“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller


Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.

That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller [https://sps.columbia.edu/faculty/michael-g-miller-phd], a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris [https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/kevin-t-morris], Miller has written An American Problem [https://www.brennancenter.org/american-problem-how-country-built-and-supreme-court-broke-voting-rights-act], a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.

The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96] took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96], five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.


FURTHER READING



•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act [https://www.brennancenter.org/american-problem-how-country-built-and-supreme-court-broke-voting-rights-act] (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.

•   Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96] (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.

•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.

•   Kevin T. Morris [https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/kevin-t-morris] is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Michael G. Miller [https://sps.columbia.edu/faculty/michael-g-miller-phd] is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.


ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA



Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conv

Will the Midterms Be Fair? Michael G. Miller on How the Supreme Court Broke the Voting Rights Act

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen



The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Reckoning], Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.

Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Cohen], former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.

Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/technology/harvard-facebook-history-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss] Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.

My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.


FURTHER READING



•   The Social Reckoning [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Reckoning] (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.

•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/technology/harvard-facebook-history-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss] — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.

•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).

•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia [https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780393881882] (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.


ABOUT KEEN ON

On the Social Reckoning: Noam Cohen Watches Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Sequel

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge



“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed [https://keenon.substack.com/p/borders-are-back-baby-from-trump] last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonn_Elledge]’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions [https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2026/a-brief-history-of-cities-in-32-inventions/]. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.

Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.

Et voilà (rather than eureka!).

Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions.


FURTHER READING



•   Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions [https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2026/a-brief-history-of-cities-in-32-inventions/] (The Experiment, 13 October 2026). The UK edition is 31 Inventions That Built Our World.

•   The extra American chapter is on the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy. The other cut chapters are free on his Substack [https://jonn.substack.com/].

•   Elledge created and ran CityMetric at the New Statesman, and also wrote A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and Conspiracy, with Tom Phillips.

•   The theory he couldn’t name at 17:20 is urban scaling [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_scaling] — Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt’s finding that productivity rises faster than population, building on Alfred Marshall on agglomeration.


FIVE TAKEAWAYS




1. Why Ideas Cluster



There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich.


2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed



In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one.


3. Gilgamesh Already Knew



The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line.


4. The Empty State Building



Two architec

A History of Cities in 32 Inventions: Jonn Elledge on the Ideas & Technologies That Built Our World

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb



The Impossible Will Take a Little While [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/paul-rogat-loeb/the-impossible-will-take-a-little-while/9781541608849] is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rogat_Loeb], the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.

In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster.

Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis.


FURTHER READING



•   Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/paul-rogat-loeb/the-impossible-will-take-a-little-while/9781541608849] (Basic Books, 13 October 2026). Full contents and excerpts [https://www.paulloeb.org/take-awhile/].

•   Loeb also wrote Soul of a Citizen and Generation at the Crossroads, and founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project. More [https://paulloeb.org/].

•   The Korean chapter is Jungmin Choi’s “Lightsticks and K-Pop”. The Norwegian teachers are Loeb’s own essay, “Refusing to be Quislings”.

•   The Berlin story AK asks for is the Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943.


FIVE TAKEAWAYS




1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends



Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not.


2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan



Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap.


3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse



Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are

The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Paul Loeb on Perseverance & Hope in Troubled Times

“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly


INTRO



On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story [https://keenon.substack.com/p/prosperity-road?r=ktr9] of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kelly_(academic)], author of The Biggest Lie [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/biggest-lie-9781639732111/], narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story.

The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis.

“Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel.


FURTHER READING



•   Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/biggest-lie-9781639732111/] (Bloomsbury, 21 July 2026). Kelly is professor of English at the College of Charleston and has also written Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War and Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon; he edits the Seagull Reader anthologies for Norton. Biography [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kelly_(academic)].

•   Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt [https://www.harvard.com/book/9780060744755] — yesterday’s episode, and the book Kelly’s argument hands off to. Kelly dates the reversal of the American fascist experiment to 1932; Badger starts there.

•   Jonathan Rauch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/yes-its-fascism] on Trump and the f word, and his six key moments [https://keenon.substack.com/p/jonathan-rauchs-six-key-moments-of]. His The Constitution of Knowledge is the source of the phrase Kelly uses at 16:16 for the free press, academic tenure and peer review, and a reformed court system — institutions he argues were built in the 1920s and 1930s specifically to fight a politics founded on lying. Note that AK calls him John Rauch twice on the tape; it is Jonathan.

•   Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era [https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9781324131045-call-it-evil] (Norton), and Andrew Curran,

The South’s Most Successful Export: Joseph Kelly on the Prehistory of American Fascism

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger



Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Badger], the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt [https://citylights.com/new-nonfiction-in-hardcover/prosperity-road-amer-1920-1945-fr/]. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.

Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long], who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.

In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever.

On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long.

Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR.

I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago.


FURTHER READING



•   Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt [https://citylights.com/new-nonfiction-in-hardcover/prosperity-road-amer-1920-1945-fr/] (Harper, 13 October 2026). Kirkus review [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/anthony-j-badger/prosperity-road/print/]. Note that Badger has reused his own title: his first book, in 1980, was Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina [https://uncpress.org/9780807872925/prosperity-road/] — so a search on the title alone will return the wrong book.

•   Badger was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge from 1992 to 2014 and Master of Clare College from 2003 to 2014; he has been a professor at Northumbria since. Read at Sidney Sussex, took his doctorate at Hull in 1974. His Cambridge faculty page [https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-anthony-badger]. The boo

Prosperity Road: Anthony Badger on Hoover, Roosevelt and the Making of the American State

“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul



As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx [https://keenon.substack.com/p/hyperscale?r=ktr9] offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ralston_Saul] — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto.

Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-arrival-of-the-american-future?r=ktr9], Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course.

Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn.

Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey.

On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh.

“We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump.

John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada.


FURTHER READING



•   John Ralston Saul writes at his Substack [https://johnralstonsaul.substack.com/about], including the piece in French on a post-Trump America that AK raises at 05:11. He co-founded and co-chairs the Institute for Canadian Citizenship [https://forcitizenship.ca/people/john-ralston-saul/] — the organization behind inclusion.ca — with Adrienne Clarkson, and served as International President of PEN from 2009 to 2015, the first Canadian elected to the role.

•   The books AK asks about: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West was published in 1992, not 1993, and The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World in 2005, not 2018. A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada followed in 2008. Full bibliography [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ralston_Saul].

•   Chrystia Freeland’s Unreliable Boyfriend [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Unreliable-Boyfriend/Chrystia-Freeland/9781668105344] (Simon & Schuster, June 2026), the account of Canada–US relations AK quotes twice. The phrase has a history: a British MP used it about Mark Carney when he governed the Bank of England.

•   Stephen Marche on the possibility of civil war — his episode of this show [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-arrival-of-the-american-future?r=ktr9]. His book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022); the phrase AK reaches for at the top is the titl

How to Survive Living Next to Rome: John Ralston Saul on Canada, Trump and the Coming US Civil War

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel


INTRO



It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300284430/what-was-america/] by Katy Siegel [https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/art/people/faculty-staff/katy-siegel] and Elise Armani [https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/elise-armani/], a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.

What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews [https://www.bennyandrews.com/biography], who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.

So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.

“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.


FURTHER READING



•   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300284430/what-was-america/] (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum [https://www.artforum.com/features/katy-siegel-1976-bicentennial-neoliberal-art-world-1234750788/] on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument.

•   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology [https://www.bennyandrews.com/biography]. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53.

•   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soiling_of_Old_Glory] on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America [https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo215806928.html] — published in 2008 rather than recently.

•   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology [https://www.eai.org/artists/ant-farm/biography], including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch.

•   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was

What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797020/hyperscale-by-paris-marx/], the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx [https://parismarx.com/], who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself.

So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t.

When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech hyperscaler bandwagon became legal.

Follow the money, Marx says. Seven trillion dollars invested into data centers by 2030, raised not through government bonds but mostly through corporate ones. Crypto’s collapse only hurt the people who bought crypto. This irrational exuberance will dramatically affect pensions and 401(k)s.

So I asked him the multi-trillion-dollar question. If this bet pays off, these companies become more powerful than ever. If not, we are all f&*ked. So, which is worse for a critic: hyperscale’s success, or its failure?

Marx is a man of the left. So he favors failure. Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War One to hasten the revolution; Marx, more modestly, suspects that the collapse of the hyperscale pyramid would at least give us the chance to rethink. And then what? Marx wants us to have “conversations” about the type of economy we want. Hyperconversations, more like. Very noisy ones.


FURTHER READING



•   Paris Marx, Hyperscale [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797020/hyperscale-by-paris-marx/] — published today. Note the two editions carry different subtitles: the US edition is The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires (Crown), while the UK edition [https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/hyperscale/paris-marx/9781805227458] is Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It is longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year 2026. Kirkus review [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paris-marx/hyperscale/].

•   His podcast Tech Won’t Save Us [https://techwontsave.us/about/] and his newsletter Disconnect [https://disconnect.blog/about]. His previous book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, which he returns to at 46:26.

•   Karen Hao, whom Marx cites in the book as the origin of the imperial framing — her episode of this show [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-empire-strikes-back-karen-hao?r=ktr9], on OpenAI as a classic colonial power. Her book is Empire of AI (AK calls it AI Empires at 06:27).

•   Robin Wigglesworth on why the bond market, not the stock market, is where the real crisis comes — that episode [https://keenon.substack.com/p/a-fabulous-debt?r=ktr9]. His book is A Fabulous Debt.

•   The $7 trillion figure AK cites at 09:03 traces to McKinsey’s data-centre forecast [https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/charts/the-data-center-dividend] (about $6.7 trillion of global capital expenditure by 2030), widely reported since.

•   New York became the first state to pause hyperscale permits, under Executive Order 62 in J

Hyperscale: Paris Marx on the Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross


INTRO



Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab [https://www.idealab.com/] in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.

“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.

Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.

His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals.

The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html] in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over.

So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant.

“Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi [https://flat6labs.com/fr/Team/ahmed-el-alfi/], the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview.

I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine.


FURTHER READING



•   Idealab AI launched on the day of recording. Bill gave the address on air as idealab.ai and his own email as bill@idealab.ai. The thirty-year parent company is at idealab.com [https://www.idealab.com/], and his 25 Lessons from 25 Years of Idealab [https://25-lessons.idealab.com/introduction/] is the long-form version of the methodology he has now handed to a model.

•   Bill’s 2015 TED talk on timing as the single biggest predictor of startup success, which he refers to at 25:55 — watch it [https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_start_ups_succeed]. He says the new platform now does this analysis automatically.

•   On the IP argument at 17:58: ProRata.ai, his venture to make AI companies pay publishers a revenue share, raised $40m and launched Gist in September 2025 [https://axios.com/2025/09/05/prorata-ai-search-tool-publishers].

•   Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic, whom AK raises at 08:39, on the risk AI poses to democracy — listen to that episode [https://keenon.substack.com/p/ai-and-political-freedom?r=ktr9], and his book AI and Political Freedom [https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691291277/ai-and-political-freedom] (

The Hope Machine (Holy Shit, My Life is Over): Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Ideas

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.