My Troubling Thoughts on This Christmas Day
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, the decay of democratic institutions, and the rise of political movements that question fundamental human equality create a perfect storm.
Today is Christmas, and my heart is heavy. We have come so far, yet we are so adrift. The world we knew, or thought we knew, is gone. As I sit here and reflect on the past few years of my life, which have admittedly been filled with struggle, pain, and even betrayal, I’d be lying if I were to say that I am filled with hope. That would be dishonest because I am not filled with hope. I am instead filled with a sense of foreboding. That, the world we share, and that we all depend on for the sustenance of life, and for which the dreams of a brighter future for our children and our greater posterity depend, is lurching towards catastrophe. I am not bereft of hope, however. The hope I have steels me for the fight ahead, but I do feel the dangers very heavily.
I think it’s a bit of self-delusion to believe that what we now see emerging in this world is anything other than “normal,” unfortunately. We have rejoined history in all its bloodiness and all its traumas.
The evidence that our capacities as humans on this planet are hobbled by the limitations of our minds, our imagination, and increasingly, our attention is overwhelming. Whether we can sustain the game of civilization for the next hundred years is debatable. And even if we do sustain the game, what our society looks like, whether it is defined by the basic egalitarian notion of the equal dignity and worth of all human life is not without question. There are many troubling questions here, given what we see.
We are driving headfirst into a social experiment for which we have no good reason to believe is safe—rapidly advancing the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence by speed-running it into every single consumer product under the sun. We are doing this even though we don’t know the dangers that await us. But we know enough, if we think about it, to see that they are significant. The potential for catastrophe is real, and the prospects of meeting these dangers with anything resembling collective action seem distantly remote. So we are going to roll the dice here, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I or anyone else can do about that now.
The world is backsliding rapidly into an era that resembles the era that preceded the last. A less connected world. A more provincial one. But also one where the march of war drums is now a sound that is audible if you listen carefully. Here, a confused public, believes that American disengagement from the world will be a stabilizing force. That, a world of competing powers, will be a more just one.
Millions of Americans and Western citizens, more generally, have become captured by the notion that the world is otherwise a naturally peaceful place, save for the destabilizing influence of corrupt interests in the American capital. That large-scale conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, are rooted in a cloak-and-dagger conspiratorial alignment between American intelligence agencies and the profit-hungry defense contractors whose lobbyists haunt K Street. They believe, among other things, that Vladimir Putin would have been happy and content with the borders of Eastern Europe had America kept its nose out of it and Eastern European nations had realized the importance of taking no sides between the West and Russia. These people believe that the Ukrainian people would not have even wanted to align themselves with the Western world and away from Russia if not for the dastardly manipulation of the CIA—which is how the paranoid, former KGB agent who now rules Russia as a modern czar, sees it too. There is not much daylight narratively speaking between those in the West who obsess about the central nature of the CIA to all the world’s problems and the man who casts a giant shadow over Red Square. They are very offended, however, if you suggest that their narratives are indistinguishable from the propaganda that mirrors this narrative coming out of Moscow. But it is propaganda.
Here in the United States, we face a dangerous culmination of a political trend rooted in an intense distrust of institutions, expertise, and intellectualism. A rising populist fervor that sees it fit to destroy every institution in its path that it sees as captured or infected by a pernicious liberal ideology. In this moment, diverse groups of terminally non-aligned interests, from white identitarian nationalists to corporate oligarchs, have made common cause in their shared belief that the machinery of the American federal government needs to be dismantled and sold for parts. You can see an example of the nature of this unholy alliance as the Trump coalition, such as it is, is now fighting with itself over immigration. On the one hand, the aspiring oligarchical class wants to maintain access to the world’s talent. At the same time, the white identitarian right, for whom they sip margaritas with at Mar-a-Lago and pretend they can be friends, is fighting back.
I watch this debate with what I can only describe as a kind of dark bemusement and a little indignance at the otherwise respectable people on the sidelines, acting like this isn’t the vulgarity it is. When Silicon Valley CEOs jump in to defend Sriram Krishnan, being appointed as a Senior Policy Advisor, while literal white identitarian racists within the Trump coalition are openly arguing against it, and their stance is to defend the American identity of Krishnan, without stopping to ask the question about why this group of people are sharing space with white identitarian racists at Mar-a-Lago is perhaps, to me, the most shocking aspect of this moment. They are pretending, on the one hand, that they are not in coalition with fascists and racists while finding themselves in the thralls of an argument with fascists and racists, who are otherwise MAGA personalities in good standing with their political standard-bearer, Donald Trump.
They want to cast someone like myself as suffering from a cognitive pathology—Trump Derangement Syndrome, they call it—where I am unable to see the truth about Donald Trump that he’s not a bad guy. That all the bad things I think he’s done are manufactured lies by a captured corporate media that aligns itself around a radical progressive ideology that seeks to destroy America from the inside out. That if I just opened my eyes, I would see this to be the obvious truth. That the truth is, the protesters on January 6th, 2021 outside the United States Capitol’s Stop the Steal Rally, didn’t break-in. They were intentionally let in and merely went on a leasurly stroll. Like there isn’t a video of Dominic Pezzola smashing a window, using a riot shield—which I’m pretty sure was stolen from a Capitol Police officer—right before which another member of the Proud Boys jumped through the broken window, soon followed by a horde of others. I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome because I believe my lying eyes, in other words.
I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome because I observe that Trump, who trucks with Laura Loomer, who is the very woman lunging openly racist attacks on the former Andreesen Horwitz general partner, Sriram Krishnan, while the Silicon Valley elite stand-up for him joining the inchoate administration of the man who… trucks with Laura Loomer.
What about this fact pattern has anything to do with the so-called propaganda that I have consumed from the so-called “mainstream” media? What am I missing here? Other than the fact that all the people in question, acting like Trump is a reasonable actor who they can work with, are actively providing hospital ground for a racist like Laura Loomer.
Shifting gears back to more high-minded matters, this convergence of AI development and political instability creates a perilous moment. Consider that Krishnan, who faces racist attacks from within Trump's coalition, is simultaneously being positioned to shape AI policy under a potential Trump administration. This exemplifies the precarious situation we face: the development of transformative AI technology is being entrusted to an administration that openly associates with white nationalists while maintaining support from tech leaders who seem willing to overlook this fact. The same institutional decay that threatens our democracy now risks compromising our ability to govern artificial intelligence responsibly. We're not just gambling with our political future—we're potentially ceding control of humanity's most influential technology to a coalition that includes people who openly question the fundamental equality and dignity of all human beings. This historical irony would be dismissed as too on-the-nose in fiction, yet here we are, watching it unfold in real time.
The convergence of these forces—technological acceleration, institutional decay, and political instability—creates vulnerabilities our current systems weren't designed to handle. When the Founders created checks and balances, they couldn't have envisioned artificial intelligence or social media's capacity to reshape public discourse. When Progressive Era reformers designed regulatory frameworks to check private power, they couldn't have anticipated companies that could influence global information flows or develop technologies that fundamentally alter human society. Our institutional safeguards were built for a world of slower change and more precise boundaries between public and private power. Now, we face the prospect of transformative technologies being developed and deployed by private actors who seem increasingly willing to align with anti-democratic forces. At the same time, our democratic institutions struggle to maintain basic functionality. The erosion of these institutions isn't just a political crisis—it's a technological one, as we lose the mechanisms we would need to ensure AI development serves democratic rather than autocratic ends.
Not to put it mildly, this is an ethical emergency. We can’t say with a straight face that the people who now control the machinery of the state and all its might are committed to aligning its interests to a common good. They seem convinced, perhaps in their infallibility and possibly even the deluded belief that their success is collectively ours. But that is motivated rationalization on their part, at best.
The fusion of technological capability and political authority we're witnessing represents more than just a convergence of risks—it marks a potential transformation in how power operates in society. When those who control transformative technologies align with anti-democratic forces, they're not just making a tactical political choice. They're participating in creating new forms of power that combine technological reach with political authority in ways that could prove extremely difficult to check or reverse. The technical complexity of AI systems already creates significant accountability challenges. When these systems are developed and deployed by actors who resist democratic oversight on principle, we risk creating power structures that are both technically opaque and politically unaccountable.
Perhaps most striking about this moment is the casual normalization of what should be morally unthinkable combinations of power and ideology. Technology executives and venture capitalists—many proudly tout their commitment to innovation and human progress—seem remarkably comfortable aligning themselves with political forces that openly question democratic principles and human equality. They attend meetings at Mar-a-Lago, develop AI policies for potential administrations that include white nationalists, and justify these choices through an almost impressive array of ethical contortions. The cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously champion human potential through technology while collaborating with those who would restrict human dignity based on race or nationality seems lost on them. It's as if they've convinced themselves that the technical brilliance they've demonstrated in building successful companies somehow exempts them from basic moral reasoning about their political alignments. This ethical blindness isn't just personal failure - it's institutional capture on a massive scale, where the promise of influence and access has overwhelmed what should be obvious moral barriers.
This moral failure is hazardous because it could reshape the fundamental relationship between technology and democracy. When technology leaders align with anti-democratic forces while developing systems that could fundamentally alter human society, they're not just making individual ethical compromises but potentially cementing a future where technological power serves autocratic ends. The gravity of this seems lost on those who should know better. They treat collaboration with explicitly anti-democratic forces as just another business decision, as if the technical challenges of AI development exist in isolation from the political context in which that growth occurs. This willful blindness to the moral implications of their choices suggests a more resounding failure of imagination—an inability or unwillingness to recognize how their actions could enable forms of power that might prove impossible to constrain once established democratically.
The shame of this moment will echo through history. Those who now casually align transformative technologies with anti-democratic forces, who sit comfortably at tables with white nationalists while claiming to champion human progress, who pretend not to see the moral abyss opening before us—they dishonor not just themselves but the very promise of technological advancement. Their willingness to subordinate democratic principles to private power and trade moral clarity for market access marks them as architects of a potential darkness they seem unwilling to acknowledge. Future generations will look back at this critical juncture and ask how those with the power to shape humanity's technological future could readily compromise with forces that question human equality. They will ask how technical brilliance could coexist with such moral blindness. And they will judge harshly those who, in this moment of ethical emergency, chose to look away, rationalize, and pretend that serving anti-democratic power was compatible with serving human progress. The weight of this shame falls not just on those making these choices but on all who stand silent as they watch it happen.