Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars. But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated [ ]
A Conversation with Ezra Klein. Beneath Carney’s analysis of what is happening is an idea I’ve been following for some time: weaponized interdependence. This idea comes from the international-relations theorists and professors Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.” The basic concept is that over time, [ ]
The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up [ ]
When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was [ ]
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the [ ]
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates about whether AI might emulate, outstrip, or replace individual human intelligence. They ought to consider AI in terms of its relationship with governance. Existing large-scale systems of governance such as [ ]
With Dan Davies for the New York Times This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate, and on Thursday, President Trump held a gala dinner for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin. That doesn’t mean [ ]
The best way to read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is to take the authors at their word. Abundance is what is usually called a “policy book,” but Klein and Thompson don’t quite offer a traditional policy agenda. Instead, the authors begin and end with a question that is also a concentrating lens. “Can we [ ]
What happens to politics when the voice of the people blurs together with the voices of self-appointed god-emperors like Elon Musk? We are about to find out. More at Democracy Journal.
How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe. More at Foreign Affairs