Wolfgang Streeck believes that the future of democracy lies not in newfangled structures of planetary governance, but in a recuperation of the nation state’s lost capacities. In Taking Back Control?, published by Verso last year, the German sociologist and former director of the Max Planck Institute methodically traces the quiet transfer of authority over economic life from elected parliaments to technocratic institutions beyond democratic reach. Streeck’s project warrants attention as a distinctly non-right-wing flavor of protectionism that cuts through the priors of the American political landscape.

From the inflation crisis of the 1970s onwards, Streeck argues, national governments have ceded ever-larger swaths of policy to an extraterritorial network of treaties, courts, and market watchdogs. The neoliberal turn, in his telling, did not emancipate markets from the state; it re-cast the state—above all the United States—as the enforcer of a single, border-spanning market regime. The promise of friction-free trade rests on an imposed economic uniformity that ultimately strips democracies of their sensitivity to citizens’ “collective particularism.” This enforced uniformity, Streeck shows, generates the discontent that authoritarian movements in turn exploit.

Streeck’s history helps us think about the origins of reactionary disquiet without conceding to its rhetoric. It also helps us think about the necessary conditions for an alternative populism. Drawing on thinkers including Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, and Herbert Simon, Streeck argues that the complexity of the global economy can only be democratically addressed by the downward delegation of sovereign powers. Against both planetary technocracy and reactionary nationalism, Streeck envisions an international order of small, democratically empowered states capable of shaping economic outcomes in response to the public good.

Combinations’ Matt Prewitt and Guy Mackinnon-Little spoke with Streeck about the sources of state authority, the complexity gap between networks and human societies, and what an international system that bolsters rather than undermines sovereignty might look like.

One of the most important jobs we face in life is distinguishing between what is real and what is not. Discernment between the two ought to be a constant effort. For many of us, of course, it is not.

It is not however, a simple matter of digging deeply enough into an idea or a representation of fact or a story to determine whether it is based in reality or not. Often the lines are blurred, even in our own minds. As I have written here before, I am a big believer in the theory that much of what we know—perhaps most of what we know—is not true.

Much of what we are taught as history never took place or did unfold as represented in the books or stories handed down to us. Much of what we know as science is untrue. Pluto is a planet. Salt is bad for you. Or maybe not. When what is true shifts back and forth over the years, it ought to teach us a bit of humility about the reliability of our “knowledge.”

Many among us are taught to believe in certain things unquestioningly. Faith is considered a virtue. But how much of the picture of our past, present and future that faith paints is actually an accurate depiction of life in this universe of ours.

Even our own memories are suspect. Stories handed down as gospel in families are fabrications or twisted.

Understanding this produces useful intellectual humility.

In the coming weeks, the United States Senate is expected to ramp up consideration of a sprawling budget bill passed by the House that, if adopted, could block states from enforcing artificial intelligence regulations for 10 years.

Hundreds of state lawmakers and advocacy groups have opposed the provision, which House Republicans approved last month as an attempt to do away with what they call a cumbersome patchwork of AI rules sprouting up nationwide that could bog down innovation. On Thursday, Senate lawmakers released a version of the bill that would keep the moratorium in place while linking the restrictions to federal broadband subsidies.

Critics have argued that the federal moratorium — despite carving out some state laws — would preempt a wide array of existing regulations, including rules around AI in healthcare, algorithmic discrimination, harmful deepfakes, and online child abuse. Still, legal experts have warned that there is significant uncertainty around which specific laws would be preempted by the bill.

To that end, one non-profit organization that opposes the moratorium on Friday is releasing new research examining which state AI laws would be most at risk if the moratorium is adopted, which the group shared in advance with Tech Policy Press.

The report by Americans for Responsible Innovation — a 501(c)(4) that has received funding from Open Philanthropy and the Omidyar Network, among others — rates the chances of over a dozen state laws being blocked by a moratorium, from “likely” to “possible” to “unlikely.”

Let’s stop pretending this is just drama between two oversized egos. It’s not just about Trump calling Musk a lunatic or Musk firing back with Epstein-coded slime. This week’s meltdown between the former president and the world’s richest man is a symptom of something much bigger — and much more dangerous.

These aren’t just two men with platforms. They own them.

Let’s talk scale. X has about 650 million monthly active users worldwide — with around 60% under 35 — and it dominates news and cultural conversation in ways that no newspaper or network ever could. Truth Social is much smaller, hovering around 6 million monthly users, nearly all of them in the U.S., but what it lacks in reach, it makes up for in ideological purity. These aren’t just “apps.” They are fully functioning media ecosystems, operating without editors, without fact-checkers, without rules.

X and Truth Social don’t compete with traditional media — they drown it out. They out-shout Instagram, Reddit, or even YouTube in political influence, especially in election cycles. But they don’t just broadcast content. They algorithmically amplify it — injecting bias, bile, and personal agendas directly into the bloodstream of public discourse. No newsroom. No standards. No accountability. Just the unfiltered whims of two egomaniacs with vendettas and loyal followings.

This isn’t a fight between two guys online. It’s a battle for the infrastructure of truth itself.

Every headline covering their feud danced around the real story. Reporters gamed out how Trump might unleash government agencies to punish Musk. Pundits speculated Musk might push anti-Trump content down your feed. No one seemed shocked.

Few asked the real questions:

Why do two individuals have this kind of power over information in the first place? How did we allow truth itself to become a privately-owned asset?

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Futures Lab is working on projects to use artificial intelligence to transform the practice of diplomacy.

With funding from the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, the lab is experimenting with AIs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek to explore how they might be applied to issues of war and peace.

While in recent years AI tools have moved into foreign ministries around the world to aid with routine diplomatic chores, such as speech-writing, those systems are now increasingly being looked at for their potential to help make decisions in high-stakes situations. Researchers are testing AI’s potential to craft peace agreements, to prevent nuclear war and to monitor ceasefire compliance.

The Defense and State departments are also experimenting with their own AI systems. The U.S. isn’t the only player, either. The U.K. is working on “novel technologies” to overhaul diplomatic practices, including the use of AI to plan negotiation scenarios. Even researchers in Iran are looking into it.

Futures Lab Director Benjamin Jensen says that while the idea of using AI as a tool in foreign policy decision-making has been around for some time, putting it into practice is still in its infancy.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Elaine Kamarck, and William Galston explore why the Democrats aren’t building long-term coalitions, how the Democrats lost the working class, and how centrists in the party can create a compelling offer for voters.

Mounk: I’d always read about this famous paper, “The Politics of Evasion,” and I’m obviously well acquainted with both of your work, but I must admit that I hadn’t read it until yesterday, and I just fell out of my chair reading the paper, noticing how similar the situation after Democrats lost to George H.W. Bush in 1988 was compared to how you might analyze it today. Take us back to that moment and explain to us what the problems were that you were analyzing in “The Politics of Evasion.”

Kamarck: We’d lost several presidential elections in a row, even though the party was still quite strong at the congressional level and at the local level. So we were living in a sort of a myth that really nothing was wrong. It was just that Ronald Reagan was so charismatic, et cetera. Then we lost to George H. W. Bush, who was anything but charismatic. We really had to have a “come to Jesus” moment, as we say. And we had to look at the party and say something’s really wrong here. Of course, what was wrong was something that we’ve seen since, which is that the Democrats were fundamentally out of step with most of the country on values. And they were turned off by the national Democrats, even though at that point in time, they continued to elect Democrats to the House and to the Senate. So there was this need for the party to take a hard look at itself.

The Model

While explosions in small-dollar contributions have been working wonders supporting federal candidates in certain swing states in recent years, almost no money flows to most statehouse candidates.

And since it’s statehouses where most of the attacks on democracy and extremism have been doing the most damage, the lack of meaningful support for most statehouse candidates turns out to be a huge problem for democracy. Even worse, that lack of support is leaving huge numbers of these districts (the very districts where the most damage is being done) not contested at all. (Because why run if no one cares enough to support your candidacy?) And that, of course, makes the problem even worse. A downward spiral of extremism and anti-democracy, wholly uninterrupted by the other side or even a modicum of accountability.

In my book Saving Democracy, I equate the situation to a soccer game where one team is always on offense (extreme statehouses are the forwards, shooting at the goal non-stop). And the other team hardly plays defense against them:

The new pope won’t. He’s a sensible liberal who, three weeks ago, retweeted a post slamming Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” He also retweeted a post reading: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

When FDR was later asked for the roots of his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat.” There’s no question that the new social contract he struck was connected at a deep, instinctive level to the moral and social values articulated by Leo XIII.

Now the magnanimous spirit of the New Deal is under attack as never before. But help is on the way, courtesy of a South Side guy who may end up serving as the conscience of his country and the world.

The new pope won’t. He’s a sensible liberal who, three weeks ago, retweeted a post slamming Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” He also retweeted a post reading: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

When FDR was later asked for the roots of his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat.” There’s no question that the new social contract he struck was connected at a deep, instinctive level to the moral and social values articulated by Leo XIII.

Now the magnanimous spirit of the New Deal is under attack as never before. But help is on the way, courtesy of a South Side guy who may end up serving as the conscience of his country and the world.

In a little noticed interview, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg offers a host of exceptionally creepy comments.

Lots of important monopoly-related things happened last week. Now that Apple’s app store monopoly is broken, developers are cutting prices and building cool stuff. The tariff shock is about to hit in force, but the stock market has recovered all of its losses since April 2nd. Plus a lot more.

But before getting to the full round-up, I want to focus on the social future that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building for all of us, whether we like it or not, and how reliant it is on the firm’s market power.

Take a recent viral clip about a future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends, from an interview he did on the Dwarkesh podcast. Zuckerberg talked how Americans on average have only three friends, but want fifteen. He then explained that though emotional connections with AI bots are socially disfavored now, eventually society will “find the vocabulary” to understand that people who use AI to fill a hole of loneliness in their lives are “rational.”

The new pope won’t. He’s a sensible liberal who, three weeks ago, retweeted a post slamming Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” He also retweeted a post reading: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

When FDR was later asked for the roots of his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat.” There’s no question that the new social contract he struck was connected at a deep, instinctive level to the moral and social values articulated by Leo XIII.

Now the magnanimous spirit of the New Deal is under attack as never before. But help is on the way, courtesy of a South Side guy who may end up serving as the conscience of his country and the world.

The new pope won’t. He’s a sensible liberal who, three weeks ago, retweeted a post slamming Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” He also retweeted a post reading: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

When FDR was later asked for the roots of his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat.” There’s no question that the new social contract he struck was connected at a deep, instinctive level to the moral and social values articulated by Leo XIII.

Now the magnanimous spirit of the New Deal is under attack as never before. But help is on the way, courtesy of a South Side guy who may end up serving as the conscience of his country and the world.

The years of my youth must have been such a disappointment for sci-fi fans of my parents’ generation. They were raised on stories of spaceships soaring between the stars, and they grew up to see the space shuttle explode and humankind abandon the moon. They grew up expecting flying cars and robot servants, but as they reached middle age they were still trundling along the ground and doing their own laundry.

Though I’ll still go back and read some stuff from the 80s and 90s, I stopped reading new cyberpunk about a decade ago. Around that time it became clear that the pace of real technological change had overtaken authors’ imaginations; newly written cyberpunk fiction began to feel retrofuturistic, like someone writing about the present and getting it wrong. Meanwhile all I had to do to see fantastic techno-futures unfold around me was to read the news.

There are plenty of other ways in which new technologies might lead to dystopian outcomes. Beyond the obvious ones — rogue AGI and bioterrorism — there’s the possibility that modern technology might make replacement-level fertility impossible, leading to a grim, gray, shrinking world where working people have to toil ever longer and harder to support vast armies of the aged. Smartphones equipped with social media might also be leading to an epidemic of depression, loneliness, and reduced cognitive skills.

Why should those who aren’t scientists care? In the 21st century, science isn’t some esoteric intellectual affair. It’s the foundation of social and economic progress. And no, we can’t expect the private sector to fill the gap left by loss of government support. Basic research is a public good: it generates real benefits, but those benefits can’t be monetized because everyone can make use of the knowledge gained. So government support is the only way to sustain science. And that support is being rapidly ended.

But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

How do you know when you have too much going on?

The two clearest indicators: either a decline in objective performance or subjective experience. The numbers go down, the stress increases, or some combination of both. But these are end games you want to avoid. Ideally, you spot the issue in advance. It is easier to prevent overload than to escape or reverse it.

Cooking well—literally or metaphorically—means deciding how many burners you can have going, what should be boiling, and when it does so.

Make this metaphor work for you by reflecting on how many burners you’ve got going and the heat of each. You can check in at the beginning of every week to prioritize which burners need to be actively boiling versus which you can keep on a simmer. You could even put this visualization on a whiteboard in your office. If you start to feel like the entire kitchen is getting out of control, that’s a sign to turn down a burner or two, or perhaps, even eliminate some altogether.

We all want to cook, but none of us want to burn down the kitchen. Hopefully, this helps.

Why Humanity—and Dignity—Shouldn’t Surrender to Technological Inevitability

The effective accelerationism movement (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures like Guillaume Verdon and embraced by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary choice: “accelerate or die.” Those who question this narrative are dismissed as “decels” or “doomers” standing in the way of humanity’s cosmic destiny.

What’s actually at stake in this debate isn’t just the pace of innovation but whether humans meaningfully shape their own future. E/acc’s seductive simplicity—its promise that surrendering to technological inevitability will solve humanity’s problems—can slide quickly into authoritarian governance justified by “inevitable” technological imperatives. We’re already seeing these dynamics at work in real-world contexts, as when the Trump administration uses tariffs as leverage to force countries to accept Elon Musk’s Starlink—a fusion of technological and political power that bypasses democratic accountability.

The center must be held against this technological determinism. Two plus two equals four means we must always insist on seeing reality clearly, not through the distorting lens of inevitability narratives that conveniently serve those already in power. Human dignity and democratic legitimacy aren’t obstacles to technological advancement—they’re its moral foundation. Without them, technology inevitably becomes not a force for liberation, but merely another form of authoritarian control—no matter how brightly it smiles.