“I don’t feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare

 

Welcome to the summer [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-summer-that-america-became-a-nation-of-luddites-5e6dc3e7?mod=hp_lead_pos5] of America’s luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/], who believes that watermarking is “nuts.”

 

In our luddite zeitgeist, Keith believes that a watermark is a scarlet stamp of implied guilt. By marking its own product, Anthropic is not only furnishing the luddite mob with a convenient surveillance tool, but also acknowledging a tacit guilt about using Claude.

 

“You should never adjust to the market,” the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur explains. “The market’s wrong nine times out of ten.”

 

As for Dario Amodei, Claude’s dad (so to speak), Keith is even more accusatory. The Anthropic CEO is kissing ass “like a politician, not the leader of a company,” Keith hisses, repeating this week’s whispers that Anthropic is becoming an “ideologically motivated cult.” If Dario were female, Keith would probably make him a witch. Or, at least, a hussy — the hysterical implication, if not the word, of the Journal’s profile [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/claude-dario-amodei-wife-anthropic-e1eeda7d] of Cami Clark, Dario’s wife.

 

I took Anthropic’s side — somebody had to. I see watermarking as just another AI tool. It’s an honest human fingerprint in an age of fakery. Live by the algorithm, die by it too. Anyway, a watermark has its uses. Rather than moral opprobrium, it feeds our curiosity about who is and isn’t using AI. So, for example, I ran Keith’s editorial through another AI detector and it indicated 86 percent AI-generated while mine came back as 100 percent human. And if I can elude the scarlet stamp, then even I might have to join the luddite mob.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       “Watermarking Is Nuts.” Keith’s editorial takes aim at Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output — invisible text signals identifying the machine’s hand, cousin to what Google has long done with audio. His objection isn’t the mark itself (“I don’t care that it’s watermarked. I care that Anthropic thinks it should be watermarked”): a watermark starts from suspicion, implies a problem where none exists, and tells Anthropic’s own customers their use of the product needs flagging. Restream doesn’t watermark this show; Adobe doesn’t watermark its exports. To Keith it’s pure zeitgeist capitulation — and while one Claude Max subscriber in the newsletter canceled in protest, Keith hasn’t. Andrew’s rebuttal: watermarking serves curiosity, and in an age of fakery an honest fingerprint is a very human addition.

•       The Scarlet Watermark: On AI Shame. The deeper argument was theological. Keith — an atheist who concedes atheism is also a faith, and who believes in good and bad but not sin — feels no shame “recruiting an army of AI agents” so long as he can stand by the output; shame belongs to spam factories and fakers who publish unread. But society, he says, is trying to make him feel it: the canceled author who lost his agent last week proves there’s an issue. Andrew, playing therapist, diagnosed a flicker of guilt anyway — and argued shame is precisely the point: one of the last all-too-human spaces, worth preserving in an age of machines. Both then confessed their methods on air: Pangram scored Keith’s editorial 86 percent AI and Andrew’s 100 percent human. “I’m a clev

The Scarlet Summer of Our Luddite Discontent: Opening Up on AI Shame & Anthropic Watermarks

“The machines today are like toddlers learning how to walk. They stumble. They’re not very good. They make mistakes.” — Anmol Madan

 

One in three American adults are already using AI for health information — with or without their doctors’ permission. The machines, in other words, are already seeing us. This will chill some Americans in our summer [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-summer-that-america-became-a-nation-of-luddites-5e6dc3e7?mod=hp_lead_pos5] of luddite discontent. For others, however, like the San Francisco-based medical tech entrepreneur Anmol Madan [https://www.anmolmadan.com/], the appearance of doctor AI in our lives is mostly good news.

 

In his new book, The Machines Will See You Now [https://www.anmolmadan.com/], Madan lays out what he calls a “human roadmap” to “autonomous health care.” I’m not entirely sure what he means by “human” in a Blade Runner-style world where machine and man are quickly merging. But by “autonomous,” which I suspect is a euphemism, Madan means artificial intelligence.

 

What worries Madan about our current moment is the broken dialogue over AI. On the one hand, we have tech utopians promising a totally automated healthcare industry. Then we have an anxious establishment struggling to change America’s archaic and often dysfunctional medical system. And, of course, American consumers (if that’s the right word) who are already using ChatGPT or, more troublingly, TikTok, as their doctor.

 

America spends $4.7 trillion on a healthcare industry which compares poorly with the medical systems of other wealthy countries. Madan’s “parallel universe,” he promises, would cost half as much and double access. The machines will see you now. Like it or not, Dr AI is our all-too-human future.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       One in Three Already Ask the Machines. The KFF poll behind the episode: a third of American adults already use AI for health information, with or without their doctors’ blessing — and if they’re not asking ChatGPT, they’re asking TikTok. Madan’s frustration is the broken dialogue between AI exuberance (“we’re going to automate healthcare”) and medical anxiety, when the right answer is in between: new technology is no excuse for throwing out the guardrails of medical devices and clinical safety. The stakes are the brutal arithmetic of American medicine — $4.7 trillion spent for the worst outcomes among peer nations — and his “parallel universe”: half the cost, twice the access, delivered by AI systems that are tested, safe, and rigorous. Consumer appetite is already there; the safeguards are not.

•       The Waymo Scale for Medicine. The book’s organizing framework applies the self-driving industry’s levels of autonomy to healthcare. Level zero is today: 99 percent of decisions — diagnosis, treatment, prescription — made by humans. Level one is doctor assistance, already deployed: radiologists who once hauled backpacks of reports now guided by machines to where to focus. Levels two and three ease machines into the lowest-stakes treatment and diagnostic decisions with human review — and the fully autonomous end state, Madan concedes, may never arrive. To Andrew’s objection that Waymo’s scale ended with the drivers removed, Madan offers the transatlantic pilot: autopilot flies ninety percent of the route, and nobody thinks the pilot doesn’t matter. The structure, he argues, is what lets regulators, doctors, and builders finally talk about the same thing.

•       Toddlers Learning to Walk. Madan’s metaphor for today’s medical AI: toddlers — stumbling, error-prone, needing layers of protection, and badly underestimated at their peril and ours. The mistake, he argues, is concluding that because the systems aren’t perfect we shouldn’t try them at all, when a constraine

The Machines Will See You Now: Anmol Madan's Human Roadmap to AI Health Care

“The Romans did that many, many times — until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.” — Michelle Berenfeld on getting “back to normal”

 

Are we Rome (yet)? Michelle Berenfeld [https://bookshop.org/p/books/lessons-from-a-lost-republic-what-ancient-rome-can-teach-us-about-this-american-moment-michelle-berenfeld/9faec7f48cb2d30a] fears we are. Back in April of last year, the professor of classics at Pitzer College published “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic” in the Atlantic. And now Berenfeld has expanded her argument into Lessons from a Lost Republic [https://bookshop.org/p/books/lessons-from-a-lost-republic-what-ancient-rome-can-teach-us-about-this-american-moment-michelle-berenfeld/9faec7f48cb2d30a], a new book about what Ancient Rome can teach us about our current American moment.

 

There are two Romes, Berenfeld reminds us: the Roman Republic and Imperial Rome. Nostalgic tech guys like Mark Zuckerberg are obsessed with the imperial world of emperors, legions, and world domination, while the more forward-thinking founders of the American republic used imperial figures like Caesar and Augustus as negative lessons from antiquity.

 

Asking whether Trump is Roman is like asking whether the Pope is Catholic. Certainly he’s a wannabe Caesar with his fleshy face on our currency, his imperial DC arch, his daily wars, and all those fake blood sports on the White House lawn. But the daily comedy show misses the longer-term political tragedy. Berenfeld fears the shift in power from Congress toward an imperial presidency, a trend she says predates Trump and will outlast him. The gravest Roman conceit was believing, after each crisis, that things could get “back to normal” — a mantra Roman citizens repeated endlessly until there was nothing left of the old republic to protect.

 

Then there’s Zuckerberg, who even named his daughters August and Aurelia. For Zuck, Augustus should be praised for doing “tough things” to usher in two centuries of peace and prosperity. But Berenfeld reminds us those tough things included drawing up enemies lists and killing everyone who crossed him. Meanwhile, this supposed peace and prosperity (de)generated the rule of Caligula and Nero. Augustus, Berenfeld argues, was one of history’s great spin doctors, claiming to be restoring a corrupted republic while simultaneously dismantling it. No wonder, perhaps, Zuckerberg admires him so much.

 

Berenfeld says that the Roman spectacle of “bread and circuses” should be a warning. Juvenal’s complaint was that Romans traded their liberties for gladiatorial games and free grain. We’re making the same trade in contemporary America, Berenfeld observes, and getting neither. Most Americans, she concludes sadly, can’t even afford a World Cup ticket.

 

Berenfeld’s deepest lesson is about power and political agency. Political powers given up are not easily gotten back, she warns. Republics are not saved by Hollywood-style saviors, and there is no golden age to restore. That said, the Los Angeles-based classicist hasn’t completely given up hope. Nothing about Rome’s trajectory was inevitable, she reminds us. Remixing Benjamin Franklin, the American Republic is ours to keep, if we use our agency as citizens. Just don’t tempt fate by naming your daughters August and Aurelia.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Founders’ Rome vs the Bros’ Rome. Americans are obsessed with the wrong Rome. The TikTok meme, the billionaires, and the manosphere celebrate the empire — emperors, legions, gladiators, world domination — while the founders admired the republic: 500 years of government founded on the rejection of a king, with rule of law, guaranteed rights, and peaceful transitions of power, all rare in antiquity. They designed the American constitution in e

The Roman Road to the Ruin of its Republic: Michelle Berenfeld’s Lessons from Antiquity

 

“He’s not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can’t really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal

 

Yesterday, WOLA’s Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin American killing spree. Today, we talk the real thing. Pulitzer Prize-winning Joby Warrick [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Jackal/Joby-Warrick/9781668070550] has a new book out about the rise and fall [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Jackal/Joby-Warrick/9781668070550] of Carlos the Jackal, who he calls the “original super-terrorist.”

 

So who was Carlos the Jackal? Originally he was named by his Venezuelan Marxist father Ilich in homage to Lenin. Then he renamed himself Carlos, borrowing from a fake passport the French police happened to find in 1975. While The Jackal came from the London Guardian after reporters spotted Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller on the bookshelf of his London safe house. Ilich (i.e. Carlos) loved it. Anything for attention. Especially from the capitalist media.

 

His career, as a proxy Palestinian terrorist, was equally audacious. His solo debut, at 24, was the attempted London assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff. Two years later, Carlos waltzed into OPEC headquarters in Vienna and kidnapped most of the world’s oil ministers, a terrorist heist that, Warrick reveals, was financed by Muammar Gaddafi.

 

Then all of Carlos’ yesterdays — and there are many, as Warrick discovers when he interviews him in his French jail. He spent twenty years on the run, mostly barely camouflaged in faded Eastern European hotels. The Mossad didn’t even consider him worth assassinating. By the eighties he had become a gun for hire who’d stopped attacking Israelis. And at 75, in his convent-turned-prison outside Paris, the world’s original super-terrorist cooks his own meals, repeats old leftist slogans, and misremembers everything except his innocence.

 

In spite of his pathetic fate, Carlos matters because, as Warrick notes, the Jackal model is back in fashion. Russia and Iran now hire petty crooks on Telegram for a few hundred dollars to firebomb synagogues or assassinate dissidents. Gaza’s tragic hopelessness echoes the post-1967 conditions that bred the first wave of Palestinian terror. Social media is now infested with wannabe violent influencers. The day of the Jackal, then, is not only our history but also our future.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Interview with the Jackal. Warrick negotiated for over a year — with Carlos, then with a French government determined he not be glorified, since his gravest crimes were against French citizens — for roughly ninety minutes in March 2025, no recorder, no camera, notebook only. The prison is a converted sixteenth-century convent outside Paris where the Nazis once tortured members of the Resistance; inside it, Carlos remains the big man on campus — guards call him Carlos, not Ilich, and he keeps a large cell, cooks his own meals, and browses the internet. At 75 he is natty, polyglot, charming — and stooped, forgetful, repeating himself into what Warrick calls a fog of old memories. As a witness he is worthless: everything ten times bigger and better than it was, except the crimes, which he suddenly cannot recall.

•       Ilich, Carlos, Jackal: An Accidental Brand. His ardent-Marxist father named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin, after the founder of the Soviet Union. “Carlos” came from a fake passport — Carlos Martinez — that French police happened to seize in 1975; the pudgy dark-glasses photo the world memorized was a passport fake he remains embarrasse

The Yesterday of the Jackal: Joby Warrick Meets Carlos, the World’s Original Super-Terrorist

“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh

 

With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco-terrorists.” The first full account of this deadly war is the Washington Office on Latin America’s (WOLA) Killing Spree: Extrajudicial Executions in the U.S. Boat Strike Campaign [https://www.wola.org/analysis/killing-spree-extrajudicial-executions-in-the-u-s-boat-strikes-campaign/], a 27,000-word report by Adam Isacson [https://www.wola.org/analysis/killing-spree-extrajudicial-executions-in-the-u-s-boat-strikes-campaign/], WOLA’s director for defense oversight, and John Walsh [https://www.wola.org/analysis/killing-spree-extrajudicial-executions-in-the-u-s-boat-strikes-campaign/], its director for drug policy.

 

Under U.S. and international law, this is murder, Isacson and Walsh conclude about a policy they see as premeditated killing of civilians who pose no immediate threat to the United States. Its official name is Operation Southern Spear, designed as a war on terror by an inner circle of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. So the Donroe Doctrine is really a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings. Trump might be able to point to Latin America on a map, but this official US policy is about far more than geography.

 

And it even fails as drug policy. The boat strikes target Andean cocaine while fentanyl (produced in Mexico from Chinese synthetics) drives the American epidemic. As Isacson puts it, bombing these boats is like murdering a street-corner dealer and declaring the entire drug problem solved.

 

The WOLA report’s darkest implication is domestic. The Justice Department memo underpinning the campaign amounts, Walsh argues, to an open license to kill. For an administration that talks obsessively about the enemy within, the boat strikes might be a dress rehearsal. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans. Only this time they’re filming their own atrocities and boasting about them on social media. The assassination of that street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       63 Crime Scenes. The numbers, from WOLA’s strike-by-strike tracker: 63 attacks on 67 boats since September 2, 2025; 221 people killed; three known survivors. The legal analysis is not complicated: Title 18, Section 1111 of the U.S. Code prohibits murder, applies on the high seas, and premeditated killing of civilians with no self-defense justification is precisely what it forbids — no due process, no evidence offered, and in many cases no idea who was aboard. Each announcement is a near-identical Southern Command tweet, which is exactly what makes the campaign insidious: with no news handle, coverage shrinks to 150 words in the AP, and a democracy grows numb to what Walsh insists on calling 63 individual crime scenes with the United States as the responsible actor.

•       Narcoterrorism: Two Wars Welded Together. Operation Southern Spear fuses the post-9/11 war on terror with the sixty-year war on drugs: organized-crime groups redefined as the equivalent of al-Qaeda and ISIS, a secret list of two dozen designated organizations, and Stephen Miller declaring that only the military can fight drug trafficking. The policy’s continuity is real — supply control has been an American staple since Reagan — but its rupture is stark: Marco Rubio’s own justification admitted that dec

The Deadly Americans: Adam Isacson & John Walsh on MAGA's Killing Rampage in Latin America

“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts

 

This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today’s guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times. Sam Roberts [https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/product/are-they-dead-yet-art-obit] is a reporter on the Times’ obituaries desk and has a new book about the art of the obit entitled Are They Dead Yet? [https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/product/are-they-dead-yet-art-obit]

 

We recorded this a week before airtime, so I began by asking who’s going to die in the interim. He wasn’t sure — but noted that the Times keeps 2,000 advance obituaries ready. There are, he added, never enough. Beware, though, the Rockefeller curse. Roberts wrote David Rockefeller’s advance obituary, whereupon he learned that three other Times reporters had written Rockefeller advance obits — and all three were dead. (Rockefeller made it to 101.)

 

Borrowing from Citizen Kane, Roberts hunts for the Rosebud moment, the epiphany that defines a life. He hunts for the soul of the subject, not the résumé. Hence his cheerful paradox that obituaries are about life, whereas death only figures in one sentence. As for famous last words, he’s a skeptic — most were composed later by better writers. The real ones, he suspects, are “help,” or “get me a drink.”

 

And the obituarist’s own Rosebud moment? We have to go back to Brooklyn when he was a six-year-old boy. His father walked him to the corner to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass. “I want you to see history as it’s happening,” he explained. Half a century later, Roberts got David Greenglass to admit he had lied about the testimony that sent his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.

 

From the Times’ Portraits of Grief after 9/11, Roberts learned the book’s deepest lesson. There are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more — your mayor or your mailman? Or maybe your obit writer (or even your podcaster)? Sam promised that if he died before airtime, he’d call. The phone hasn’t rung. I’m still going too. On to episode 3,001.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       2,000 Obits, Never Enough. The Times keeps some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, regularly updated — and people still surprise the desk (and presumably themselves) by dying unexpectedly. Print once had a deadline or two a day; now there’s a deadline every minute. The occupational hazards are real: three Times reporters wrote advance obits of David Rockefeller and predeceased him — Roberts, the fourth, survived to see his run when Rockefeller died at 101. And the genre changes its readers: “no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again.” Alfred Nobel, mistakenly obituarized as dynamite’s merchant of death, endowed the Nobel Prizes in response — proof that a premature obituary can be the most consequential document a man ever reads.

•       The Rosebud Method. Roberts’ organizing device comes from Citizen Kane: the Rosebud moment, the epiphany — a teacher, a meeting, an accident — that changed the trajectory of a life and made it worth recording. The model, via The Economist’s Ann Wroe, is the soul rather than the stenography: Wikipedia has the chronology; the obituary hunts the essence. Advance obits are never vetted by their subjects — facts checked, yes; the portrait, never — because an obituary is a news story, not a eulogy. And the form’s great secret is optimism: obituaries are about life. Death gets one sentence. (Famous last words, meanwhile, are mostly posthumous fiction. The real ones: “help,” or “get me a drink.”)

•       Giuliani, Trump, Ep

Are They Dead Yet? Sam Roberts on the Art of the Obit

“By operating in secrecy, they’re able to avoid or evade accountability — and, in many instances, engage in anticompetitive behavior or even fraud.” — Renée M. Jones on unicorns

 

Twelve years ago there were 39 unicorns — private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Today there are over 1,400, collectively valued above $7 trillion, with the twin beasts of Anthropic and OpenAI at the front of the herd, driving the entire American economy. A good thing, surely?

 

Not according to Renée M. Jones [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296350], the SEC’s chief regulator of corporate finance from 2021 to 2023 and author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296350]. The former SEC big game warden worries that this stampede of wild unicorns might be driving the entire American economy off a cliff.

 

Her problem isn’t that these private companies exist. It’s that we know almost nothing about them. That’s because of changes in the law since the Nineties that have lifted the hundred-investor cap on private funds, thereby enabling them to mushroom from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion. Add secondary markets where insiders quietly cash out, and the IPO becomes optional. And so we know almost nothing about companies like Anthropic and OpenAI with private valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

 

The result is what Jones calls the founder-friendly model of Facebook, Uber or Airbnb. With super-voting shares at ten votes apiece, founders effectively choose their own bosses, thereby stripping investors of the power to discipline anyone. Think Travis Kalanick and Mark Zuckerberg. Think Theranos, WeWork and FTX.

 

Unicorns are named, of course, for their impossibility. Not so long ago, nobody could imagine a private company worth more than a billion dollars. However, with $7 trillion now on the table, Jones is concerned about the health of the American startup economy. On the brink of the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, I fear Renée Jones might be right about the dangers of a real crash triggered by the stampede of these mythical creatures. Jurassic Park is now playing in Silicon Valley. Pass the popcorn.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The $7 Trillion Secret. The unicorn was named for its rarity: 39 existed twelve years ago. Today there are more than 1,400, worth over $7 trillion — roughly 1,100 in America, nearly 300 in China — and the biggest of them shape the economy while disclosing essentially nothing. That is Jones’ target: not the billion-dollar valuations but the secrecy. A billion-dollar private company faces neither the disclosure rules nor the governance requirements of a public company its size, which means accountability arrives only by accident — a scandal, a frustrated investor, a whistleblower calling a reporter. Everything else stays dark.

•       How the IPO Died. Startups once went public within five to seven years, for two reasons: growth capital lived in public markets, and the 500-shareholder rule forced large private companies to register — it’s reportedly why Google and Facebook held their IPOs at all. Both reasons were legislated away. NSMIA (1996) uncapped private funds, whose assets exploded from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion; the JOBS Act (2012) moved the trigger to 2,000 shareholders with employee shares exempt; and secondary markets — Forge Global, Nasdaq Private Market, EquityZen — let insiders cash out without a prospectus. The IPO became a liquidity event rather than a necessity. Only AI’s bottomless capital hunger, Jones notes, is pushing OpenAI and Anthropic toward the public markets at all.

•       Founders Choosing Their Bosses. The founder-friendly model gives startup founders super-voting shares — ten vote

Is Jurassic Park Playing in Silicon Valley? Renée Jones on the Unicorn Stampede in Startup Finance.

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott

 

Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed.

 

Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487], by James M. Scott [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487], America’s foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487] focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse.

 

Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn’t, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima’s city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes.

 

So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Defeat Is Not Surrender. Scott’s organizing insight: as destructive as it was, the atomic bomb was inherently a political weapon, aimed at the chasm between a nation defeated and a nation willing to say so. Surrender is a political act — and Japan’s politics ran through Hirohito, ostensibly the center of political, cultural, and spiritual life, in practice a figurehead bypassed by militarists who had consolidated power through the 1920s and ’30s under the standing threat of assassination. His first peace soundings had to be conducted incognito, for fear of his own army; not until June 1945 does he rise to the occasion. Truman, by contrast, emerges as strong and morally serious — a First World War artillery officer who inherited the Okinawa bloodbath, approved the invasion of Japan, chose what he saw as the lesser evil, and then stopped all further atomic use the moment surrender came.

•       The Firebombing Precedent. Would FDR have made the same call? “Absolutely. No doubt about it.” The moral threshold had already been crossed on March 9, 1945, when Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing and burned Tokyo — 105,000 men, women, and children in a single night, the most destructive conventional raid in history. The Pentagon braced for public outrage, monitoring editorials, radio, and the floors of Congress. None came; Time wrote that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.” LeMay took the green light and burned 64 cities — 170 square miles — before the first atomic bomb ever fell. War Secretary Henry Stimson confessed his amazement to his diary; FDR, with every opportunity to rein it in, said nothing. When Elliott Roosevelt later claimed his father would never have dropped the bomb, Stimson publicly corrected him.

•       The Second Bomb Mattered More. Scott’s most counterintuitive argument: Nagasak

Three Deadly Days in August: James M. Scott on Truman, Hirohito & the Two Bombs That Ended the War

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare

 

The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/]. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.”

 

Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith.

 

And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu’s ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.”

 

What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today’s transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.”

 

Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith’s editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don’t disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI’s output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.

•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith’s much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that’s fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith’s rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don’t go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.

•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week’s main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith’s verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working c

Let Them Eat Intelligence: A Silicon Valley Eulogy for the Working Class

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall

 

Yesterday [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-the-deal], Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall [https://www.beacon.org/A-Protest-History-of-the-United-States-P2145.aspx] describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States [https://www.beacon.org/A-Protest-History-of-the-United-States-P2145.aspx], she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it.

 

Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob.

 

So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.

•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.

•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted offici

The United States of Protest: Gloria Browne-Marshall on the Engine Room of American Democracy

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