheme to “stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” with the goal to “distract the public from her use of a private mail server.”
Graham, who once decried Putin’s covert attack on the United States, now was an obsequious Trump foot soldier.
What neither Graham nor Ratcliffe told the public was that this intel was based on Russian intelligence reports that had been pilfered by the Dutch intelligence service and that CIA analysts believed were not credible and perhaps even disinformation. Graham was deploying unverified Russian intelligence to back up Trump’s phony claim that there had been no Russian assault on the 2016 election and that the whole thing was a Democratic hoax. He had pulled a complete 180.
Graham, who once decried Putin’s covert attack on the United States, now was an obsequious Trump foot soldier. He recklessly and irresponsibly called the suspicious Russian intelligence that Ratcliffe made public “the smoking gun.”
And he stuck to this line. Last year, when Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, appeared before the Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, Graham railed against the Trump-Russia investigation and called it “one of the most disgusting episodes in FBI history…led by corrupt people.” He falsely stated that a Justice Department inspector general’s investigation had declared the inquiry “fraudulent.” (The IG report concluded it was legitimately opened but identified several problems with the probe.) Graham had become a pit bull for Russia denialism.
What’s odd is that while Graham was helping Trump cover up Putin’s attack on American democracy, he was also a fierce advocate for Ukraine. “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote after learning of Graham’s death, saying he was “deeply saddened.”
So when the issue was Ukraine versus Russia, Graham was fervently opposed to Putin’s barbarous war and tried to nudge Trump into maintaining US support for Kyiv. But on the matter of Putin’s attack on the United States, Graham fully caved in order to protect Trump—and became a useful idiot for Putin. No matter which principles Graham held and which policies he cared about, ultimately what mattered most was the influence he gained by serving a demagogue.
My search for a psychiatric bed in an overburdened health system
By Helen Santoro, Illustrations by Oona Zenda, for KFF If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” Eight days before my 33rd birthday in April, a social worker at a crisis clinic near Denver determined I was an imminent danger to myself. She placed me on an involuntary 72-hour mental…
The socialist left’s curious problems with women
Political movements usually celebrate their greatest successes. They build on them. They elevate them. Which is why the Democratic Socialists of America’s treatment of some of the party’s most successful women, including some of their own, has always been so bizarre. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was never acceptable. Sen. Elizabeth Warren became “the snake.
Tilting at windmills
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump administration abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges…
Scientists Ponder a New Climate Defense Tactic: Throwing Shade at El Niño
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it’s set to create chaotic weather around the world.
A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Niños and global warming: dimming the sun.
El Niño develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Niño can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.
“The thesis seems quite reasonable,”… but actually executing something like this would be “a political nightmare.”
The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Niño events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.
“El Niño is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,” says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.”
Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds’ reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique’s efficacy, they’ve only been on very small scales.
MCB is one of a few different solar geoengineering methods intended to reflect sunlight back into space. Other methods, like using planes to inject aerosols into the stratosphere, can only work globally. But MCB has the potential to be a regional cooling solution.
To get around the lack of MCB experiments, researchers looked at a recent natural phenomenon that mimicked it: the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season. More than 10,000 bushfires raged across the country, producing almost 1 million metric tons of smoke. That represents one of the largest inputs of smoke into the stratosphere that humans have observed with satellite technology.
While the effects of this massive amount of smoke were complex, previous research shows it helped trigger a rare triple-dip La Niña—the opposite phase of El Niño—thanks in part to reflective particles in the smoke.
This event, Ricke says, enabled her and her coauthors to finally address a question they’d had for years about whether regional interventions can help relieve the pressure events like El Niño put on the global climate system. The researchers created a model based on the MCB effects of the Australian bushfires, and ran it against two different historic El Niño events to observe its effects. The modeling showed that lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Pacific’s surface would have significantly reduced the magnitude of those El Niño events and their global impact.
Geoengineering techniques have traditionally been viewed as a method to cool the entire planet, acting as a counterbalance to humans’ use of fossil fuels—albeit an extremely controversial one. The new study makes the case that some forms of geoengineering would be better used to target regional events, like El Niño. Doing so has the potential to avoid—or at least lower the risk—of the compounding effects of El Niño piled on top of rising temperatures due to human activity.
“There’s the possibility that you’ll create an unpredicted problem that is worse than the problem you’re trying to solve.”
“The idea of having to sustain geoengineering indefinitely gives a lot of people pause—we all understand that cooperation at that magnitude would be hugely complicated in the world we live in,” Ricke says. “This is a totally different way to think about geoengineering.”
Geoengineering techniques like using planes to inject aerosols into the stratosphere—or even more fantastical ideas like space mirrors—have been met with skepticism from scientists, policymakers, and the public. This is mainly due to their unpredictability—altering the weather can come with a lot of unintended consequences—and their potential to create political instability. It’s likely even a regionalized approach like the one proposed in the new study would run into the same issues, but it appears to be scientifically feasible—or at least worth further study.
“The thesis seems quite reasonable,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, says of the Scripps study. But Dessler warns that actually executing something like this would be “a political nightmare,” resulting in conflict or war if something goes wrong in what would be a worst-case scenario.
“These models are imperfect, and there’s the possibility that you’ll create an unpredicted problem that is worse than the problem you’re trying to solve,” Dessler says. “I think this is a really interesting paper, and I learned a few things reading it, but I certainly would not say that this is a great idea and we should implement it.”
Ricke agrees: “There’s a lot of things we need to figure out from models before trying it in the real world,” she says. Still, she says, this research could prove crucial for the future if humanity fails to address fossil fuel pollution. “The reason people do research on solar geoengineering is because we might end up in a world where we need it.”
Who Should Own the Robots?
In late February, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who has since left the organization, posted on X that something had broken in the way software gets made. “It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months,” he wrote. Coding agents that “basically didn’t work before December” had, in a matter of weeks, become capable enough to “power through large and long tasks” and disrupt the default workflow of his profession.
Weeks later, a friend relayed an exchange I haven’t been able to shake. He’d been talking with a group of experienced software engineers when one of them said: “My job title is more like an AI manager now. I don’t have to really write the code. I input prompts into one AI coding agent, I get another AI coding agent to run tests on it, then I review it, and it goes into production.”
I don’t know which model upgrade was responsible, but this is several years of skill displaced—and the engineer describing this transition seemed proud of it. He had handed over not just his work but the identity he might have built around being a software developer; yet his narrative was one of empowerment.
That narrative is a political problem. While previous waves of capital concentration sparked collective reaction—resulting in the Knights of Labor during the industrial revolution and the CIO during the digital revolution—AI displacement is producing a class that can’t unionize because their roles are eliminated before class identity can form. It doesn’t help that one of the most affected professions, tech workers, were never strong unionizers to begin with: The first certified bargaining union at a major American tech company formed in 2022 at Activision Blizzard. Knowledge workers are among the least inclined to see themselves as “labor,” and tend to realize it only after being displaced.
The standard counterargument to AI-fueled job loss is that the technological leap will create jobs the same way computers and ultimately the internet did. But even if the engineer I quoted above is right that his role merely changed, there will be fewer managers than there had been coders, and the list of “doers” who will no longer have much business in their own field gets lengthy: the contractor in Ohio whose Structured Query Language work is now a SaaS subscription; the paralegal whose document review is now done via large language model; the management consultant whose throughput just doubled “thanks” to Copilot, but whose company is quickly absorbing the productivity gain by reducing headcount. These people, or at least some of them, will keep working—on tighter margins, in narrower roles.
But the question that matters is: Who owns the machines that replaced some or all of their labor? Because if we keep treating AI displacement as a misfortune to be managed, our proposals will follow suit: Retrain, cushion, compensate the workers. That is a temporary salve at most, not a sustainable remedy. A check can replace a paycheck, but it won’t replace the identity that came with the work. The only sustainable response is to keep displaced workers in the game—as owners of the capital that replaced them.
Robots are capital. It’s no secret that capital concentrates: Absent regulation, and in the face of taxation systems structurally favoring capital gains, every previous technological revolution led exactly here. Many economists assume this as the default trajectory; the purpose of regulation and the welfare state is to keep the dynamic in check. The United States has among the lowest tax-to-gross domestic product ratios in the developed world, and that helps to explain why 11 out of the (currently) 15 trillion-dollar companies are based in the U.S.
It would be simple to blame AI for its own side effects, but unless (or until) AI becomes conscious it is still a tool in the hands of humans. Blaming it would be just as misdirected as blaming cars for road accidents. Besides, AI is a productivity booster on the scale of electrification; deployed correctly, it could enable shorter hours, higher wages, and broad prosperity, the way previous technological shifts eventually did. The blame lies instead with our failure to keep wealth distribution in check, a flawed regulatory system that has been corroding for decades and is now asked to absorb what seems poised to become the largest productivity shock in living memory. Even if one leaves aside the ethical nuances of this reality, what’s different this time is speed: Anthropic’s recent research shows adoption curves measured in months rather than the decades it took computers to redraw the labor market. Displaced workers won’t have the time to even realize what’s going on, let alone find each other, organize, and design adequate institutions to navigate an orderly transition.
The result is a strange political quiet on the subject, perhaps best signaled by the fact that the loudest exception so far has come from the Vatican. In May, Pope Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical to AI, widely covering the dignity of labor and the concentration of power in a handful of companies. The letter was symbolically signed on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical on labor and capital addressing the industrial revolution. But a papal letter is not a movement, and the lack of organized response among workers is conspicuous, because the dispossession is already visible and material: Entry-level hiring is collapsing in several industries, white-collar layoffs are the norm, the Dallas Fed has flagged a pattern of productivity gains without employment increases.
In Washington, some progressive Democrats have made it a cause: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act to freeze construction until federal safeguards are in place. Sanders went further, proposing a Sovereign Wealth Fund Act that would require 50 percent of the stock of the largest AI companies to be moved into a public fund paying every American a dividend, similar to Norway’s oil fund model. This proposal is an important corrective to a debate that has largely treated AI as an energy and environmental challenge. But the remedy must reach further than a dividend check. What needs protection isn’t just the workers but their identity—and if that can no longer be provided by labor, it must come from becoming owners of the machines that replaced them. Right now, the people being displaced remain scattered and unorganized, but this is the demand they’ll make when they find their voice.
Workers have found their voice before: The Luddites protesting the mechanization of textile mills set in motion a reform process that eventually led to the Factory Acts; the introduction of computers in the 1970s and 1980s produced a fertile conversation about de-skilling that ran for two decades, starting with Studs Terkel’s Working in 1972 and culminating, in the optimism of the early post–Cold War years, with the tech-friendly reforms promoted by the so-called “Atari Democrats,” implemented during the Clinton-Gore presidency, and intellectually enshrined in Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work in 1995. None of these movements achieved everything they wanted, but like an immune response, they produced lasting adaptations: political coalitions, regulation, and a shared understanding of the problems at hand. The current moment has none of this—not even a vocabulary for what’s happening. So far, the news coverage has focused on side effects such as the strain data centers put on energy grids and infrastructure and, more recently, AI’s use in cyberattacks; labor displacement registers, but not with the weight it deserves.
If this displacement concentrates wealth and power in the hands of whoever owns the AI, leaving everyone else high and dry and potentially jobless, why have the workers themselves stayed so quiet, with the resistance primarily delivered by politicians? Because resistance requires class identity, which is exactly what AI ends up dissolving. The steelworker had “steelworker.” The mill worker had the mill. Historical labor movements were built on the recognition that workers shared something specific—a craft, a workplace, a common antagonist—and that recognition was the precondition for organizing. In a world where AI displaces entire professions, the lawyer, the analyst, the programmer have no equivalent community. Most AI practitioners are robots. The humans formerly representing these professions are fewer, less powerful in output, scattered, individualized. That looks more like a diaspora than a united constituency ready to collectively push back.
Most critically, these professional communities won’t reproduce. As AI performs more of the work that used to define entry-level jobs, companies stop hiring humans for those roles. This is the demographic equivalent of a fertility rate below replacement: Given enough time, it leads to extinction. The professions get replaced and therefore controlled by the machines that substituted them, under the supervision of a much smaller number of people who own them. The policy tools that could redirect this trajectory exist—retraining, expanded safety nets, equity-sharing schemes, a serious conversation about what taxing AI productivity would look like—but the people who need them lack the coherence, and over time the critical mass, to demand them politically.
The closest historical analogue to this situation is feudalism, an observation others have made—Yanis Varoufakis and Cédric Durand have famously argued that we’ve already entered a “techno-feudal” order, in which tech giants extract rents the way medieval lords once did. The parallel is correct, but it understates the effect of AI on the political dynamics. Feudalism persisted for centuries, despite the serfs having very clear ideas on what fairness would have looked like: Medieval uprisings, from the Jacquerie of 1358 to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, show the injustice was perfectly well understood. But feudalism had the upper hand because organization across communities and regions was effectively impossible, leaving serfs trapped in the cycle of survival, season over season, working land that wasn’t owned.
What eventually changed was a slow accumulation of forces—trade, urbanization, religious schisms, even the plague—and among them, a technology: the printing press, gradually changing the way information could travel. It took three centuries, through the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but by 1789 those forces had compounded enough for the Bastille to fall.
Replace land with “compute,” and the dynamic rhymes. Except this time the intervening technology, AI, is working in the opposite direction, and this is where the “techno-feudalism” parallel breaks down: The printing press enabled collective action, while AI effectively suppresses it. It atomizes the workforce, accelerates displacement beyond the pace at which workers can build the institutions that might represent them, and concentrates the surplus in a small number of firms. Those firms are now powerful enough to resemble sovereign states, they are ruled as near-absolute monarchies, and their leaders have enough economic firepower to dominate the public discourse. Think of a middle-class family in America today, how little time they have for civic action after all the demands of the household are met, and suddenly the comparison with the Middle Ages feels real.
Granted, the informed public already harbors strong feelings toward large tech companies in general, and toward AI specifically. In poll after poll, a majority of Americans express worries about AI and want more regulation of it. Sometimes that is expressed in real-world terms, in communities’ slowing or blocking data centers or ChatGPT users’ mass-uninstalling the app after the organization cut a deal with the Pentagon. People aren’t passive. But local action and individual consumer choice aren’t the same as organized, broad-based political power.
The geographic split compounds the problem. Countries with existing social contracts and collective institutions—the Nordics, parts of continental Europe, parts of East Asia—have a foundation to build on, however imperfect. The United States is running this experiment with the lowest union density in the developed world, weakened federal labor enforcement, and a policy debate that has barely begun to treat AI as a political question at all. This is also where much of AI development is concentrated—in the country least equipped to equitably redistribute the gains.
If the net effect of AI is to mark the end of labor—more precisely, the end of labor as the primary factor producing wealth for the majority of the population—the solution has to come from decoupling identity from labor. This implies rebuilding identity itself: civic participation, community, new forms of solidarity rooted not in what people do for a living but in what they are trying to protect; a mission-driven identity, to replace the wage-driven one that industrial labor produced.
John Maynard Keynes imagined, almost a century ago, that abundance would eventually let civilization turn to higher endeavors; Francis Fukuyama later predicted “centuries of boredom” at the end of history. Neither vision has materialized, but their underlying intuition is worth rescuing: We’re not walking a path, we are the path. When the path stops, so does our identity; avoiding that requires dedicating ourselves to a meaningful objective.
Right now, a meaningful enough objective is to figure out a stable social contract that doesn’t sink democracy into the oligarchy of a few trillionaires. The tools to make this happen aren’t mysterious. We know how to tax the productivity of capital, and we know it wouldn’t stifle innovation. We know how to widen ownership of productive assets: employee equity, public positions in the models and the compute, a sovereign fund that pays the public a dividend on the robots, the way Norway reinvests its oil revenue in public services.
On the upside, the speed of displacement—which makes this a crisis rather than a stable order that could last for centuries—might precipitate a viable solution. As more professionals experience displacement personally, as more entry-level workers can’t find jobs, the societal strain becomes visible in daily life: families forced to move 20 streets down as desirable neighborhoods are scooped up by new millionaires; workers forced to work longer shifts and multiple jobs to cover the gap between wages and cost of living; coffee shops filling up with hopeless job applicants on laptops; a shrinking tax base offering fewer social services to people who suddenly need more of them. Eventually, the shared experience itself becomes the basis for a new solidarity.
Not everyone needs to organize. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that when a committed minority reaches 10 percent of a population, the idea or behavior they hold becomes a majority view. Applied to social change, once that threshold is crossed, the idea “spreads like flame.” The open question is whether that threshold can be reached before a new class of techno-oligarchs has reshaped public institutions into something we no longer recognize as democracy.
What equivalent of the printing press can get the right constituency to activate, and drive society toward a more equitable, prosperous future? A good start would be to understand what small, incremental steps anyone can take. One such step is active participation in civic life, which starts from voting and leads to near-impossible feats such as the election of an immigrant of Indian descent as the mayor of New York City. Another step is letting go of the myth that capital deconcentration is impossible, which starts from choosing one’s investments based on impact instead of sheer returns, and comes full circle not in the money it returns but in the impact it forces—as in 2021, when Engine No. 1, a tiny activist fund backed by the three largest U.S. pension funds, won three seats on ExxonMobil’s board and pushed the oil major to take the energy transition seriously. Finally, and most importantly, society should understand that the people on the losing side of the AI rupture are not a professional diaspora to be cared for—supported as they ride into the sunset, perhaps handed some kind of pension—but a still-unorganized constituency of workers waiting to become stakeholders.
Whether they become stakeholders is the whole question. If workers come to own a piece of the machines, they’ll keep their identity, share the gains, and all of us will be able to work less. This is Keynes’s vision, finally realized. If workers don’t, they’ll be deprived of their jobs, their identity, and their share of the wealth all at once, while the world increasingly belongs to a handful of techno-oligarchs who are clearly less interested in democracy than they are in amassing wealth.
Sen. Lindsey Graham dead after brief illness, his office says
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies in Congress and a longtime advocate of direct confrontation with Iran, died Saturday evening after a “brief and sudden illness,” his office said in statement posted on social media. The office did not provide any additional details about the South Carolina Republican, who was 71 years old. “Senator Graham’s family…
How Republicans paved the way for white nationalists to invade DC
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. The white supremacist group Patriot Front brazenly marched in Washington, D.C., on Independence Day. Their faces covered in white ski masks and their eyes obscured by sunglasses, the identically dressed group of men celebrated our…
Whale of a tale
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Does Trump know which country he’s at war with?
As new minimum wages take effect, California’s cities keep raising the bar
Local governments are pushing wages above the state’s already high minimum, even as many workers still can’t keep up with California’s cost of living. By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main The flip of the calendar to July brought a scrap of relief to workers scattered from California to New York, as a series of minimum wage adjustments kicked in. Alaska, Oregon and the District of…
Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act
The firings leave the federal election agency with no commissioners as Trump seeks to reshape voting rules. By Jessica Huseman for Votebeat President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape…