Trust math, not people” represents the ultimate engineer’s cop-out. It’s not the dispassionate advance of enlightenment, but a deliberate retreat from the field of moral complexity. It imagines that systems can substitute for virtue, that protocols can eliminate the tragic dimension, that risk and trust and error can somehow be erased rather than always needing to be held, managed, forgiven, sometimes endured.

When Bitcoin maximalists celebrate the system’s indifference to human concerns as a feature rather than a bug, they reveal the anti-human heart of their philosophy. They’re not just advocating for a new financial tool; they’re promoting a worldview where human judgment, compassion, and moral agency are seen as weaknesses to be engineered away.

Bitcoin still requires trust in the developers who write and maintain the code, in the community that could execute a 51% attack, in the miners who confirm transactions, in the exchanges where most people buy and sell, and in the social consensus that gives the tokens value. What appears as “trustless” is actually just trust laundered through technology, obscured but not eliminated. The system doesn’t remove the need for trust; it relocates it, often in ways that make accountability harder rather than easier.

We have now seen what the MAGA movement has planned for America, and it’s pure destruction.

First, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency turned out to be entirely an ideological purge rather than an attempt to make the government run more efficiently. Promises of trillions of dollars in savings dwindled to a mere $160 billion (and will likely dwindle even further), as Elon’s squad of young tech workers rediscovered the fact that the U.S. government is already a pretty bare-bones operation. Meanwhile the effort will cost an estimated $135 billion, basically eliminating all of the savings. And although not everything it’s doing is counterproductive, DOGE will probably leave a lasting negative impact on American state capacity.

Nor has Trump’s ideological purge been limited to DOGE. Worried that DEI and other progressive ideologies have permeated America’s scientific establishment, the administration is gouging science funding and getting rid of key personnel needed to keep America’s research engines humming:

We are so far now from the elemental clarity of that world. We eat what algorithms plant. We live inside a system so vast and spectral that the gears are invisible but grind just the same. Our “disruptors” wear sneakers to board meetings and assure us they are changing the world, even as they enclose it, bit by bit, behind paywalls and patents.

We are told to be “optimistic,” to “look on the bright side,” as if history is a parlor trick we can wish away. As if the machinery of exploitation, once set in motion, will grind itself to a stop out of sheer boredom.

No. What matters is not optimism. It is courage.

The Collapse Won’t Start With Tanks
The real collapse isn’t going to start with tanks rolling down Main Street.

It’s going to start when nobody trusts anything anymore.

The same loss of trust is spreading beyond food. It’s hitting taxes, aviation, healthcare, everything.

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data.

These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement.

Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades.

These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale.

Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos.

In a world where knowledge is cheap,

curiosity, curation, and judgment

– signalled well – becomes insanely valuable.

This is why even if AI doesn’t eat your job, it will take a nice chunky bite out of your salary.

And the reason for that is fairly simple. You can keep performing tasks that provide value. But those tasks won’t have economic value.

There is no economic value unless there is scarcity.

So if you’re looking for economic value, look for the new scarcity!

It’s not enough to be human in the age of AI. That only gets us to value.

What matters is how scarce our unique form of human-ness is. That’s what gets us to real economic value.

what a bunch of tech bros could’ve gained by rummaging around our data for the last four months?”

“Trump’s orbit is always temporary, and I’m not sure Musk expected him to voluntarily nuke the economy. Tesla is in meltdown—he has no choice.

But…they can already declare victory. All evidence points to a data extraction operation. The goal is to ingest critical datasets, train them behind closed doors, then build a centralized “government brain” (an AI platform) that they can license back to the government.”

“It’s been 100 days. They’ve hit labor, treasury systems, veterans affairs, HHS, cloud services used by federal agencies. etc. etc. They likely have hundreds of terabytes of data already in their control. To answer your question, he has what he needs and they can do this without him now.”

Yascha Mounk is a political scientist at SAIS who is also a really interesting Substacker. I was struck by his writing about Trump’s passive-aggressive foreign policy — my term, not his — and wanted to interview him about it. This was actually recorded more than a week ago; I held it back because I was afraid that it would get buried by the flood of economic news. Since we seem to be in a (temporary) pause, here it is — with subtitles! Transcript below.

In a world where knowledge is cheap,

curiosity, curation, and judgment

– signalled well – becomes insanely valuable.

This is why even if AI doesn’t eat your job, it will take a nice chunky bite out of your salary.

And the reason for that is fairly simple. You can keep performing tasks that provide value. But those tasks won’t have economic value.

There is no economic value unless there is scarcity.

So if you’re looking for economic value, look for the new scarcity!

It’s not enough to be human in the age of AI. That only gets us to value.

What matters is how scarce our unique form of human-ness is. That’s what gets us to real economic value.

“Markets don’t just take care of themselves. Capitalism needs to be cultivated.”

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook turned political economist, wasn’t there to soft-sell. His new book, The Rise and Fall of American Marketcraft, is a hard confrontation with a crumbling fiction: that markets are neutral, self-regulating forces of nature. They aren’t. They never were. And the people who pretend otherwise aren’t protecting freedom—they’re engineering chaos.

And he called it out by name. That infamous image of Zuckerberg standing behind Trump wasn’t just awkward optics—it was an alignment of interests.

“They want to be marketcrafters. But without democracy. Without institutions. Without the public.”

He described how Facebook and others, in their early years, depended on government funding, infrastructure, and legal frameworks. But now, many of those same founders are financing lawsuits, lobbying against antitrust, and attacking agencies designed to keep markets fair and open. It’s not just hypocrisy. It’s an effort to replace the state with the platform—and remove any structure that might say no.

If you work in the media industry, you’re likely aware of The New York Times’s tremendous success with its gaming vertical; in fact, millions of people subscribe for the sole reason of playing games like Wordle and Connections.

But it’s not the only publisher that’s incorporated games into its business strategy. Hundreds of outlets ranging from Morning Brew to The New Yorker utilize a platform called Amuse Labs to build everything from crosswords to sudoku. In a recent interview, co-founder John Temple explained how publishers can leverage games to increase time on site, repeat visits, advertising revenue, and paid subscription conversions.

Zuckerberg’s words were prescient. Last week in Washington, D.C., the U.S. government kicked off its trial against Meta. Regulators argued that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp neutralized potential rivals, creating a monopolistic dynamic for the social media platform.

Google is also under investigation by the government. Last week, a federal judge ruled that Google acted as an illegal monopolist in parts of its ad business.

After decades of a laissez-faire approach to regulating technology companies—which arguably has led tech to become Big Tech—the U.S. government is seeking to reign in today’s technology gia

One of the most most tangible federal government innovations of recent years was Direct File, the long-sought effort to allow taxpayers a free and user-friendly means to report their taxes. The fate of Direct File had hung in the balance, but AP reports that sometime last month the Direct File team were told to expect layoffs and not to work on a version of the product for the next tax season. It appears that Direct File is dead.

Even if you never used Direct File, you should mourn its loss. It’s showed that good government tech and tech for good are compatible goals. Government can build high quality tech tools internally, better and more cheaply than if the project was farmed out to a private vendor.

But the Trump administration is not serious about using technology to make services work better. Instead they will kill low-cost and high-value tech innovations within government, deliberately making services worse and more expensive. DOGE is in the business of enabling private sector wealth extraction from the poor, and destroying public sector value creation.

The death of Direct File is also a testament to the power of rent-seeking, as the private tax preparation industry’s years of lobbying to kill a public option paid off.

At this stage, the platforms stop being just “tech companies” and become something bigger: media empires that dictate the flow of information, attention, and even reality itself.

• They control what news people see.
• They determine what content gets engagement.
• They shape political narratives.
• They decide what voices get amplified or silenced.

This is the paradox of social media. Every platform starts with a mission. Every platform ends with a monopoly.

The cycle keeps repeating because these platforms are not just businesses anymore—they are infrastructure. They are more powerful than traditional media, more influential than governments, and more entrenched in daily life than most people realize.

Last week’s Vancouver TED conference delivered a chilling wake-up call through four speakers who, from different vantage points, converged on an unmistakable warning: Our digital ecosystem isn’t just broken — it threatens the foundations of democracy, truth, and human autonomy itself.

These speakers didn’t merely diagnose the crisis. They named it, mapped its architecture, and issued an urgent call to collective action before it’s too late.

Journalist Carole Cadwalladr, returning to the TED stage after her landmark 2019 talk on Facebook and democracy, delivered perhaps the most urgent warning of all:

“In years to come, allowing your child to be data-harvested from birth will be considered child abuse.”

This week I moderated a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference in Last Vegas with Dhar Mann, a massive content creator with who publishes scripted shows with motivational messages.

If you don’t know who Dhar Mann is, he’s basically the Mr. Beast of Facebook video. He has amassed tens of billions of views on the platform alone. He’s huge on YouTube, IG, and TikTok. His viral content success has allowed him to open a 100,000 square foot studio in Burbank where he shoots all of his content. Dhar has over 150 employees from script writers, to a wardrobe department, to a sprawling post production assembly line.

One thing he said to me while we were on stage that I found so interesting, is that, though he has always had a global audience, for years it never made sense to cultivate fandoms in secondary markets because the CPMs are so much lower outside of the U.S. and English speaking countries. He said that just a couple years ago it cost him $200,000 annually to dub his content into another language.

Trust math, not people” represents the ultimate engineer’s cop-out. It’s not the dispassionate advance of enlightenment, but a deliberate retreat from the field of moral complexity. It imagines that systems can substitute for virtue, that protocols can eliminate the tragic dimension, that risk and trust and error can somehow be erased rather than always needing to be held, managed, forgiven, sometimes endured.

When Bitcoin maximalists celebrate the system’s indifference to human concerns as a feature rather than a bug, they reveal the anti-human heart of their philosophy. They’re not just advocating for a new financial tool; they’re promoting a worldview where human judgment, compassion, and moral agency are seen as weaknesses to be engineered away.

Bitcoin still requires trust in the developers who write and maintain the code, in the community that could execute a 51% attack, in the miners who confirm transactions, in the exchanges where most people buy and sell, and in the social consensus that gives the tokens value. What appears as “trustless” is actually just trust laundered through technology, obscured but not eliminated. The system doesn’t remove the need for trust; it relocates it, often in ways that make accountability harder rather than easier.

We have now seen what the MAGA movement has planned for America, and it’s pure destruction.

First, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency turned out to be entirely an ideological purge rather than an attempt to make the government run more efficiently. Promises of trillions of dollars in savings dwindled to a mere $160 billion (and will likely dwindle even further), as Elon’s squad of young tech workers rediscovered the fact that the U.S. government is already a pretty bare-bones operation. Meanwhile the effort will cost an estimated $135 billion, basically eliminating all of the savings. And although not everything it’s doing is counterproductive, DOGE will probably leave a lasting negative impact on American state capacity.

Nor has Trump’s ideological purge been limited to DOGE. Worried that DEI and other progressive ideologies have permeated America’s scientific establishment, the administration is gouging science funding and getting rid of key personnel needed to keep America’s research engines humming:

We are so far now from the elemental clarity of that world. We eat what algorithms plant. We live inside a system so vast and spectral that the gears are invisible but grind just the same. Our “disruptors” wear sneakers to board meetings and assure us they are changing the world, even as they enclose it, bit by bit, behind paywalls and patents.

We are told to be “optimistic,” to “look on the bright side,” as if history is a parlor trick we can wish away. As if the machinery of exploitation, once set in motion, will grind itself to a stop out of sheer boredom.

No. What matters is not optimism. It is courage.

The Collapse Won’t Start With Tanks
The real collapse isn’t going to start with tanks rolling down Main Street.

It’s going to start when nobody trusts anything anymore.

The same loss of trust is spreading beyond food. It’s hitting taxes, aviation, healthcare, everything.

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data.

These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement.

Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades.

These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale.

Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos.

In a world where knowledge is cheap,

curiosity, curation, and judgment

– signalled well – becomes insanely valuable.

This is why even if AI doesn’t eat your job, it will take a nice chunky bite out of your salary.

And the reason for that is fairly simple. You can keep performing tasks that provide value. But those tasks won’t have economic value.

There is no economic value unless there is scarcity.

So if you’re looking for economic value, look for the new scarcity!

It’s not enough to be human in the age of AI. That only gets us to value.

What matters is how scarce our unique form of human-ness is. That’s what gets us to real economic value.

what a bunch of tech bros could’ve gained by rummaging around our data for the last four months?”

“Trump’s orbit is always temporary, and I’m not sure Musk expected him to voluntarily nuke the economy. Tesla is in meltdown—he has no choice.

But…they can already declare victory. All evidence points to a data extraction operation. The goal is to ingest critical datasets, train them behind closed doors, then build a centralized “government brain” (an AI platform) that they can license back to the government.”

“It’s been 100 days. They’ve hit labor, treasury systems, veterans affairs, HHS, cloud services used by federal agencies. etc. etc. They likely have hundreds of terabytes of data already in their control. To answer your question, he has what he needs and they can do this without him now.”

Yascha Mounk is a political scientist at SAIS who is also a really interesting Substacker. I was struck by his writing about Trump’s passive-aggressive foreign policy — my term, not his — and wanted to interview him about it. This was actually recorded more than a week ago; I held it back because I was afraid that it would get buried by the flood of economic news. Since we seem to be in a (temporary) pause, here it is — with subtitles! Transcript below.

Yascha Mounk is a political scientist at SAIS who is also a really interesting Substacker. I was struck by his writing about Trump’s passive-aggressive foreign policy — my term, not his — and wanted to interview him about it. This was actually recorded more than a week ago; I held it back because I was afraid that it would get buried by the flood of economic news. Since we seem to be in a (temporary) pause, here it is — with subtitles! Transcript below.

“Markets don’t just take care of themselves. Capitalism needs to be cultivated.”

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook turned political economist, wasn’t there to soft-sell. His new book, The Rise and Fall of American Marketcraft, is a hard confrontation with a crumbling fiction: that markets are neutral, self-regulating forces of nature. They aren’t. They never were. And the people who pretend otherwise aren’t protecting freedom—they’re engineering chaos.

And he called it out by name. That infamous image of Zuckerberg standing behind Trump wasn’t just awkward optics—it was an alignment of interests.

“They want to be marketcrafters. But without democracy. Without institutions. Without the public.”

He described how Facebook and others, in their early years, depended on government funding, infrastructure, and legal frameworks. But now, many of those same founders are financing lawsuits, lobbying against antitrust, and attacking agencies designed to keep markets fair and open. It’s not just hypocrisy. It’s an effort to replace the state with the platform—and remove any structure that might say no.

If you work in the media industry, you’re likely aware of The New York Times’s tremendous success with its gaming vertical; in fact, millions of people subscribe for the sole reason of playing games like Wordle and Connections.

But it’s not the only publisher that’s incorporated games into its business strategy. Hundreds of outlets ranging from Morning Brew to The New Yorker utilize a platform called Amuse Labs to build everything from crosswords to sudoku. In a recent interview, co-founder John Temple explained how publishers can leverage games to increase time on site, repeat visits, advertising revenue, and paid subscription conversions.

Millions of people are going to start being “collected” on. But should they?

The Department of Education and your servicer are legally required to keep your MPN and produce a copy on demand.

I know it’s quaint thinking of me, to you know, rely on the law. But that’s not optional. It’s the legal basis for the debt. It’s the whole contract.

I can’t just storm into Macy’s and demand they pay me a million dollars. That’s not how contracts work. I can’t just make it up.

First — and why aren’t more people saying this? — what the hell was the Treasury secretary doing giving a closed-door briefing on a significant policy change that hadn’t yet been officially announced? Isn’t that a setup for large-scale insider trading? Indeed, attendees at that conference surely made market bets before Bessent’s remarks became public.

Let’s also talk about the substance of what Bessent reportedly said. Namely, he declared that the enormous tariffs Trump imposed on China will soon be reversed. Those tariffs are indeed crazy, amounting, as Bessent said, to an embargo.

But this is an extraordinary reversal — a capitulation equivalent to surrender. And bear in mind that the damage being done by Trump’s tariffs comes not just from how high they are but from the uncertainty they’re creating. That gigantic China tariff was announced just two weeks ago. Now Trump says, “we will be very nice and they’re going to be very nice.” How can any business make plans in this kind of environment?

And then we gave the citizens of the district the rare opportunity to ask questions of their so-called “representative.”

They asked questions about everything from federal workers’ rights to the cutting of cancer research to climate change to gerrymandering to Pete Hegseth. They were truly excellent and deeply informed questions, often leading to loud audience applause:

And even though he wasn’t there, we asked AI—as we called it, “ChatGOP”—to draw from Warren Davidson’s public statements to approximate the answer he might provide if he’d bothered to show up here, or at any town hall. We thought his constituents had a right to hear what he’s been saying elsewhere:

Francis was led down the aisle, resplendent in white, very erect, walking slowly and greeting people along the way. Just before he reached the sanctuary, he halted suddenly and turned to his right, noticing that pew. Then, as the rest of us waited, he walked to its far end, and bent himself to speak. He greeted each person in turn, touching them. As the people with whom he was conversing could not rise, he had to lower himself. So, over and over, Francis knelt down to look someone in the eye and to hold both of their hands in his. This took about fifteen minutes. It was a moment to think about others, and in that sense, for me, a liberation, from my own anxiety and selfishness.

Many words and much grandeur followed. But that moment is what I remember.

After 100 Days, the President Has Started to Make It Clear How He Will be Defeated

“Activism targeting markets…a formula to remember.”

He may ignore the courts. He may run roughshod over a supine Congress. But Wall Street holds the whip hand with Trump and those who want to influence him are starting to realize it.

We have also seen that once again, Trump the egomaniac is sensitive to the perception that he is a loser. He doesn’t care about us or about history. But he does care how he is perceived by his rich pals. This has already led him to repeat a pattern from his first administration. He is loyal to no one. Therefore, in a big enterprise like a government (and he has once again demonstrated how bad he is with core competencies like, say, management), in which responsibilities must be delegated, all his top aides know they must keep feeding the beast of the boss’ ego or they will fade in influence and access or worse, be pushed out.

This has already happened with Trump’s “co-president” Elon Musk. Musk is on his way out not because the law requires it (Trump doesn’t care much about law), but because a.) the stories that he rivaled Trump in power, fueled by Musk’s behavior, were a wedge between the two and b.) he has alienated far too many people in a DOGE effort that is far, far from producing the results Musk once promised.

There are many good ideas in Klein and Thompson’s book, but no solutions to the crisis we now face.

Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.

As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can.

Books are time capsules, buried on the date the author sends it to press, unearthed by the reader months or years later. They are written for the world as it existed at the time of writing, often with an eye toward the world as the author imagines it might become. But writers are not soothsayers by trade. And it seems the times we now live in are better suited to apocalyptic fiction.

Zuckerberg’s words were prescient. Last week in Washington, D.C., the U.S. government kicked off its trial against Meta. Regulators argued that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp neutralized potential rivals, creating a monopolistic dynamic for the social media platform.

Google is also under investigation by the government. Last week, a federal judge ruled that Google acted as an illegal monopolist in parts of its ad business.

After decades of a laissez-faire approach to regulating technology companies—which arguably has led tech to become Big Tech—the U.S. government is seeking to reign in today’s technology gia

As unpleasant as it is, questions need to be asked about America’s epidemic of mass shootings.

Political leaders in the U.S. try desperately to avoid the stark reality: the mass shooting of kids is a uniquely U.S. problem. Yes, there are atrocities going on around the world – genocides, child slavery, human trafficking, etc…- and as grotesque as these acts are, none are more perplexing than a man arming himself to the teeth and then walking into a school, opening fire and killing random children. Why, even if homicidal, would anyone choose a school full of children to act out their violent spree?

The following is my general view on the issue. I draw heavily on the excellent work by Harold Schwartz, “The Mind of The Mass Shooter” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, as well as other publications and the fundamentals of neuroscience.

Centralization of economic power facilitates centralization of political power. That was once a hard-won lesson, and it’s a lesson we must re-learn. Plus, the end of big box tyranny.

Neumann’s book, therefore, was received warmly. For Neumann, a key driver of the rise of the Nazi movement was monopolization, because he saw it as a system of economic control that was totally compatible with, and indeed encouraged, the rise of an authoritarian government. He noted that the Weimar Republic oversaw a massive merger wave; chemical giant IG Farben was a result of the combination of six firms in 1925. The Social Democrats, he argued, failed because they “did not see that the central problem was the imperialism of German monopoly capital, becoming ever more urgent with the continued growth of the process of monopolization. The more monopoly grew, the more incompatible it became with the political democracy.”

In the U.S., however, our antitrust laws saved our democracy. “In Germany,” Neuman wrote, “there was never anything like the popular antimonopoly movement of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” The Sherman Act, in other words, wasn’t perfect, but it did stop the rise of fascism. This kind of influence is obvious in decisions at the the time, which had deep moral rhetoric. In 1945, Judge Learned Hand ruled that Alcoa was a monopoly, noting that “among the purposes of Congress in 1890 was a desire to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.”

The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services may be the most reckless of all of Donald Trump’s appointments.

During COVID, however, these individual acts of opting out morphed into an unlikely new political force – the “conspirituality” movement. The combination of personal health obsession with conspiracy upended traditional politics.

It gave right-wing extremism a major makeover.

Conspirituality didn’t just happen. It was driven by online algorithms that tapped obsessions over personal health and suspicion of science into wormhole paths for QAnon. This process is chillingly revealed in the book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher.

Around the middle of 2022, it became apparent that the Biden administration was going to go all-in on industrial policy. The policies that Biden implemented — the CHIPS Act, and the green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act — had already been in the works for quite a while. But so had a bunch of other Democratic policy ideas that didn’t end up making it into law.1 So it wasn’t until 2022 that we realized that industrial policy was going to be Biden’s Big Thing.

Conservative industrialists, however, are facing a much harder dilemma right now. Biden’s industrial policy was a mixed bag, with more successes than failures. But Trump’s tariff policy is a giant flaming disaster. The dollar is down, as investors flee American bonds, putting the country’s whole financial stability in danger. Forecasts for the real economy are getting more pessimistic by the day. Stocks are down yet again. Here’s a representative headline:

Data-sharing between government agencies is one of DOGE’s key objectives. And in many ways, updating the handling and distribution of federal data is a noble endeavor. Much of the U.S. government runs on outdated legacy technologies, and (according to a 2023 brief from the American Economic Association) government data “could serve policymakers and the public better if not for … agencies’ uneven access to key source data.”

But data sharing is also a potent weapon—or, rather, a key tactic in the weaponization of bureaucratic agencies as ideological enforcers. The biggest threats to privacy in the twenty-first century often do not come from the collection of any specific piece of information; they come from data linking. Information that was collected for a particular purpose by one organization can be used for a very different purpose by another organization, especially when it is merged with other data into a detailed personal profile. Individuals end up, in effect, with a digital twin, assembled from the informational footprints they leave behind.

Electoral Autocracy: What Authoritarianism Often Looks Like Today

Today, we have a proliferation of electoral autocracies, or countries with strongman leaders who keep a semblance of democracy going —emphasis on semblance— by allowing opposition parties and media to exist, and holding elections. “Here we have a ballot box…the democracy gets its power from the people. It’s what we call national will,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed to CNN in 2018, denying he was a dictator.

Elections are often the last democratic institution standing in a country where the judiciary, bureaucracy, and security forces have been captured and made tools of the executive. But those elections have a different function when strongmen “game” the system so elections tend to produce the results necessary to maintain the strongman and his allies in office. For example, they shut down opposition media and domesticate what is left, so the opposition’s message does not reach voters during election seasons. GOP muse Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, has done that.

One of the most most tangible federal government innovations of recent years was Direct File, the long-sought effort to allow taxpayers a free and user-friendly means to report their taxes. The fate of Direct File had hung in the balance, but AP reports that sometime last month the Direct File team were told to expect layoffs and not to work on a version of the product for the next tax season. It appears that Direct File is dead.

Even if you never used Direct File, you should mourn its loss. It’s showed that good government tech and tech for good are compatible goals. Government can build high quality tech tools internally, better and more cheaply than if the project was farmed out to a private vendor.

But the Trump administration is not serious about using technology to make services work better. Instead they will kill low-cost and high-value tech innovations within government, deliberately making services worse and more expensive. DOGE is in the business of enabling private sector wealth extraction from the poor, and destroying public sector value creation.

The death of Direct File is also a testament to the power of rent-seeking, as the private tax preparation industry’s years of lobbying to kill a public option paid off.

Under pressure from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, nearly all the staff of the Defense Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech development arm — are resigning over the coming month, according to the director and three other current members of the office granted anonymity to discuss their job status freely, as well as internal emails.

The resignations will effectively shut down the decade-old program after the end of April.

The Defense Digital Service was created in 2015 to help the Pentagon adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon. It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.

Without the program, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech talent pipeline and counter adversarial drones will be sunset, one soon-to-be former employee said.

At this stage, the platforms stop being just “tech companies” and become something bigger: media empires that dictate the flow of information, attention, and even reality itself.

• They control what news people see.
• They determine what content gets engagement.
• They shape political narratives.
• They decide what voices get amplified or silenced.

This is the paradox of social media. Every platform starts with a mission. Every platform ends with a monopoly.

The cycle keeps repeating because these platforms are not just businesses anymore—they are infrastructure. They are more powerful than traditional media, more influential than governments, and more entrenched in daily life than most people realize.

Last week’s Vancouver TED conference delivered a chilling wake-up call through four speakers who, from different vantage points, converged on an unmistakable warning: Our digital ecosystem isn’t just broken — it threatens the foundations of democracy, truth, and human autonomy itself.

These speakers didn’t merely diagnose the crisis. They named it, mapped its architecture, and issued an urgent call to collective action before it’s too late.

Journalist Carole Cadwalladr, returning to the TED stage after her landmark 2019 talk on Facebook and democracy, delivered perhaps the most urgent warning of all:

“In years to come, allowing your child to be data-harvested from birth will be considered child abuse.”

This week I moderated a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference in Last Vegas with Dhar Mann, a massive content creator with who publishes scripted shows with motivational messages.

If you don’t know who Dhar Mann is, he’s basically the Mr. Beast of Facebook video. He has amassed tens of billions of views on the platform alone. He’s huge on YouTube, IG, and TikTok. His viral content success has allowed him to open a 100,000 square foot studio in Burbank where he shoots all of his content. Dhar has over 150 employees from script writers, to a wardrobe department, to a sprawling post production assembly line.

One thing he said to me while we were on stage that I found so interesting, is that, though he has always had a global audience, for years it never made sense to cultivate fandoms in secondary markets because the CPMs are so much lower outside of the U.S. and English speaking countries. He said that just a couple years ago it cost him $200,000 annually to dub his content into another language.

The idea of paying “your fair share” is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling ourselves it, the faster we can actually get to a tax policy that makes sense for everyone.

Taxes pay for nothing.

When the money is debited from your bank account, that money is eliminated from the economy. It doesn’t go into a bank account for the US government. There isn’t a bank account for the government at the Fed or the Treasury that the money goes into (that’s not how government procurement works.)

The U.S. government could buy everything it wants—without collecting a single cent from you or borrowing a single dime. There are consequences to this, which we’ll get into, but make no mistake: the government does not need your money to “pay for stuff.”

This whole idea that people need to “pay their fair share”? It’s a myth. That’s just not what taxes d

We’re suing to force the executive branch to disclose how it’s spending taxpayer dollars

Congress requires the White House to show the receipts on where it’s spending taxpayer money

Apportionments are an essential part of how the federal government operates. Congress passes government funding bills that tell the executive branch how much money it must spend for different purposes. Apportionments are the White House’s way of doling out the money to federal agencies — sort of like an allowance. They are legally binding plans, issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), that tell agencies how and when they may spend the funds Congress has appropriated. Agencies generally cannot actually spend money until they receive an apportionment.

Ensuring spending transparency is a longstanding, bipartisan concern

When Congress enacted this apportionment transparency requirement — on a bipartisan basis — it sought to protect its constitutional power of the purse and strengthen oversight of federal spending. In 2022, that law received support from organizations across the ideological spectrum. In recent weeks, those organizations and others — including R Street, National Taxpayers Union, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Project on Government Oversight, and Protect Democracy — have joined together again to express concern about OMB’s decision to take down its apportionment site, call on OMB to comply with the law, and express doubt about OMB Director Vought’s stated explanation for the change.

1. The first way the Trump regime openly becomes a dictatorship is by directly defying a Supreme Court order.

2. The second way we officially become a dictatorship is if the Trump regime can accuse any American citizen of being so dangerous as to justify being sent to a foreign prison, without any independent court reviewing the regime’s evidence.

Recessions Can Start on a Dime

Our country has suffered 48 recessions since its birth — one, on average, every five years. The key lesson of these downturns is that if enough people believe a recession is coming, they will make it happen. Economists call this multiple equilibrium — more than one place the economy can land based on self-fulfilling expectations. And many of the potential landing spots are miserable.

What explains multiple equilibrium? It’s as simple as Jane lays off her workers because she thinks Sam is laying off his, and vice-versa, where Jane’s customers are Sam’s workers and Sam’s customers are Jane’s workers. As President Roosevelt put it, at the height of the Great Depression, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” No macroeconomist has strung together eight words of such profundity.

Coordinated confidence is a public good — one that intelligent policymakers (remember them?) don’t take for granted. Declaring economic war with the entire planet and thermo nuclear economic war with China, the world’s second largest economy, is far beyond what’s needed for Jane and Sam to panic and shed their immediately extinguishable liabilities — their employees. It’s also plenty to trigger financial collapse.

Toward a Coherent Realism: India, Nigeria, and the Strategic Stakes of Civilizational Alignment

So who are the great powers that liberals need to talk to now? And how ought we talk to them?

Take India. Modi is not a liberal. But he is a civilizational actor—which makes him legible in ways that many Western technocrats aren’t. He is a strategic narcissist who wants to anchor a postcolonial future that vindicates India’s mythic past. That is the lever: prestige, myth, and long-horizon glory. Not morality—but narrative. If the West is to survive the interregnum, it must offer India a stake in civilizational coherence rather than transactional containment. India must see the United States as a partner in its myth, from Hollywood to Bollywood.

To survive, the West must rediscover itself not as a geography or alliance—but as a myth worthy of loyalty, shared across time zones and traditions.

The liberal technocratic approach—lecturing India about democratic values while seeking its markets—has failed spectacularly. It misunderstands what drives Modi and the Indian project. They do not seek Western approval; they seek vindication of India’s rightful place in world history. Our engagement must inspire glory, not bury partners with NGO reports and scolding press releases.

Why Both the Chinese and American Economies Need You to Keep Buying iPhones

Amid fears of a $3,500 iPhone that sent consumers rushing to stores, Apple was spared from Trump’s new reciprocal tariffs on Friday, at least temporarily. For the time being, iPhones—along with a vast array of other electronics—will be subjected only to the 20 percent tariff levied on virtually all Chinese goods last month. But the White House insists that one day, as a result of the tariffs, iPhones will be American-made.

Today in our pages, Patrick McGee says that idea is a fever dream. “The problem with building iPhones in America isn’t that they’d be priced at $3,500 each; it’s that they wouldn’t be built at all,” he argues.

No one understands the subject of Apple and China more deeply than McGee, who—thanks to Trump—has written maybe the best-timed book of the year. Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company is out May 13.

The sheer scale of what it takes to create the glass rectangle in your pocket is shocking—1,000 components across hundreds of factories with workers laboring round the clock. “What’s certain is that the U.S. and China both need Apple to succeed, albeit for very different reasons. The world’s most valuable company now finds itself caught in a cold war between two superpowers that want a divorce but need to make it work for their kid.”

How we would do things if we were serious.

The goals of trade policy with China should therefore probably include the following:

1. Preventing China from gaining an overwhelming military advantage over other nations
2. Reducing China’s ability to exert economic pressure on other nations
3. Reducing supply chain vulnerability in nations threatened by China, so that any future conflict with China wouldn’t crash those countries’ economies.

The opposite of curiosity is a word which sounds like death: hebetude

To be curious is to be audacious. Not in a grandstanding way, but in the quiet defiance of refusing to let the world go unexplored. Curiosity is not just a trait. It is propulsion. A vector. A form of courage dressed in intellectual appetite. And if we are to take anything seriously in our technologically infused, algorithmically governed century, then we must be honest: curiosity is the most consistently underrated force in human history. Otherwise, why would we drill rote learning into young minds?

Forget the tired cliché that curiosity killed the cat. What it actually did was invent calculus, rewrite genomes, decode starlight, and build machines that imitate human thinking. The cat, one suspects, died quite content, probably while reverse, engineering Schrödinger’s box.

Feynman, the great showman of physics, who intimated that the pleasure of finding things out was akin to sex. He was only half-joking. To him, curiosity was not the means to an end. It was the end.