Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that end, what is needed from the next phase of contributions to this discussion are proposals to reboot science and generate breakthroughs, policies to create an environment in which transformative gro...| American Affairs Journal
In this sense, tech today is less Jeffersonian than the first Californian Ideology suggested, celebrating the hacker, the dropout, and the lone builder, with the profound skepticism of centralized power entailed by these archetypes. It is arguably more Hamiltonian, focused on building state capacity at the national level. Whereas the old Californian Ideology captured the liberating power of technology, the new one affirms its constructive power. Tech’s social capital may be uneven, but its ...| American Affairs Journal
Following her defeat in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened. While that tome is not considered a classic work of political analysis, its implied titular question animates a good deal of writing about politics these days, including two books released over the past year: Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. Both books are attempts to grapple with the significance of the political energies of which Trum...| American Affairs Journal
The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. The self-flattering story Democrats have told themselves is that rising white racism explains the defection of white working-class voters. But that simple story was always undercut by data showing white racism has declined, not increased, in recent decades. And the fable was further unde...| American Affairs Journal
Today’s consumer capitalist societies present us with a paradox: We are told year in and year out that living standards are rising, but many people—especially younger people—can feel their quality of life decline as time goes on. This feeling is palpable and can be seen in the hardest of the quality of life indices, such as the suicide rate and the rates of drug addiction and overdose. Noneconomic measures show a large decline in quality of life in recent years, but economic metrics sho...| American Affairs Journal
Can consumer data be treated as a “strategic resource,” as the most recent National Counterintelligence Strategy asserts, from both the commercial and security perspectives simultaneously? Or will one necessarily come at the expense of the other? As the age of “Big Data” and advances in computing have birthed the Artificial Intelligence era, these questions require urgent attention from policymakers. From OPM to Equifax to Salt Typhoon, the issue is now less that a single sensitive pu...| American Affairs Journal
The debates over the Department of Government Efficiency have revealed, if nothing else, that the federal budget is obscure even to the political combatants ostensibly responsible for developing and overseeing it. In the executive branch, Elon Musk highlights that billions of dollars of payments are processed by the Treasury without even a memo line. Meanwhile, in Congress, Republican politicians highlight the incompleteness of the bureaucracy’s spending records, while Democrats bemoan the ...| American Affairs Journal
The American grid is in trouble. For years, our country has been retiring reliable power plants and building unreliable wind and solar resources. Moreover, most of the country’s power gets allocated in complex power markets where decisions are made beyond the public eye. And areas without markets still fall beneath the aegis of utilities, leviathans who toss their weight around in state politics and often get caught up in corruption schemes. These were problems when America’s power demand...| American Affairs Journal
Zeal for reinvigorating manufacturing, coupled with fears that AI can leave workers behind, are generating a rare moment of political and policy unity where such a new workforce development strategy and an American apprenticeship renaissance could finally gain traction. Silicon Valley’s history offers important lessons for the industrial future U.S. policymakers are looking to realize. The innovators working on advanced technologies and the workers with good secure jobs in manufacturing wer...| American Affairs Journal
China’s rise as a strategic adversary and maritime power has finally triggered much-needed introspection and shaken America out of a multigenerational hibernation. The U.S. maritime industrial base (MIB) faces a Chinese counterpart hundreds of times larger in both shipbuilding capacity and commercial orders. Revitalizing America’s maritime industry to compete and win in a global economy saturated with nonmarket actors requires dramatic and rapid changes. Rather than chasing politically ex...| American Affairs Journal