Social Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note to (non-paying) readers:

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

—LW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the theory was proved wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended reading:

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

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

Glenn Greenwald and I have been reporting together on industrial animal abuse for years, and specifically about Ridglan Farms, a Wisconsin dog breeder that sells beagles to laboratories for heinous scientific experiments.

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

Hope you enjoy it.

—LW

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

Hope you enjoy the piece.

—LW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you give it a read.

—LW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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